The most explicitly emotional aspect of leadership, according to Kouzes and Posner, is to encourage the heart by showing appreciation for others’ accomplishments and celebrating community. Here managers need to be able to understand complex feelings. How can we make sure that celebrations of coworkers’ successes produce a basking in reflected glory rather than mere envy? What kinds of ceremonies feel genuine? How do we reward accomplishment without undermining intrinsic motivation? These are all challenges for the emotionally intelligent manager.
Who Do We Serve?
Developing others forces leaders to ask, “Who does a leader serve?” Does the leader serve him- or herself first, or the needs of his or her team, shareholders, and customers? The concept of a servant leader has regained some interest recently. A servant leader is motivated to serve the needs of people first and to acquire the interest in, and skills of, leadership later. In essence, the focus of the servant leader is on the needs of employees and their continued growth and development. Such a person may be great to work for, but we’re not so sure that a servant leader will necessarily be effective in other domains.
But the concept of a servant leader reminds us that one of the goals of a good leader and, we believe, of an emotionally intelligent leader, is to do the right thing for people. A leader’s resources are the people of the organization, the human capital. A good leader gets things done with and through the wise use of these resources, while at the same time replenishing these human resources. We have found that those higher in emotional intelligence tend to be more interested in developing and helping people. The emotionally intelligent manager, then, should be able to focus on the development of these human resources.
Pretend for a moment that you are a product manager. In this matrix management environment, your development team does not report to you. You have just received a preliminary engineering analysis indicating that the costs and schedule for the product are way out of line. This will be a surprise to the team. You need them to get motivated and to find a way to make this development effort work, given these changed parameters. What do you do?
Emotionally Intelligent Management
There are a number of ways to approach this situation that seem quite reasonable but will not be very effective. For example, many managers slap a smile on their face and try to motivate the team through sheer happy will power. There are indeed times when we need to grin and bear it, but the team will pick up on a phony smile. When that happens, the falseness of your assurances becomes apparent, and any trust that had been developed previously will be lost.
There is no single, best answer to the question faced by this product manager. Stepping through a series of Emotional Blueprint questions, however, may begin to shed some light on possible solutions:
- Identify Emotions: How are you feeling about this interaction? How might the team be feeling about this interaction? What about the engineers who did the analysis?
- Use Emotions: How will these feelings influence your approach and thinking about this interaction? How will the team approach and think about this interaction?
- Understand Emotions: How will the team react? What are they expecting from you? For example, how will they feel if you ask them to “work harder” on the problem?
- Manage Emotions: How will you manage your feelings about this interaction? What will you do to manage the feelings of the team so that they recognize the seriousness of the problem and get to work on it right away?
You might discover that your initial panic led you to believe that the project was hopeless and beyond being rescued. Now you’ve come back more to an emotional center and see that the news is bad but perhaps not as bad as you thought at first. You sense the concern of your project team and leverage your somber mood and theirs to stay focused on details and problem finding. You prepare the team for the bad news—you don’t sugarcoat it— but you also don’t claim it’s the end of the world. You might indicate that you felt it was the end of the project when you first heard the news but that additional analyses brought you toward a slightly different conclusion.
You express empathy for the team; you understand their confusion, anger, surprise and fear. Because the news is bad but not devastating, you realize and communicate that this particular show must go on; the team is going to stay intact and find a way out of the mess. Now is the time for the motivational speech that is delivered with emotional directness and intellectual honesty. If you truly believe, as does the engineer, that you can salvage the product, then it is up to you to effectively communicate this message to your team, just as you have communicated it to yourself.
Reflecting on your emotional transition can give you the map or blueprint you need to help direct the team toward the same goal.
The path to achieving such a goal, almost by its nature, will be a rocky one, and the team will experience a number of setbacks. Your job, as a manager, is not to anticipate every possible problem but to have an idea of how to manage yourself, and your team, when confronted with a setback. Benazir Bhutto, the first female government head of an Islamic nation, knows what it is to experience obstacles and setbacks. As Bhutto, former prime minister of Pakistan, concluded, “Leadership is very much predicated on the capacity to absorb defeat and overcome it.”