42Develop a Leader Mindset
to be realistic. Cultivating self-awareness is hard, because we often mask
what’s toughest for us to handle with emotions that feel safer.
To develop awareness around your behavior, identify patterns in the
way you act on your feelings. When you feel angry, do you lash out or do
you withdraw? When a task intimidates you, do you hang back or take
over? Audit yourself briefl y at the end of each day, for example, during your
commute: What positive and negative emotions did you have today? When
during the day did you feel effective, and what behaviors felt off? What do
you think was driving your emotions and actions today?
You can ask yourself these questions on the spot, too—for example,
after you lose your cool with an employee or when you ace an important
task. Don’t just focus on your problems; your successes have just as much
to teach you.
Feedback from coaches, trusted colleagues, and even from your em-
ployees can help you gain perspective on what’s going on, according to
Goleman. How do they experience your moods and behaviors? A close
friend or family member may be able to help you here as well, so consider
reaching out: “I’ve been feeling really energized at work lately, and I’m not
sure where the boost is coming from. Can you help me fi gure it out?”
Ideally, the reactions you observe in yourself will be adaptive, mean-
ing that they will resolve the fundamental emotional problem you’re fac-
ing. For example, you recognize that you’re routinely impatient with one
of your team members, so you adapt your approach to working with him
to eliminate the frustration. But we all engage in some actions that are
maladaptive and only make the situation worse. Classic maladaptive re-
sponses include:
• Procrastination
• Denial
• Brooding
• Jealousy
• Self-sabotage
Emotional Intelligence43
• Aggressiveness
• Defensiveness
• Passive aggressiveness
The concept of pattern is important here. Everyone procrastinates
sometimes. But as individuals, we tend to gravitate toward particular be-
haviors or thought progressions, our “go-to” reactions. If you regularly shut
down during confl ict, denial might be an important emotional pattern for
you. Or if confl ict usually causes you to cycle through the same thoughts over
and over (“She’s wrong. I can’t believe she doesn’t see it! She made one good
point, but mostly she’s just wrong”), you’re probably prone to brooding.
These emotional habits affect everything from our performance on a
project to the impressions we make on our peers. But the patterns you’ve
observed aren’t written in stone; they’re plastic. Once you become aware
of any negative effect you have on others, you can adapt and mitigate the
impact.
Emotional steadiness and self-control
If you’re self-aware, you know when you’re angry. The next step is to use
that self-knowledge to manage your emotions. This ability, which Goleman
calls self-regulation, matters for three reasons.
First, your team reacts to your mood. A leader’s mood is communi-
cable; your emotions color the experiences of everyone working around
you. Goleman and his colleagues term this mechanism mood contagion.
If you’re pessimistic and depressed, your team will be, too, even if it’s not
their natural disposition. If you wear your stress on your sleeve for all to
see, your team members will feel more stress as well. That’s because moods
are transmitted at the physiological level through an open-loop system
that involves hormone levels, cardiovascular functions, sleep rhythms, and
immune functions. Our bodies respond involuntarily to these signals, and
these distinct physical changes eventually combine in an all-encompassing
emotional experience—good or bad.
44Develop a Leader Mindset
Second, emotional steadiness allows you to question or slow down your
decision making in high-stakes situations, so that you don’t make emotion-
ally charged or ill-conceived choices. In today’s business environment, the
ability to keep a level head through rapid upheavals or long periods of un-
certainty will serve you well.
Finally, your self-control underwrites your integrity. You need to be
able to moderate your impulses so you can say no to ethical temptations
that might harm your career or your organization. Impulsive actions don’t
need to be illegal to compromise your leadership; if you throw a contract
to a friend, sleep with an employee, or even go back on your word to your
team, you risk losing your employees’ respect and confi dence. Stress in par-
ticular can bring out the worst in all of us in the workplace. Self-control in
highly stressed situations is invaluable.
Managing your hot buttons
No matter how diligently you work to manage your emotions, you probably
still have hot buttons—behaviors you’re particularly sensitive to in other
people or things you’re personally touchy about. Maybe you loathe being
interrupted, especially by a certain self-important colleague. Or perhaps
you feel embarrassed about your public-speaking skills and poorly handle
challenges to your ideas when you’re giving presentations.
When you fi nd yourself confronted by a hot button, you often can’t
contain the negative feelings it sparks. Perhaps you snap at the colleague
who interrupted you, lose your ability to articulate your thoughts, or start
to tear up in the middle of your presentation.
Business strategist and executive coach Lisa Lai suggests a three-part
strategy for keeping calm in testy situations:
• Acknowledge what’s happening. Put your self-awareness into ac-
tion. Hot buttons always have a history. Maybe you react so poorly
to being interrupted now because it was a major problem at your
last job or in a personal relationship. Don’t let those associations
control you: recognize the history that’s being triggered, but make
a conscious decision not to project that past onto this situation.
You don’t know how this moment is going to unfold.
Emotional Intelligence45
• Abstract yourself from the story. What’s happening feels per-
sonal; that’s why it has the power to rile you. But what if it weren’t?
What if being interrupted wasn’t a referendum on your worth or
status, or about you at all? You don’t know why your counterpart is
behaving this way, and you don’t have to play out their drama. So
imagine you are watching this situation happen to someone else:
what would be the best thing for them to do?
• Develop a physical cue. Heightened emotions take you deep in-
side your own head, but you can use your body to help redirect
your thoughts. When you feel things escalating, make a subtle ges-
ture or movement to anchor your focus fi rmly in the present mo-
ment. Lai herself presses her palms on the underside of a table or
against each other; you can take a few deep breaths, hold a pen or
other object fi rmly in your hand, or pick a place to fi x your gaze for
a few seconds while you gather yourself.
The good news is that you can recover even if you do snap at one of these
triggers. If you do something you regret, acknowledge what happened. If
you yelled at or humiliated someone in your outburst, start by apologizing.
Then take a leap and explain what really happened for you: “I was angry
and I’m not proud of how I acted. I’ve tried to understand what made me
lash out like that, and I think I felt disrespected when you interrupted me.”
It’s hard to wade back into the emotions that provoked your behavior in the
fi rst place. But research shows that people respond with heightened com-
passion and forgiveness when you appropriately disclose your emotions.
Managing an employee’s emotions
Just as good managers regulate their own emotions, they also monitor and
react to the emotional states of the individuals on their teams. While you
can’t control how they feel or even how they choose to act, you can steer
them in a more productive path. For example, if Pedro is pouting in a meet-
ing about a new initiative, his disaffection may derail your team’s support.
But by working with Pedro to address his emotions and help him express
46Develop a Leader Mindset
them in a more positive way, you can defuse the tension in the meeting and
better understand his point of view, perhaps learning something impor-
tant in the process.
To do this, you must acknowledge an employee’s emotional state, com-
municate that you value them as a person, and explain that you aren’t will-
ing to ignore inappropriate behavior. Then you can help them understand
and solve the underlying problem. Here’s how:
Step 1: Spot the emotion
Don’t wait for the dam to break: watch for telltale signs, like a gap between
what someone’s saying and their body language—for example, if someone
says they’re on board with a decision but they avoid eye contact or get red
in the face.
You seem unhappy with this choice. Help me understand what
you’re thinking right now.
Step 2: Practice active listening
Engage your employee to search for the issues that are motivating their
emotional response. What can you infer about the facts this person is work-
ing with, about the values driving their reactions? What word choices and
body language seem extreme, what phrases or ideas do they keep returning
to? Follow up by paraphrasing what you’ve heard and asking open-ended
questions about it.
I can see this decision process has been frustrating for you. Help
me understand. What’s behind your frustration?
Step 3: Reframe your employee’s emotions
Use the information you’ve gathered to develop a hypothesis about what’s
going on, and then test it. If your employee is resisting a new training pro-
cess, for example, do they not see its value, or do they believe it won’t be
well implemented? Make an informed guess and ask for their response. If
you’re right, your employee will feel heard; if you’re wrong, their reaction
will still teach you something useful.
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