Author: Byron Darden

Ready to Treat Yourself Right?

Posted on by Byron Darden

The concepts that apply to nutrition apply to the executive lifestyle as well.   Slowing down, taking one task at a time, and applying what you learned about nutrition will help you develop facilitation skills. Want to know more?

I’m Byron Darden, and nutrition has been an important part of my life since I was a small child. I wouldn’t have been able to train as a championship figure skater or coach world-class skaters had I not nourished my body. Through life’s ups and downs, proper nutrition and caring for myself have allowed me to thrive. A big part of coaching women in business is to look at the big picture. Inconsistencies in nutrition even affect performance in the boardroom. While I am not a nutrition coach, seeing the overall picture is my specialty. Click on the button below to book a strategy session. We’ll discuss this and more and get you on the track to success.

STRATEGY SESSION

Founder’s Corner

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Recalling the day when my therapist shared her observation that I was not in touch with my emotions, triggered the memory of Goldie Hawn’s character, Elise Eliot-Atchison in the First Wives Club when she learns of a similar observation about her emotions.

“You think that because I’m a movie star I don’t have feelings. Well, you’re wrong. I’m an actress. I’ve got all of them.”

– Elise Eliot-Atchison

I’m not a movie star. I am an actor. So to hear about yourself that “you’re not in touch with your emotions” is on par with learning poor acting skills. It’s a bit of a mountain to face and climb. Yet, I took on the task to scale that mountainside which soon revealed evidence that Indeed, I was not demonstrating being in touch with my emotions.

Instead, I seemed to hide my emotions in a nonchalant way I responded to important news, issues, and happenings in my environment. It wasn’t that I wasn’t in touch with my emotions. It was that I managed them to the point of often leaving others unsure just how aware I was that being diagnosed with prostate cancer is severe news. I took the news in stride and I shared the news with equal parts of concern and confidence. I also knew that should I choose to go to a very dark emotional place about having it, the severity increases in my mind and body. Then it can be a matter of time before I head down a rabbit hole each time dark news passes through my life.

It is one thing to have a choice in expressing emotion and to decide not to express yourself. It is quite a different matter to consciously choose to emote or not because it will help you cause or hurt it. I know that heightening my expressiveness with a fellow enthusiast regarding how much I love chocolate will most likely inspire a desirable conversation about the heavenly brown, silky substance. Raising that level of expressiveness to a fan of Hershey is an example of lacking care or knowledge of your audience.

It takes a deliberate mindset to steer emotions in such a way that they bring value to a communication interaction. Less effort can easily bring about miscommunication. Or at best, a communication that comes across as foggy and non-specific.

It’s at the level of specificity that effective leaders go beneath the surface to what we really mean when we say what we say to others. At the level of meaning, we profit from mindful choices of language from which all things are born. Therefore we are wise to give thought to what we say given our words will manifest in a tangible way. Put another way, once we speak and take action, there’s no taking it back.

Leading with Emotion

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A great leader guides, inspires, and motivate. They do not just bark orders and handle discipline for an organization – they are so much more! Ideally, personnel under their leadership thrive as they feel understood and appreciated.

Often, leaders are taught to take the harsher road – to leave their emotions out of decision-making processes. This approach is ineffective and outdated. At the same time, outbursts of emotions (i.e., your boss yelling at you for missing a deadline) are also detrimental. In addition to industry knowledge, today’s leaders need a high emotional intelligence level.

Emotional Intelligence is recognizing emotions that arise, understanding them, and how they affect those around you. Effective leaders use these emotional intelligence traits to lead their teams effectively.

  1. Self-awareness
  2. Self-regulation
  3. Motivation
  4. Empathy
  5. Social skills

Each of these traits promotes a workplace where people feel heard and understood.

Defining Emotions

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Successful businesses use the power of emotions to appeal to customers. These may include fear of missing out, the need to fit in, a way to make your lives easier, and more. The product or service seems disingenuous when emotions are not used in the creative process. The same logic applies to the use of emotions in the workplace.

Historically, we are taught that emotions do not have a role in the workplace – we are not to mix business and personal. The old way is to keep your feelings out of the decision-making process. Research finds that this is contrary to human nature and that businesses thrive when emotions are utilized correctly. Bringing a natural human aspect has immense positive effects.

A leader that utilizes emotional intelligence adapts to situations quicker and more effectively. Rather than react impulsively from an emotional place, a leader utilizing emotional intelligence responds thoughtfully and in control to authentically express emotions so that the message is received from a place of congruence.

Company culture thrives on empathy and inclusiveness. Conflicts are handled with honesty and fairness.

Emotional intelligence involves understanding your own emotions and using those emotions in your dealings with others. Included is an effective grasp of how others perceive the emotions of others and using this reasoning to understand and manage your teams.

Using Emotional Intelligence

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For the past twenty years, I’ve personally coached executives in some of the biggest global businesses. Throughout those years, I’ve seen the changes and challenges in the “no emotion” era of business. I’ve found that what separates great leaders from the rest is how they can read a situation and respond appropriately.

“great leadership works through the emotions…even if they get everything else just right, if leaders fail in this primal task of driving emotions in the right direction, nothing they do will work as well as it should or could.”

– Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, Annie McKee on Emotion Drives Expressiveness

As a leader, you can use emotions to your advantage by remembering some simple guidelines:

  1. Choose your words and respond wisely. Rather than using emotions to drive decisions, they can be an effective way to express the importance of the decisions to be made. You are missing half of the equation when decisions are made solely with emotion or with non at all. For example, in the heat of the moment, you lose your temper in a meeting. Once your words and actions are out in the open, there’s no taking it back.
  2. Look at the facts, discuss the situation with others, and ensure you lead with your heart and head, rather than raw emotions alone. Unmanaged emotions can cause the road to become foggy. They can cloud judgment and lead to ineffective decisions.
  3. Avoid carrying emotions from the rest of your life into your business decisions. Getting cut off in traffic on the way to work or getting your coffee with soured cream can affect the rest of your day. Find a place to calm yourself and approach work situations with a clear mind.
  4. Use your emotions to heighten your communication effectiveness and engage with empathy. Use intuition and listen to your heart. Keep an open mind and make decisions that align with your personal and organization’s values.

In the event you believe otherwise, then consider this. Why do you imagine so many generations of corporate employees have been told to “check your emotions at the door” unless emotions continued to show up despite the warning for all those generations?

Emotions can be threatening to some. They are uncomfortable and challenging to process. They can muddy the waters of the process. Avoiding emotions leads to other issues, including not being heard, fear of retribution, resentment, and shame.

The challenge is to strike a balance between how you are feeling and how you will productively articulate those feelings. Using emotional intelligence will help you recognize your feeling, understand why you feel the way you do, and allow you to reorient your thinking and actions to promote understanding.

Another important aspect of this is how a leader recognizes the emotions of their team members. From quiet types to more spirited members, leaders benefit from nurturing their responses in addition to how they disseminate information down the line. For example, a leader has a meeting with their next-line managers. Each manager is directed to take information to their team and, depending on how the managers feel about the information, they will determine how to communicate it to their team. A great leader will recognize the emotional blocks that might cause strife down the line.

DO NOT Check Your Emotions at the Door

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I’m willing to bet that there’s not an ad agency in business that isn’t or hasn’t flooded the market relying on emotion to sell everything you can imagine. Their best tool appeals to our sense of fear, jealousy, or desire. Ad agencies do this with a great deal of research and a comprehensive understanding of their target audience. Without this forethought, they are likely to miss the target, because emotions are “an essential part of being human. Emotions drive us.”

In the event that indeed this emotional appeal is so effective for selling goods and services, then why have business leaders been expected to show up at work every day without their humanity? You might argue that selling with emotion has nothing to do with leading with emotion in business. I encourage you to seek a more worthy argument to have. Without emotions, you have created a robotic workforce that lacks creativity and will not appeal to customers. Hence one of the reasons why I often hear from leaders about their challenge with team’s inability to be innovative.

In addition to my years of coaching executives, from entry-level leaders to the C-Suite, I’ve studied the effects of expressed vulnerable emotion in the corporate environment. I’ve also studied the impact of changing emotional behavior in the Organizational Change Management work I’ve been leading for even longer, dating back to 1983 in the nonprofit space. Two decades before, I began working in the for-profit space.

The Effect of Emotions on your Bottom Line

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Taking stock in what is known as a business’s intangible assets in classic terms does not include people. Yet when we read between the lines, while people may not qualify as such, according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), they represent what is known as “wetware,” which accounts for the mental capability, intelligence, and additional mental skills that employees possess.

Those qualities are a benefit to the company. Those benefits qualify as intangible assets. Consider that 349,000 associates work for Starbucks. Imagine the wetware that number turns out given the type of employee you’ll find worldwide that brings a level of people capability to that brand.

Essentially, the people behind a brand or, more aptly, the folks who run businesses account for a great deal of wetware. So how does this wetware relate to leading with emotion? I believe that is a question that can be answered in one word, humanity. When one brings their humanity to work, there is an expression of caring and appreciation that is shared, magnified, and measurable.

Expressions of humanity alter human energy creating a nurturing environment where growth, advancement, the rise of positive neurons, and effervescence exist in its immediate atmosphere.

Examples of expressed humanity are enthusiasm, passion, being present, vulnerable, empathetic, confident in its generative state, listening, and feedback. I can stop there because I could fill pages with more examples, and I believe the point is clear.

Recognize Your Emotions and Use Them to Your Advantage

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Have you stopped to think about how emotionally intelligent you are? To determine where you need to progress in this topic, it’s essential to know where you are now. While I do not personally endorse a particular program, there are several quizzes available online that will determine your emotional intelligence baseline.

This article references five quizzes, ranging from very short to more involved.

Did you know that there are 34,000 defined emotions? Should you have trouble expressing yourself and are confused about defining your emotions, a tool such as Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions can help. Dr. Robert Plutchik defined eight primary emotions: joy, sadness, acceptance, disgust, fear, anger, surprise, and anticipation. These emotions can be further clarified throughout the wheel. Understanding how these emotions interact with each other leads to a better understanding of how we react.

Fact-Based Emotions

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Tasha Eurich, an organizational psychologist, found that out of 95% of people who think they are self-aware, only 10-15% demonstrate awareness traits.

While we recommend thinking before speaking and not going off the emotional deep end, sometimes getting a little worked up can get results. Own up to your questionable choices and errors – you are human, and admitting your challenges often results in respect.

Continuing to grow as a leader is your purpose. Just keep in mind that it’s not always a smooth path. Since stepping into the world of leadership development, my mission has been to help female executives navigate the corporate path. Along the way, I’ve discovered the importance of emotional intelligence among leaders. Visit the blog at www.byrondarden.com for resources, tips, and tricks to navigate the changing workplace situations. While there, take the leadership styles quiz and then make an appointment with me to discuss your unique situation. Together we can bridge the gap between emotions and leadership.

Recognizing and Dealing with Systemic Racism

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What began as a school leadership development program ended with the question of how to eliminate systemic racism in a public school system. While this issue was top of mind for quite some time, I’d yet to find an opportunity to address it. Having a long history of experiencing the presence of inequality during my own formative years as a student, no one needed to caution me that this was a volatile conversation to raise. I elected to remain quiet, sighting that, like mastering figure skating in which timing means everything, calling out structured racism may fracture relationships rather than build them.

Instead, the topic was brought into sharper focus from within the pedagogical world of education. This particular occasion inspired me to take notice that the time had finally come for us to give voice to the silent past and raise awareness of the loud approaching future. As I see them, the facts are, that virtually all structured organizations inherited this issue through generations. The institution of education cannot escape. Eventually, the topic would surface, and I looked forward to one day creating the space to open what feels similar to an old war chest left forgotten in a musty attic to be discovered by someone willing to call foul and allow the unpleasant smell to be aired out for all to become aware.

Considering my work coaching executive women, I’m well aware that primary and secondary educators are historically female. Thus, the backbone of education is low salaries and high expectations, where women are often marginalized. I see power struggles and people staying in their plight. I witness the emotions and circumstances that often trigger the ills of racism to rise up like a rainbow after a rainstorm. Only it’s not as pretty a sight as the diversity of color we think of following rain showers. Here is yet another institution where women struggle to find their place and deal with the challenges of an environment where racism and sexism rises to meet their makers. This confrontation leaves people historically excluded from society to defend themselves with less than adequate means.