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Three Skill Sets to Drive Your Leadership Performance

Posted on October 29, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

There is nothing more destructive to an organization than a leader who is out of touch. You have to remain relevant. There is no doubt our world has changed; a lot of it for the better. Our workforces have also changed in the cultural adaptations of how we treat women and minorities with dramatic and positive change. If you haven’t yet adapted to these realities as a leader in the forms of jokes, condescending phrases, and other unacceptable cultural norms you are heading for troubled waters. Are you prepared to accept the personal and professional consequences of knowingly or unknowingly
demeaning the inherent value of another human being? Yet behaviour lapses time and time again show us that the inability or unwillingness to adapt and stay relevant to these changes reveal leadership weakness that lead to irresolvable damage to team unity, team cohesion, and team performance. Following are three foundational skills sets every leader should hone to develop high level behaviour performance to maximize highly effective relationships with team members.

1.Develop a Learner’s Attitude
Success in every dimension of life is related to your ability to connect with others. It is also true that your success is directly related to your ability and willingness to learn, to change, to adapt, and to grow. Relationships by their nature require constant and consistent tending. The quality of care you put into these relationships translates into either a negative or a positive behaviour experience for other people. When leaders share meaningful learning experiences with their employees, they gain empathy and compassion for the people doing the work of the organization. Consequently the compassion and respect experienced by team members drives levels of employee engagement to higher levels. (See Harvard Business Review, “Power Can Corrupt Leaders. Compassion Can Save Them,” Hougaard, Carter, Chester, February 15, 2018.)

2. Develop Humility
In their book, Laws of Lifetime Growth, Dan Sullivan and Catherine Nomura, write about the connection between humility and leadership influence: “Only a small percentage of people are continually successful over the long run. These outstanding few recognize that every success comes through the assistance of many other people—and they are continually grateful for this support.”

No one person wins alone regardless of the level of individual talent. Humility is a leadership character trait that Good to Great author Jim Collins identified in what he calls “Level 5 leadership.” Collins and his team identified that level 5 leaders always accept blame for mistakes and give away all praise for success to others – a habit they call “the Window and the Mirror.” As a leader, can you give up what you believe is your right to finding fault with others, accept personal accountability and responsibility for the stewardship obligation you have as a leader? Can you be open to receiving candid and honest feedback about your own behaviour and its impact on those you lead? Can you become excited about letting others help you learn about your own habits to improve the effectiveness of your leadership influence?

3. Develop Selflessness
In the book, High Altitude Leadership, Chris Warner and Don Schmincke discuss the debilitating toll selfishness takes on companies. They call the destructive and unproductive condition of selfishness “dangerous, unproductive, dysfunctional behaviour” or DUD behaviour. Using real-life climbing experiences of the world’s tallest summits, the authors demonstrate eight dangers that not only can cost you your life on a mountain but derail your organizational strategy as well. Selfishness is one of these dangers. Selfishness, the disregard for the welfare and the needs of others, will prevent you from reaching the highest levels of your performance. Selflessness, putting the needs of others ahead of your own, is essential to creating and sustaining positive and supportive connections with your team. It fuels your performance success.

Acquiring new skills also requires learning and change — one cannot learn and still be the same person, team, or organization. There is a constant evolution in the way we think and act, brought about by new understanding, new knowledge, and new skills. When you are ready to change, start with the skill of Positive Presence, an innovative thought model connecting workplace behaviour to human energy and provides a systematic, programmatic methodology for equipping leaders with the knowledge and understanding necessary for developing and sustaining the behaviour skills needed for influential leadership.

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High Level Performance Requires High Level Behaviour Skill

Posted on October 22, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

Leadership failure rarely is the result of the absence of technical skill and intellect but incompetence in behavioural skill. You only need to look at the daily news headlines to substantiate the credibility of this statement. You gain higher levels of management responsibility based on your individual technical skill performance. Your overall leadership success is clearly dependent on your behaviour skills since senior leadership achievement is strategic oriented rather than operational. The truth is that the so-called soft skills of behaviour are really the hard skills that create the measure of influence in your leadership accomplishment and your organizational performance.

Time and again the fundamental problems of employees related to the lack of engagement and work performance stems from how people consistently experience their leader’s negative behaviour. (See SHRM, “7 Tips to Increase Employee Engagement”, Tamara Lytle, Sept. 22, 2016). These leadership failures can be directly linked to the absence in consistent, positive behaviour, to the three fundamental elements of influential leadership: self-awareness, collaboration, and connection. You must remember that individual leader behaviour is singularly the most important predictor to organizational performance.

Regardless of an official title at work, or in your community – whether you realize it or not — you are a leader. Every time you connect with someone, you have the opportunity to lead thru influence, and so, we are all Influential Leaders. A key factor to your leadership influence is discovering and developing self-awareness. Self-awareness is all about being intentional and purposeful in managing your behaviour. Following this principle leaders need to take the time to periodically evaluate their behaviour performance in light of their technical performance. The only alternative to this process of intentional, self-evaluation is to put your behaviour on autopilot. … but the experience of two commercial airline pilots overflying their destination city by over an hour is testament to the danger of relying on an autopilot – especially with something as critical to organizational performance as highly developed and effective relationships.

Albert Einstein wrote, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” I would like to modify his words to read that these significant problems cannot be solved with the same level of behaviour we were at when we created them. The good news is we can change. Intentional and purposeful self-evaluation is imperative to identifying and correcting leadership lapses and weaknesses in behaviour. Highly effective, influential leaders thrive on daily feedback regarding how others are experiencing them in their leadership behaviour. How about you? Are you the kind of leader others desire to follow? Would you follow you as a leader? Beginning the process of consistent feedback on your behaviour may begin to make the difference for you in both your personal and organizational performance. You cannot overcome and win your performance challenges alone.

Influential Leaders recognize the importance of self-awareness, collaboration, and connection. They spend time focusing their efforts in key areas that strengthen connections with the people they lead to drive performance. They focus these efforts around the leadership skills that create behaviour capacity. One such skill is the skill of Positive Presence™, an innovative thought model connecting workplace behaviour to human energy and equips leaders with the knowledge and understanding necessary for developing and sustaining the behaviour skills indicative of strong relationships in an energized work force. When you have meaningful relationships with other people you work more effectively together. You have a common goal and a consistent purpose. Your efforts are channeled toward the same common outcome and you drive performance in the organization to peak levels. This is when you make the magic happen for you and your organization. This is worth thinking about today!

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Leaders other people want to follow?

Posted on October 15, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

Currently, there exists a knowledge gap among leaders who lack a deep understanding of the critical role they play between themselves and the behaviour strengths of their employees. People connect and engage with their leader before they connect and engage with their work. The research is clear on this point: the more positive and supportive this relationship, the more engaged and committed people are in their work. All six dimensions of performance are higher in people who have a positive mental image of their boss than people who have a less positive and even toxic image of their leader. Leader behaviour creates leader image. This connection between behaviour skills and peak performance is critical to your success. Leaders are operators. They make things happen in the organization. Organizations that compete both locally and in the global economy can ill afford the root cause of leadership failure present in most organizations – the failure to positively connect with the people doing the work of the organization. Your challenge and opportunity is to create and implement a systematic and programmatic architecture for leadership development and performance management within your organization that promotes behaviour capacity of leaders as the strategic leverage to maximizing the technical skill capacity of the people doing the work of the organization.

The lynchpin to all of this is individual leadership behaviour – and individual leadership behaviour is in essence the physical manifestation of one’s human energy. Gone are the days when a paycheck, the employee of the month award, and the gold watch at retirement were sufficient motivators for people to perform at their best or to remain loyal and dedicated to the organization. Many of today’s CEOs are still holding onto tradition, the way things have always worked, and they are still exhibiting the behaviours of the hierarchal top down driven management style that can often stifle creativity, vision and growth. What is needed today is the ‘Catalyst’ type leader — an influential leader — that can drive performance change and performance excellence.

Just as technology has increased the borders of our markets, it has also increased competition for the best and brightest employees. Employees today seek to work for a company and leaders with whom they feel proud to be associated and who treat them like active contributors, not passive producers. In a study by the Society for Human Resource Management focusing on employee job satisfaction and engagement, “relationships with immediate supervisor” was ranked more significant to employees, than benefits or the organization’s financial stability. Employees want to work for leaders who appreciate the value they add and rely on their passions and talents to every extent possible.

Leaders must acknowledge that workplace culture is a direct reflection of organizational values and the willingness to live out those values in daily behaviour at every level within the organization. A direct influence on workplace culture is the degree to which leaders choose to engage with others. Leaders must make a purposeful decision to create and sustain highly effective relationships with their employees. Although engagement is a personal matter, influential leaders acquire and practice daily a behaviour skill-set to create a culture that promotes a sense of personal ownership, accountability, and responsibility among their team members.

Changing behaviour is a challenge, even when not doing so means lost business, bankruptcy, the demise of a company, or harming other people. By the same token, changing a workplace culture that is dysfunctional or toxic will only occur by changing behaviour. As arduous as it seems, it is certainly achievable with the proper focus, training, and accountability. When leaders choose to focus on the aspect of individual leader behaviour and commit to a systematic, programmatic methodology of development, employee engagement and commitment will improve and in turn will drive performance excellence.

When you are ready to change, start with the skill of Positive Presence, an innovative thought model connecting workplace behaviour to human energy and provides a systematic, programmatic methodology for equipping leaders with the knowledge and understanding necessary for developing and sustaining the behaviour skills needed for influential leadership.

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The Power Performance in Your People

Posted on October 8, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

The business and professional climates in which we work remain increasingly competitive. Each day competitive markets grow as technology spans the vast array of global industries. These rapidly changing environments are causing ambiguities and confusion about the roles and responsibilities of leaders. In this increasingly competitive environment how do we guide the performance of our teams – specifically productivity, innovation, initiative, teamwork, problem solving, and adapting to constant change? What is your strategy to combat the threats to your individual performance and the performance of your teams? As you continually assess your market threats and you continually receive pressure from your leaders and your boards to excel, where will you find the solutions needed to assure you attain the outcomes you desire?

With our associates — The Frisina Group and The Center for Influential Leadership — we are constantly researching and advocating for these solutions, and we have identified the key element to building success in your organization beyond your profound impact as an influential leader – it is the power in your people.

The Performance Power of Your Presence
Never doubt the impact on performance marked by your presence as a leader. You are without a doubt ridiculously in charge of the destiny of your organization. Without question there is immense pressure on you as a leader today, and we recognize the personal impact this pressure has on your own behaviour capacity. We have mentioned the impact of market changes, but we also need to address the issue of shifting time periods. Twenty to fifteen years ago the workday had a finite amount of time. Today because of “technology connectivity” your connection to your job rarely ceases. The only time you cannot be reached to manage workplace issues are when you are inhibited from using your phone.

Consequently you are always available for work and work is always available to you. To achieve peak performance in an economically and time constrained environment requires hiring knowledge based workers. This term, traditionally reserved for information technology personnel, architects, coders, and researchers has now come to mean all employees, including front-line staff. Every employee must become an Influential Leader. Influential leaders do not identify with a particular title, nor do they have a designated rank in an organization. Influential leaders are people who take every opportunity – every connection with a coworker, every connection with a client, every connection with the community—to make a positive and meaningful difference. Some people are naturals, but for most of us, leading thru influence – making a positive and meaningful difference — is a learned skill. Three identifiable attributes of an Influential Leader, are:

1. Creativity. These people can come up with new ideas and know how to harness new platforms of technology in your industry. Your market is changing constantly. Rigid, inflexible, and an unimaginative workforce will not be able to bring forth innovation and new collaborative efforts to propel you and your organization in the hyper speed transitions
required to cope with constant change.

2. Adaptability. These people can adapt to change. Being rigid and inflexible to new ideas that will transform your organization is not going to propel you to the levels of performance you desire. You want people who can adapt to rapid change that is happening all around us. People that are not only comfortable with change but thrive in it.

3. Flexibility. These people exhibit this behaviour strength and know how to work well with others, they are team players who thrive on high performance teams and are effective collaborators. Change is comfortable for these people because they can flex from personal desires and interests to new organizational objectives to achieve the desired end state.

The Performance Power of Your People
In today’s workforce the talent pool of technically competent people fluctuates. While everyone competes to hire people with strong technical skills, performance is a function of both technical skill and behaviour capacity. The increasing stress of the pace of change has a direct effect on behaviour capacity that impacts the effectiveness of technical skill to drive performance. Behaviour capacity is the leverage that drives technical skill performance because behaviour capacity is directly linked to how the brains of people actually function. If peak performance is your end state and transformational change is essential to achieve it, then you need to recruit and develop people with both technical and behaviour capacity skill sets.

Harnessing people power, both individually and at a corporate level, begins with the skill of Positive Presence™.  Positive Presence is a new and deliberate way of thinking and behaving that makes the connection between human energy and behaviour and is easily practiced and developed right on the job. For many, it is just a lot of common sense, but for others it is a slow and gentle process that requires the help of both team mates and leaders.

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The Generationally Diverse Workforce

Posted on July 9, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

For the first time in history there are five generations of people in the workforces of modern developed countries – silent or traditional (born before 1946), baby boomers, (born approximately between 1946 and 1964), generation X (born approximately between 1965 and 1979), millennial or generation Y (born approximately 1980 and 1994), and generation Z (born approximately 1994 and after). All the generations share strong work ethics and workplace needs, and they all want work that is meaningful and that adds purpose to their lives.

The core beliefs of each generation differ from the next, and so too do their needs in the workplace. Following is a brief description of each generation.

Traditionalists need respect. They are motivated by acknowledgement of their historical experience and expertise. They maintain an attitude of commitment and endurance and make personal sacrifices for the greater good. Their professional relationships are formal and reinforce workplace hierarchies.

Baby boomers need success. They view money as evidence of social status. They are motivated by material gain and professional advancement. Although driven, as individuals, boomers promote collaborative efforts and prefer business decisions to be made by consensus. Boomers believe in the importance of following historical precedents and take a process-oriented approach to their work.

Generation X (Gen-X) needs autonomy. Supervisors should provide feedback, not give orders. Generation X employees are motivated by professional growth and flexibility in their work. They work independently, believe in personal responsibility, and struggle to fit work into their lives. For Generation X, precedent is superseded by what is pragmatic, and its members’ informal approach undermines workplace hierarchy and positional authority.

Generation Y (Millennials) need validation. Generation Y employees seek to contribute to society and to make a difference. Flexibility and the opportunity to pursue personal growth are highly motivational to Generation Y employees. Generation Y expects equality and its members consider everyone from the CEO to the mail clerk as their peers. Their casual approach to work and social interactions reflects their desire for immediate recognition on a professional and personal level.

Generation Z (Gen-ADD) are yet to be understood. Generation Z is the “post-internet generation” and because they are so new to the workforce, the jury is still out on exactly what they need. We do know that their media consumption habits differ from precious generations and they prefer cool products over cool experiences. Two characteristics of this generation are they are entrepreneurial and tech-savvy.

A generationally diverse workplace must stress the need for leaders at all levels to be emotionally aware and have a well-developed skill of Positive Presence.

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Your Workplace Behavior Style

Posted on July 2, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

Identifying your own and being aware of others’ behavioural style will contribute to your leadership success in several ways. First, this recognition improves your interaction and communication with others so that your interaction with that person accomplishes its goal. For example, if you know someone has an analytical style, you will adjust the way you talk and act to avoid triggering an emotional reaction in that person. Second, it allows you to showcase or model, and thus teach, the combination of behavioural styles that work best. And third, it gives you an opportunity to play to your strength.

There are four main categories of behavioural styles that are generally recognized. Note that different researchers assign different names to these attributes:

• analytical, driver, amiable and expressive (developed by Larry Wilson Learning System)
• thinker, feeler, intuitor, and sensor (developed by Carl Jung)
• thinker, director, relator, and socializer (developed by Tony Alessandra)
• dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness (developed by William Moulton Marston)

To better illustrate the concept of behavioural style, the following is a brief description of the four categories, using the names from the first bullet above:

1. Analytical. An analytical person is more responsive than assertive, attentive to facts, unemotional, extremely precise, detail oriented, and not fond of small talk.

2. Driver. A driver is assertive, interrupts conversation, answers quickly, seeks out key facts, has low levels of empathy, and is extremely task focused.

3. Amiable. An amiable person is a good listener, responsive, people focused, and friendly. This person seeks to understand and thrives on building relationships.

4. Expressive. An expressive person is enthusiastic and friendly, talks a lot and talks fast, loves to tell stories to convey a point, can be loud, seeks to grasp concepts, is assertive, has high levels of empathy, and is people focused.

All of us have a dominant style, but we also have habits that fall into the other three categories. Each style has its strengths and weaknesses, an important consideration in team formation. When building a team, you should include people with different behavioural styles because each style contributes differently and beneficially to team dynamics and team goals. In addition, homogeneity in style is insufficient to tackle the diverse issues and situations the team will confront.

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The Value of Behaviour Style

Posted on June 25, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

As a human you are a complex manufacturing plant for electro-magnetic neuro-chemical energy. Positive emotions exist in positive energy. Your energy is nothing more than your thoughts and feelings which manifest into the physical world as behaviour. As you develop your skill of Positive Presence you will become emotionally aware and you will see the connection between how a person is behaving and how they are feeling.

If a person is feeling positive and energized you will see positive behaviours such as happiness and cooperation, and if they are displaying negative behaviours, such as frustration and anger, it’s a sure bet that they are internally caught up in a loop of negative energy. Science has proven that your behaviour is a direct response to your thinking and mental patterns. So if you want to change your behaviour, change your thinking.

Science has also proven that your mental patterns, in turn predict your behavioural style. And your behavioural style has the ability to stir up emotions in others. Behavioural style, or social/communication style, is the way we conduct ourselves in front of other people, particularly in the workplace. Are you friendly and warm? Are you reserved? Are you assertive? Are you in full control?

Your behavioural style, which is important to delineate from personality, either attracts or repels other people, and vice versa. Sometimes you cannot articulate why you like or dislike someone’s behaviour, because these types of preferences are unconscious. Influential leaders and those desiring to be influential in their workplaces understand their own behaviour and the impact it has on others around them. Understanding this is critical to enhancing the performance of your workplace.

Influential leaders are leaders (with or without a formal title or role) who possess the mind and behaviour habits that create positive and energized emotions and as such display positive behaviours that will resonate with another’s style. They are highly practiced with the skill of ‘Positive Presence’ and it places them in a position to model emotionally balanced behaviour. More importantly, it enables them to be agile and flexible in their behaviour in order to make positive connections with others even in stressful situations or during a crisis event

As a leader, you are in a unique position to make a difference in peoples’ lives. Developing your emotional awareness through understanding of your and others behavioural styles will create the ability to develop your influential leadership and transform your workplace into the peak performing environment we all desire.

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The Seven Employee Needs

Posted on June 18, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

Many leaders are unaware of the needs and concerns of their workforce. Unmet needs produce strong negative feelings and resentment. These employees become complainers, cynics, and faultfinders. They resist change, and they disengage from the culture and all initiatives. They “just work here,” and they only do enough work to keep from getting into trouble. If they fail in this outcome, they will demand more money, more benefits, or unusual work arrangements. This is the mindset that they come to work with every day. Who wants to hire or retain “talent” such as this? Leaders must realize that these negative behaviours are the employees’ way of compensating for the positive emotional fulfillment they are missing from their job. Leaders cannot throw money at this problem, as that solution will bring more difficulties.

Research in human resources and talent management has identified the following employee needs that, when met, lead to high levels of engagement and retention:

1. Inclusion and belonging.
People have a fundamental need to be in healthy and supportive relationships. At work, this includes being part of the discussion and decision making that affects their job.

2. Appreciation and Recognition.
We all have an emotional need to be appreciated and recognized for who we are as a person as well as for our gifts, talents, and abilities.

3. Challenge and Achievement.
Having challenging work provides us the opportunity to use the best of our gifts, talents, and abilities. Data suggests that every day a vast majority of people go to a job and hate it simply because it does not challenge them mentally or give them an opportunity for achievement.

4. Trust and Accountability.
Productive relationships cannot exist without trust. We need to know that we can count on others and that we are all playing on a level field. Gallup studies confirm that trust is the number one trait employees seek from their superiors, followed by compassion, stability and hope.

5. Growth and Learning.
Continuing education and training dollars is often the first sacrificial offering in a cost-cutting initiative. But in fact, learning and development are fundamental emotion-based needs. What’s more, in today’s constant changing work environments, learning and improving our skills is a must.

6. Power and Control.
Everyone wants to be empowered enough to control their own work processes and to have a say in how those processes should change.

7. Meaning and Purpose.
People want and need to know that their daily work contributes to a larger effort, one that is more valuable than merely making money. In today’s complex, ambiguous and fast changing organizations, meaning and purpose is easily lost. Take health care work for example. It has intrinsic value, meaning, and purpose. The irony, however, is that countless health care workers (and professionals) trudge off to their jobs every day not recognizing that what they do has so much meaning. They are mentally overwhelmed, physically exhausted, and emotionally depleted by the constant stress and demands of their job.

In today’s environment of complex, ambiguous, and constantly changing organizational landscapes, negative human energy is possibly the greatest threat to organizational performance and success. Attaining emotional awareness and learning the skill of Positive Presence will enable you to easily recognize when employee needs are not being met.

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Understanding Emotional Needs Today

Posted on June 11, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

Influential leaders are leaders (with or without a formal title or role) who possess the mind and behaviour habits that create positive and energized emotions within themselves and around them. They are emotionally aware leaders, and they actively seek information to understand and respond to the various needs of their employees.

Often, these needs are not communicated clearly and are expressed as laments – for example, “I feel so out of the loop” (the need to be included) or “No one listens to my ideas” (the need to feel respected and valued). An emotionally aware leader hears what is being said between the lines, so to speak. They know that all employees (including themselves) have the same basic needs, but the degree of importance given to each need varies from person to person and from situation to situation. For example, one person feels stifled because they have to give weekly updates to their boss, but they feel grateful that their boss is always willing to help them. While this person feels the need to be independent most of the time, they need to feel supported all of the time.

Employees’ needs fall under what is called the Two-Factor Theory, also known as the Motivation-Hygiene Theory, a framework developed by psychologist Frederick Herzberg. According to this theory, employees have two kinds of needs: hygiene, (e.g., good salary and benefits, job security, safe workplace) and motivation (e.g., job growth, feeling of accomplishment, recognition). In his research, Herzberg found that “motivators were the primary cause of satisfaction, and hygiene factors the primary cause of unhappiness on the job.” In other words, when employees are not satisfied with their jobs, they say it is because of hygiene factors (e.g., low pay, bad boss), but when they are satisfied they say it is because of motivation factors (e.g., fulfilling work, meaning, value, and purpose).

Herzberg’s theory, which he introduced in 1959, is still relevant today. Motivation factors are based on employees’ emotional connection to their work. These factors continue to be included on many (if not all) lists of employee demands from their organizations. Gallup research on strengths-based leadership indicates that the more people feel that their emotional needs are being met, the more energized, engaged, and passionate they are about their performance, productivity, and overall commitment to the mission and vision of the organization.

Understanding the needs of your employees is a complex and often confusing undertaking, because what one employee needs is far different from what another employee needs. Learning the skill of Positive Presence on the job, in real time, is a good place to start. Understanding too, that it’s not something you can learn in isolation. Your skill of Positive Presence must be tried and tested in your workplace with your work colleagues – because, what works for one person, will not work for all. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ quick fix. Learning the skill of Positive Presence is, for most people, a slow and gentle process that requires an open mind, a common vocabulary, and a will to change, flex and adapt.

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The Four Traits of Emotionally Aware Leaders

Posted on June 4, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

As we leave the technological era and move through the knowledge era and into the next, the makeup and definition of a good leader evolves as well. Research and experts have identified at least four additional traits to the hallmark traits of authenticity, humility, honesty, and courage. These additional traits are necessary in leaders at all levels.

1. Mental Presence
Being mentally present reflects a conscious decision to pay full attention (physically, mentally, and emotionally) to everything that is occurring around you. Mental presence enables you to focus, observe, learn, listen, form an opinion, and develop insight. Equally important, it prevents you from saying or doing anything that could trigger a negative emotional reaction in others.

2. Emotional Control
Having emotional control does not mean repressing feelings. It means making a conscious effort to stay focused, composed, and even tempered. No one benefits from a leader whose first reaction to a bad situation is to scream at everyone around them, or who openly vents their frustrations in public when overwhelmed. Conversely, no one benefits from a leader who is so emotionally closed up that they cannot show compassion, affection, or joy when necessary or appropriate.

3. Inspiration
Being inspirational is second nature to self-aware leaders. They inspire others with their words, actions, behaviour, character, experiences, self-confidence and self-control. Self-awareness of your volition, mental models, and emotions is the strongest foundation you have for inspiring others. When you are self-aware, you are sympathetic to the plight of others and you are likely to want to make a difference in their lives. In addition, you understand and thus avoid your own emotional triggers, and that gives insight into the emotional patterns of other people-what makes them happy, sad, angry, and so on.

4. Responsiveness to Concerns and Needs
People make an emotional connection to their leader before they connect with their work. ‘Influential leaders’ — leaders with or without a formal title or role — possess the mind and behaviour habits that create positive and energized emotions within themselves and around them. They are highly practiced with the skill of ‘Positive Presence’ and it places them in a position to model emotionally balanced behaviour. More important, it enables them to be responsive to others’ needs, which is a primary contributor to employee engagement.

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