As a human you are a complex manufacturing plant for electro-magnetic neuro-chemical energy. Positive emotions exist in positive energy. Your energy is basically your thoughts and feelings which manifest into the physical world as behaviour. Learning and developing your skill of Positive Presence increases your ability for emotional awareness. With increasing emotional awareness comes the ability to see the connection between how a person is behaving and how they are thinking and feeling.
Science has proven that your behaviour is in 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 mental patterns predict behaviour style. Your behaviour style has the ability to stir up emotions in others. Behaviour style, or social/communication style, is the way you conduct yourselves 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. Often your behaviour style aka social/communication style resides in your subconscious and can be obvious to those around you, but not necessarily to yourself. Leaders who are keenly aware of their behaviour ‘style’ and understand how their ‘style’ affects others (positively and/or negatively) have the greatest ability to enhance workplace performance.
Many organizations are at a loss when it comes to building culture. CEOs are quick to put their top leaders into a room for a couple of days, even a couple of weeks, and expect a culture change. As an upper-tier leader, what you know and what can you do to influence change are often two different things – no fault of your own.
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 – and this is the mindset that they come to work with every day. It is a mindset that is also easily transmitted from employee to employee.
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 colleagues.
As we move through the knowledge era toward the Age of Connection (aka The Network Society) due to the internet, the necessity for emotionally aware leadership is absolutely critical for organizational success. 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.
Its important to note that, for the most part, your brain is not wired for the positive – you are actually predisposed to the negative. But, your brain can be easily taught to recognize the negative, then release the negative, and replace it with positive thoughts and feelings. So it is, that a keen emotional awareness is needed for you to be able to respond appropriately to the concerns and needs of your followers.
Authenticity, humility, honesty, and courage are hallmark leadership traits that research has attributed to a leader’s emotional awareness. In today’s knowledge economy in which the majority of your workforce is made up of knowledge workers – those people whose jobs require formal and/or advanced education and are often professionals in their own right – there is now a critical need for leaders, from the top right down to the front lines, to possess a deep emotional awareness of both themselves and of those they lead.
Emotionally aware leaders understand their own (and, by extension, their employees) emotional triggers. Emotional triggers are people, events, conditions, or experiences that arouse intense negative reactions. Incompetence, micromanagement, constantly missing or incomplete information, arrogant and superior attitude, lack of communication, and excessive number of unproductive meetings are just some of the emotional triggers at play in the workplace. Once triggered, an emotional reaction may stir up other negative memories and negate any positive experiences on the job.
A leader’s words, attitudes, and behaviour 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.
Leaders without emotional awareness, do not relate well to others or engage with them, and in fact, 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.