Heart Over Head: The Importance of Emotional Leadership

Heart Over Head: The Importance of Emotional Leadership

The ability to understand and manage one’s own emotions, and to recognize and influence others’ emotions, is a critical leadership skill. It can make the difference between marginal accomplishment of a goal, and engaging the hearts and minds of team members to uncover innovative and game changing solutions that exceed expectations.

Emotions represent the Heart in the Head + Hands + Heart equation of leadership. It’s where leaders demonstrate that they care about and can connect with others. The emotions of individuals can either activate and motivate the team, or move them to disassociate from the goal and passively comply. Leaders who engage the capabilities and skillsets (hands), and intellect (heads) of their team; but fail to engage their minds and emotions (hearts) will find that there’s a missing link to maximize performance.

Imagine that you’re leading an organization in transition. The current state is unworkable, and you have a plan and vision for the future, but it will require radical change. You know it is essential to communicate the need for and plan to change (head), the requirements for change (hands), and gain supportfor the change (heart). To effectively do this it’s helpful to understand employee emotions (fear, excitement, uncertainty, confusion, distrust?) and address each one to effectively encourage, motivate and inspire the team.

Or possibly you’ve been tapped to lead a major project for your organization. You assemble a team comprised of people with the right skillsets (hands) to develop a comprehensive strategy (head). But because you recognize the importance of ensuring that the team gets along and collaborates well together (hearts), you’re spending time up front in teambuilding, to effectively and successfully attain the desired goals.

Emotional Deficiencies

We all know leaders who demonstrate poor emotional leadership. These are the ones who appear insecure, lack empathy, assume everyone on their team thinks like them, are far more task-focused and less people-focused, or lack sufficient relationship building skills. They may be known as office bullies, highly authoritarian, using positional power, and seem blind and uncaring about how others perceive them. Some focus excessively on the bottom line and quantitative metrics, ultimately well-meaning, but misdirected. They are the ones that no one wants to work for, present to, or interact with.

You can point to them in your company, and you hear about them in the business, political, and societal environment around you. You know the damage that their behavior has on the team and the organization, because it’s the subject of frequent conversation and wondering why “someone” in a senior leadership role doesn’t address it. These leaders may have some successes in obtaining business objectives, but it comes at the high price of disengaging a large percentage of their team.

Emotional Balance

Effective leaders strike a balance between task and people orientation to accomplish their objectives. This means that they need to focus on building relationships with their teams to enable creativity, innovation, participation and engagement. Simultaneously they need to provide structure, goals, policies and timelines to frame the work of the team. They need to work through the strategic challenges along with the personal emotions team members have about the challenges ahead.

Team members should not only understand the process for accomplishing their work. Leaders need to connect with them at an emotional level so that they understand why their work is important and how they add value. And leaders should prioritize the interpersonal relationships in a team before addressing the work to be accomplished. This includes building a foundation of trust, self-awareness, concern for others, appreciation for others’ capabilities, understanding individual motivations, teambuilding, serving, and providing inspiration.

Leading With Emotion

As a leader working toward a goal or driving change, here are several keys to appropriately manage your emotions, and influence the emotions of others.

1. Identify your stakeholders. This includes different groups of employees, clients, investors, unions and retailers.
2. Anticipate how they feel. Put yourself in their shoes. Be specific and detailed in defining their interests.
3. Acknowledge their feelings and concerns. Address these early. Even if you don’t have all the answers, let them know you’re working on it.
4. Identify what they can do. People feel more empowered when they have choices.
5. Invite ideas and input. Implement their ideas wherever possible. This reinforces the value of their perspectives and concerns.
6. Communicate, communicate. There’s rarely any such thing as over communicating on a topic.

Several years ago, I was part of a leadership team that had the unfortunate duty to inform a group of employees that we were closing their location. We opened the meeting by framing the business needs and quickly got to the point. We hoped to offer most of them jobs in a new site that required them to relocate. We knew that many of them might not be interested in moving their families, but we let them know that we valued their skillset and contribution, and that they could make a choice to accept relocation benefits or be provided with a separation package. Then we detailed our plans to help them and their families make the right decision for themselves. For the next several months we focused more on their personal needs and emotions, and less on the business at hand. The result was a group of employees with a positive connection to their future, based on the decisions they had made.

Emotional leaders value not only the capabilities, skillsets and intellect of their team and colleagues. They recognize the importance of engaging them as individuals with a wide range of heartfelt needs. Emotional leaders effectively manage their own emotions and positively influence the emotions of others to reach their goals.