03/07/2022

Keys to Great Emotional Leadership

The pandemic clarified the overlap between our personal and professional lives

Leaders don't necessarily take on their jobs expecting to be emotional managers. Which may be why there's so much evidence it’s not working out so well. According to one survey, 75 percent of stressed-out workers attribute their stress to their immediate supervisor.

Happiness at the office, as I wrote last week, can be a difficult goal to achieve. It's worth adding, though, that happiness isn't the only emotion you may be called on to address. And given the various types of emotional strain that workers have faced in the past year, leaders have an increasing responsibility to better understand and manage them.

And too often, according to executive coach Sarah Noll Wilson, leaders fall short. In a Harvard Business Review article titled “How Supportive Leaders Approach Emotional Conversations,” she catalogs the many ways that leaders try to avoid talking about stress. They can dismiss or minimize problems or slather a stressful situation in what she calls “toxic positivity,” chirping platitudes like “Just look on the bright side!”—a phrase that, in my experience, is guaranteed to do little besides make a person fume quietly and feel unheard.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.