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One definition of leadership is getting work done well through other people. Your success depends on the people you lead, if you’re a leader. That’s why I think it’s important that leaders understand how to help people get into the optimal state because in that optimal state, they’re going to perform at their best. And by the way, that’s going to make you look better.
Set the tone
Leaders set the tone, the emotional tone for an entire outfit in an organization, whether it’s a team or a massive corporation, and how we get along or don’t get along with our direct boss, with the person who leads us, is a great determinant of how we feel about what we’re doing. Leaders who have emotional intelligence, who are high in emotional intelligence, get better performance out of the people they lead. In other words, they help people get into that optimal state. They create the situation that’s going to encourage that. And they do it through being self-aware, being positive, keeping their eye on the larger goal despite distractions, being empathic, caring about people, letting them know that you have their back, you support them. All of these things facilitate that optimal state.
If you have a boss who thinks that, well, I’m going to beat these people up. I’m going to stress them out to get the results I need. You’re going to be on the trajectory toward burnout, and you’re very likely to maybe give everything for results for the organization, but your relationships will suffer, your health will suffer, and you may be more likely to quit. You’ll have high turnover in that boss’s division. So a leader with low emotional intelligence is actually draining the organization in the long term. They may get results for the quarter by driving people, by stressing them out, but they’re burning them out, and they’re going to lose good people.
A good emotional intelligence, the boss would get the same results, by the way, by inspiring people, by motivating them, by finding out what they care about and relating that to doing a good job. So having a boss with high emotional intelligence means you feel not only inspired, not only motivated, you feel supported, you feel guided, you feel you have clarity about what’s expected from you, but you give your best in your best state, in the optimal state, not in a desperate, stressed out state.
Send the right emotions
Research at the Yale School of Management has found that emotions are contagious, and they’re most contagious from the leader outward. The leader is most often the center of strong emotions, either negative or positive. If the leader is in a negative mood, very anxious, for example, people on the that team will catch that mood and performance goes down. If the leader’s in a very positive mood, I feel really good, I feel enthusiastic, people catch that positive mood, and their performance as a team or as a group goes up.
As a leader, remember, you’re a model. When a teacher is teaching social emotional learning, it’s very important that the teacher himself or herself go through the guidance and training in those abilities because they are a model for thirty or forty kids with everything they do. And the same is true for leaders. So you are an exemplar, hopefully, of high emotional intelligence, and people who you lead will naturally want to follow your example or keep you in mind as the kind of person they would like to be.