Master your own emotions and you will master the team’s emotions
Increasingly, organizations are realizing that a leader’s emotional intelligence level impacts the effectiveness of their team management and performance. In this article, I will discuss why collaborating with emotions is crucial in team leadership, what the most common challenges for leaders are, what problems managers face when managing with emotions, and what strategy can be applied to master one’s own emotions, so that the team willingly cooperates with the manager and becomes more effective.
One of the biggest challenges managers face is dealing with stress, pressure, or anxiety. A strategy that can help in managing one’s own emotions at work and beyond is developing the skill of interpreting the information that emotions carry. As the authors of
yourself questions: What is this emotion telling me? What does emotion “X” want to make me aware of? What should I pay attention to? Often, emotions indicate that we have “violated” our values or norms, which is why we reveal them not to analyze them, but to draw conclusions that we will apply from now on and in the future.
Communication is crucial in managing and collaborating with emotions within a team. Whether we are currently exceeding results and increasing the organization’s value together with the team largely depends on
effective leadership based, for example, on managing knowledge workers, including experts. Without the competence of asking questions or understanding linguistic structures and how we evoke emotions in the recipient through the language we use, it can be difficult for leaders and managers to manage, especially employees’ emotions. Instructional management is reserved for individuals new to a given position, when there is a need to learn procedures or applicable rules. In the case of experts or knowledge workers, the aforementioned approach is very ineffective, generates conflicts, and resistance to cooperation.
Conflicts are inevitable at work, but there are principles and approaches that allow for their effective resolution. One such principle is the “win-win” approach, where both parties try to find a solution satisfactory to all. This approach is not about choosing between two sides “x or y,” but about creating a third solution that incorporates elements of both positions. The starting point for successful negotiations is primarily focusing on the causes of the conflict, rather than on the emotions resulting from it, or the impressions or feelings of both parties. It is worth asking questions about facts, findings, data. The question “When would this problem not have arisen?” will allow us to go back to the aforementioned cause of the conflict and more easily begin to lay the first foundations for resolving the conflict.
Mastering emotion management is crucial for effective team leadership because it allows us to more effectively control ourselves: our internal mechanisms and states, which at any given moment might be resource-poor. Emotions such as intense fear, regret, feelings of shame, or guilt cognitively limit our ability to find solutions and think logically, which are key skills in managerial positions. Leaders who can manage employees’ emotions are more effective in resolving conflicts, making decisions, and building strong team relationships.
Mastering the skill of collaborating with emotions can also help increase employee engagement and motivation, and achieve better results for the team and organization, because we better interpret what employees are expressing and understand them more precisely. As a result, this allows for more effective alignment of communication and management so that both sides remain satisfied and the company functions better.
