Without emotional awareness, you cannot relate well to others or engage with them, and in fact, you are more likely to cause dissatisfaction, conflict and performance dysfunction. It’s less than 30 years since the idea of emotions having an impact on personal and professional success, productivity and performance was named: emotional intelligence (EI). Emotional awareness operates under the same principles as EI. Its message is simple: When you are emotionally aware, you are conscious of others’ emotions and are more able to bring out the best in their behaviour and performance.
Your thoughts are the primary trigger to emotions (and vice versa) in somewhat of a cause and effect relationship. How you choose to think about an event or another person directly relates to the emotions triggered by those thoughts. If you change your thoughts, you will change the emotion. Research is proving over and over that an environment of positive emotional energy is needed for achieving peak performance, building strong and sustainable relationships and experiencing good health in the workplace.
A leader’s emotional awareness is important because employees relate to their leaders on an emotional level in several ways. First, how employees feel (e.g., awed, intimidated, indifferent, impressed) about their leaders influences the way they do their job and the way they behave on the job. This feeling extends to whether they stay or leave the organization and whether they act as ambassadors (or proud advocates) of the organization.
Second, a leader’s words, attitudes, and behavior have the ability to incite various negative and or positive emotions in their employees. Even followers who manage their emotions well can be affected by this emotional energy. It is the inadvertent or unconscious control that leaders have over the emotional state of their followers that can distort the dynamic between management and employees, creating dysfunctions. For example, a leader who has fondness for telling jokes in the workplace may amuse some employees but may annoy, frustrate or even offend the rest. This reaction could lead to a loss of respect for the leader, especially if the employees cannot ask the boss to cut out or cut down the joking.
Third, a leader’s professional decisions, strategies and actions can be taken personally by some employees and thus create an unintended emotional response. In unstable financial economic climates, everyone is nervous about losing their jobs; any change to current practices may be misconstrued as economic instability and can stimulate and elicit strong emotional responses such as anger and fear.
At the end of the day, if your goal as a leader is to cultivate an organization that is operating at peak performance, then you should be focused on the emotional dimension. Providing your leaders with the necessary training for them to be able to model emotionally balanced behaviour is crucial.
Catherine is the President and CEO of CORPORATE HARMONY, providing virtual solutions for leadership development and organizational culture change. Her leadership and coaching experience as a Project Manager in an ever-changing, fast moving technological organization with unrelenting demands drove her to the realization that a positive mindset and strength-building behaviors are essential for today’s complex and chaotic organizational systems. CORPORATE HARMONY’s virtual platform of programs, coaching and performance measurement, is an innovative online technology of tested proprietary content. The world-class content of CORPORATE HARMONY’s Positive Presence Program develops the skill of ‘Positive Presence’ and the necessary ‘Positive Presence Behaviour Competencies’ for maintaining a positive and energized mindset and increased performance in today’s complex work environment, and leading to a culture of collaboration and connection. Catherine’s vision for Corporate Harmony is to bring the skill of “Positive Presence” to the corporate world as it becomes more complex, ambiguous and chaotic. Catherine is uniquely positioned to impact organizations’ productivity and long term success, with her powerful vision of eliminating bad stress from every workplace around the globe, bringing purpose into the people equation to promote healthy, productive and meaningful work cultures and turn the tide on the neglect of mental health on a global scale. Catherine is author of the book: “CORPORATE HARMONY – The Performance Link for Today’s Modern Organization” Catherine can be reached at: Catherine.Osborne@corporateharmony.ca or go to ‘contact us’ on our website www.corporateharmony.ca. Catherine is available for consultation, and can be reached by 519-695-3407.