adminWomen & Leadership
Maggie Mzumara
IF you have ever been told that “you are too emotional”, “you need to be rational in dealing with stuff” or that “you are too sensitive” — well, it is time to turn that myth on its head and flip the script. Stop being made to feel guilty or as if something is wrong with you for being emotional.
Apparently, it is actually a positive thing to be emotional, in fact, today’s leadership requires that we harness, sharpen and use our emotions to full advantage.
We are taught to suppress our emotions and express them only in controlled ways. It is considered highly unprofessional to express emotion while at work.
According to David Caruso and Peter Salovey in their book “The Emotionally Intelligent Manager”, the above views about emotions are incorrect.
“The emotion centres of the brain are not relegated to a secondary place in our thinking and reasoning but are instead an integral part of what it means to think, reason and be intelligent,” writes Caruso and Salovey.
Our model of emotional intelligence begins with the awareness, recognition and identification of emotion.
Something unexplainable can hold you back from moving on with a major decision.
It can be a look on the faces of a few of your more senior developers or managers that indicate some subtle signs of uneasiness and caution.
Second, you can feel some inner discomfort, recognise it, and not let it go.
Third, you can subconsciously express your uneasiness and sense of trouble as well by looking down at the floor, slightly frowning, and rubbing your hand over your chin.
Feelings influence thinking
The fleeting feelings of worry and concern can focus your attention — and your team’s attention — on a problem.
With your brain or something inside of you saying, “we have a problem”.
Your thought processes can become more attuned to search for and find errors and inconsistencies. And you can actually find them.
The process in this model then moves to an understanding of emotions, what causes them and how they change. For instance, you can determine that the change in the mood of your group is due to some potential issue regarding the requested product specification change.
You reason that the growing sense of uneasiness is not due to either the lateness of the hour (the meeting is on time) or to any other external issues. It seems pretty clear to you that everyone is focused — and for good reason.
The fourth and final part of our model indicates that because emotions contain data, we must stay open to them and integrate them.
The last thing you need is another project setback.
And you certainly do not relish having to tell your boss that these latest changes will not fly.
Many of us in similar circumstances might try simply to ignore the uncomfortable feelings, discourage them, and direct the team’s attention to the next agenda item.
If you let the feelings hold sway, allow them to redirect attention, figure out what is going on, and then stay open to the wisdom of these feelings to uncover a serious problem – you have used emotional intelligence.
Caruso and Salovey support this, saying you have just employed an emotionally intelligent approach to core functions of managing, such as planning, flexible thinking and adaptability. “A focus on emotion does not make you weak or vulnerable, instead it allows you to be much more able to face up to, and successfully cope with conflict and change.”
This approach to managing is not just a reactive, passive analytical tool, it has a strong prescriptive and positive function. It is not enough to uncover problems, the job of the effective manager is to solve problems and this is where our emotional intelligence approach pays dividends.
According to the authors, there are four emotional skills around which the emotionally intelligent manager is built:
Read people: Identifying emotions
Emotions contain data. They are signals to us about important events going on in our world, whether it is our internal world, social world or the natural environment.
We must accurately identify emotions in others and be able to convey and express emotions accurately to others in order to communicate effectively.
Get in the mood: Using emotions
How we feel influences how we think and what we think about. Emotions direct our attention to important events, they ready us for a certain action and they help guide our thought processes as we solve problems.
Predict the emotional future: Understanding emotions
Emotions are not random events. They have underlying causes, they change according to a set of rules, and they can be understood. Knowledge of emotions is reflected by our emotion vocabulary and our ability to conduct emotional what-if analyses.
Do it with feeling: Managing emotions
Because emotions contain information and influence thinking, we need to incorporate emotions intelligently into our reasoning, problem solving, judging and behaving. This requires us to stay open to emotions, whether they are welcome or not, and to choose strategies that include the wisdom of our feelings.
◆ Maggie Mzumara is a leadership, communication and media strategist as well as corporate trainer, who offers group trainings as well as one on one coaching in various areas of expertise. She advocates women leadership and is founder of Success in Stilettos (SiS) Seminar Series, a leadership development platform for women. Contact her on [email protected] or follow on Twitter @magsmzumara.
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