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EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Being a Good Boss in Dark Times
Jennifer Porter
JULY 05, 2016
jul16-05-649684715
Senseless acts of violence affect all of us. Mass shootings, suicide bombers, assassinations — the emotions such events bring up are strong, even if our personal connection to the events themselves is not. Feelings of sadness, pain, confusion, and anger don’t get checked at the office door. If you’re leading a team or an organization, how can you help manage the emotional culture of the people you’re responsible for?
I had an opportunity to explore that a few days ago when I spoke with a Derek, the COO of a large, publicly traded company based in the Midwest, the day after yet another tragedy. We spent the first ten minutes talking about his trip to some of their European offices the prior week and some questions he was thinking about. At a pause, I asked him how he was reacting to the latest tragedy. Derek talked about when he heard, how his family reacted, and how terrible it was. I asked him what it meant for him as a leader and he paused. He wasn’t sure.
As we explored how the event affected him and how it might affect his employees, Derek thought through some possible actions and created a plan. In the process, we recognized some valuable lessons for leaders in communities facing exceptionally difficult events.
Bring your emotions to work. Some people believe that emotions should be left at home. In fact, for a long time this “myth of rationality” guided workplace expectations. And yet, it’s impossible. We all have emotions, and asking one another to not bring them to work or to repress them is, in the former case impossible and in the latter unadvisable. Research by Daniel Weinberger, a psychologist at Stanford University shows people who consistently repress emotions have a higher risk for asthma, high blood pressure, infectious diseases, and overall ill health. Emotional Intelligence is a cornerstone of leadership and it involves understanding our own and others’ emotions and navigating them affectively – not suppressing them.
Be willing to be imperfect. Derek has a blog. He said he might write about his reflections on the tragedy later in the week, when he had more of the facts and understood more about what happened. We talked about the possibility and impact of blogging sooner – that day even – and sharing his confusion and upset, instead of or maybe in addition to his later analysis and perspective. This was not his typical approach, which, I think, made him uncomfortable. Brene Brown, the noted researcher in the field of vulnerability says that being imperfect is about being vulnerable and that the most dangerous myth about vulnerability is that it equals weakness. On the contrary, she says “Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t’ always comfortable, but they’re never weaknesses.”