Are you an emotionally competent leader? Is your team torn by emotional and interpersonal issues that are affecting your performance? Are there clashing personalities within your team? Are you having a hard time guiding and supervising your team members? The workplace can often be a stressful and pressure-filled environment, so leaders must be able to effectively provide adequate emotional support and guidance for their team members. Emotionally competent leaders provide emotional stability and flexibility essential for any successful team.
Importance of emotional management to leaders
Stress, pressure, and arguments in the workplace are sometimes unavoidable. Negativity and conflict can often appear in the workplace, whether it’s because of deadlines, miscommunication, or a simple clash of personalities. As such, an organization has to rely on competent leaders and supervisors with high Emotional Intelligence to properly manage their team members and foster a good workplace culture.
A bad work culture due to toxic team behavior and emotional mismanagement could drastically reduce the employee’s productivity and efficiency. That is why managing our emotions effectively in the workplace is a vital factor in creating a successful work environment. So, here are four qualities of an emotionally competent leader.
1. An emotionally competent leader is self-aware.
A leader is a person too, that is why good leaders recognize that they must first be emotionally stable themselves before they can even begin to help other people. Self-awareness allows leaders to know and manage their own emotions. An emotionally competent leader is aware of their own emotional states, the causes of those emotional states, and their effects on their own and team’s performance and productivity. An emotionally competent leader must be self-aware enough of their own ego and personality so as to not let them get in the way of helping and guiding other members of the team.
Another thing to remember is that you should not make hurried decisions or judgments, instead, you should pause and think critically about what action is the best course to take. Your reactions as a leader must be measured and well planned, and not hastily made or highly emotional responses.
2. A good emotional leader leads by example.
Employees and team members look to their leaders for assurance and emotional support. When things get tough and everyone is panicking, it is the leader’s job to stay cool and collected so as to provide a calm presence for other people.
You must be the bastion of emotional stability and calmness that other team members would look to. Emotionally competent leaders must have the self-discipline to regulate their own emotions and control their actions so as to project confidence. They often demonstrate high emotional intelligence and serve as role models or examples for the other team members to follow.
Emotionally competent leaders don’t blame others or those below them for any mistakes and can hold themselves accountable for their actions. They don’t fall for the trap of blaming subordinates or finding scapegoats, which would add to the toxicity and negativity in the team. So, good leaders find a solution to problems and not someone to blame.
3. A good emotional leader is self-motivated and motivates others.
Have you ever had a bad day at work and were in no mood to accomplish any tasks for the day? Did you want to procrastinate or leave some work unattended? Emotionally competent leaders always fight the urge to procrastinate and don’t give in to temptation. The rest of the team members depend on the managers to give instructions and get things done even when they are tired or emotionally drained. They can always motivate themselves to do what is expected and required of them, regardless of their current feelings.
A properly motivated leader would also know how to engage and motivate the rest of the team. Leaders must learn and understand their employees’ and team members’ unique personalities, backgrounds, and characteristics to better motivate them to give their all for the organization. This would result in better team culture and higher productivity.
Optimism is the key to properly rallying the other members of the team. Even if the team is experiencing difficulties, a leader must always try to maintain a level of constructive optimism so as to keep their team motivated and focused on the job.
4. An emotionally competent leader is empathic to other people.
Good leaders don’t just manage projects, but they also manage people. Leaders can often read the emotions of their team members based on body language and the overall mood of the room. They put themselves in the shoes of other people so that they can better understand their needs and wants. Emotionally competent leaders assess the emotional states of team members and respond appropriately to emotional cues and body language of employees by taking into deliberation the diverse backgrounds and cultures of team members. They give the employee the opportunity to express their thoughts and feelings or state the current needs they are facing so that they can work through solutions together.
Promoting and encouraging a positive emotional climate in the workplace is vital for any organization that wants to boost employee cooperation and satisfaction. A step towards this goal is to ensure that leaders are emphatic to their employees, by being a good and responsive listener that does not offer judgment or criticism.
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