Emotional Intelligence for Leaders

Introduction to the course - what you can expect

2.1 Why developing emotional intelligence? Outcomes for you Developing emotional intelligence goes well beyond the basic idea of empathy: there are clear, measurable results you can expect as you develop your ability to positively influence your emotions and the ones of people around you. For example: 1. You will develop a stronger ability to understand what’s going on around you 2. You will be able to gain skills and knowledge faster 3. You will gain more support from others[1] 4. You will be seen as a better performer by people above you in hierarchy [2] It’s all very tangible and real, and the way it works has to do with how able you are to control your emotions and influence them. The more you are in a positive emotional state and experience emotions like gratefulness, the less your brain is under strain, and the more space it has to explore new thoughts, establish relationships and experiment.[3] The more you follow on that, the more relationships you will build thanks to it, and the more skills you will learn.[4] Basically, you’d be building a safety net of new resources you can rely on, which will then allow you to perform better. Plus, studies[5] show you will not just perform better, but actually be seen as a better performer by whoever is above you in the hierarchy. Outcomes for your team You will see your team’s performance increase, and you will see your team be more motivated, independent and resilient. You will perform at a higher level, be more efficient and work in a reliable climate of trust. [6] Outcomes for your team will be slightly longer-term, but as they learn to communicate at a deeper level with you (and with each other in turn) they will find a psychologically safer and healthier place to work in. And because of that, they will want to invest more energy, be proactive and be more willing to take competent risks. Emotional intelligence helps understanding others and communicating better with them. It helps teams and leaders stick together and be healthy and resilient, even under uncertainty and pressure. If you are going through some rough waters, you’d appreciate someone noticing, offering a helping hand, or just in general caring. If someone does that for you, you’d be thankful, and will like that person more because you know he or she is someone you can count on.[7] Not only that, you’ll also want to reciprocate: you’ll be thankful for what he or she has done and will feel that it’s right to be as supportive and caring in his or her regard. And if you put this dynamic at a leadership and team level, you can see how people in a team with a good dose of emotional intelligence will support each other, stick together, understand each other and motivate each other. That’s why EI is such a key factor at work. SOURCES Dutton, J. et al. “How to be a positive leader” (2014) Fredrickson, Barbara L. ‘The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions.’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 359, no. 1449 (29 September 2004): 1367–78. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2004.1512. Sadri, Golnaz, Todd J. Weber, and William A. Gentry. ‘Empathic Emotion and Leadership Performance: An Empirical Analysis across 38 Countries’. The Leadership Quarterly 22, no. 5 (2011): 818–30. Stephens, John Paul, Emily Heaphy, and Jane E. Dutton. High-Quality Connections. Oxford University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199734610.013.0029.

2.2 Why emotional intelligence? For yourself Emotional intelligence is the ability to control and manage our emotions, to positively influence our own emotional state and the one of the people around us. Most of your emotional life is unconscious.[1] You feel something and depending on what it is you take a more optimistic or pessimistic view on things, and you then base your behaviour on that point of view. For example if you are feeling down because of stress, you will be more on edge and will not want to engage and joke around with others. This is how we often deal with emotions: we just let them happen and influence our life – and more often then not, we let them run their course and let time take care of them. If you are like me, when you have a bad day you just label it as a “bad day” and count on the fact that you’ll be doing better tomorrow. That’s a passive approach, that’s what I mean by letting emotions influence our life – and as a leader, this approach is problematic. If you don’t have the tools to manage and influence your emotions, and let them be in charge of your behaviour as a leader, you can count on the fact that your team will notice. They will not want to engage or interact with you and possibly just won’t like being around you – the opposite of a positive and supportive work environment! If it’s ever happened to you that because of an event or after a bad interaction you had with someone (e.g. a conflict) you · felt like your energy was being drained, · kept going back to that event and reinforcing your own negative thoughts about it, · couldn’t think straight or focus elsewhere because of how much you were going around in circles about it… …that’s exactly what I’m talking about. When you are in such a bad emotional place, it will reflect on people around you. And when you are in that state, you know damn well that using logic or trying to be rational about it won’t be of any help. That’s where emotional intelligence comes in handy. Being emotionally intelligent means taking an active role: having the tools and skills to influence your emotional state and make your “bad day” into a much better one for you and for people around you. Emotional intelligence means not letting your emotions be in control of your choices and behaviours, but, knowing how to cause a positive change in your emotional state, redirecting your attention and energy to where it matters And at a more advanced level, it means being able to do this for others, uplifting them, helping them react, enabling them to focus on what matters instead of having their emotions damp them down. For your team Emotional intelligence improves a leader’s ability to inspire, motivate and drive performance. It builds resilience, respect and trust, which in turn lowers the risk of stress and burnouts.[2] If you are a leader, you need to work with both tasks and people, and working with people always brings emotions into the mix. Whether you acknowledge them or ignore them it’s your choice, but they are there whatever you do. And if someone in your team is taken over by some personal issue, maybe just by a conflict with someone, and doesn’t have the skills to deal with it, you will see how much of an impact it can have not only on the person, but also on the team’s overall spirit and performance. Breaking it down, there are three reasons for which you should care about developing emotional intelligence as a leader: · First: any environment with low emotional intelligence is probably not a healthy one. As you are responsible for setting up a safe and enabling work environment, it’s your job to make sure you do. · Second, you should care personally about your team’s well-being. If you absolutely don’t care about how your team members are doing, maybe there’s a bigger issue to discuss. · And third, someone in a bad emotional place won’t manage to get anything done - not only that: they could take their emotional weight out on the rest of the team, which is likely to sink their productivity as well. In other words, emotional intelligence, is not just a “plus” for leadership, there is also a measurable strategic aspect to it. SOURCES Goleman, Daniel. 1995. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books. Zak, Paul J. ‘The Neuroscience of Trust’. Harvard Business Review, 1 January 2017. https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust.

Yes, it is. Emotional intelligence isn’t a talent you are born with, it’s a skill and like any other skill you can explain it, learn it and refine it over time. You are not born more or less emotionally intelligent than others. You learn to be as you go along. And while it’s true that some people are better at picking it up than others, it doesn’t mean you will never get to their level. Emotional intelligence is something that has been studied for decades, we now know what builds it, and how to learn and practice each Block, just like for any other skill. Think about it as learning an instrument: you’re not born being able to play the piano. You study the theory, then you practice basic exercises, and then move up to more advanced stuff. The more you go along, the more advanced stuff you’re able to do. The moment you stop, your level decreases.

3.1 Self-assessment The first step to improve your emotional intelligence skills is to know your starting level, this assessment will help you find out. I suggest you do it right now and don’t skip ahead. If you go on reading past the test, your results may be biased. There are 50 statements at this link: https://ebz-coaching.com/quiz/emotional-intelligence-test/ for each one please indicate how much you agree or disagree it applies to you (1=fully disagree, 7=fully agree). Your results will indicate: · your overall emotional intelligence level · your proficiency in each one of its four components or Blocks. Everything you'll read from this point onwards comes straight from scientific research – you’ll see the references throughout the chapters – and even this test has been built on the basis of those sources. The reason is simple: my aim is to give you the chance to test your emotional intelligence in the most accurate possible way.

3.2 Your results (assessment and breakdown) As you’ve probably figured out in the test results, there are four building Blocks[1] that you need to work on if you want to learn and develop emotional intelligence: 1. Being aware of what you are feeling exactly and what causes you to feel that way; 2. Being able to control and influence your precise emotional state, 3. Being able to read well the emotional state of the people around you; 4. Using emotional intelligence skills in practice, to communicate better and interact at a deeper level with your team. The four clusters of questions you just answered and scored yourself on correspond exactly to those four Blocks, and seeing your results you should have a pretty clear idea of where your strengths and weaknesses are, and of where you should work on the most. Ideally, you should score high in all Blocks. Realistically, you will be scoring high in some and low in others. Here is what each Block means - along with your score Block 1 - Recognizing what you are feeling exactly, and why We’ve seen that most of our emotional life is unconscious and that we don't spend much time thinking about what we feel. Being emotionally intelligent means diving deeper. It means being able to pinpoint precisely both what you are feeling and knowing exactly why you are feeling it. The reason you need this Block is that before you try to influence your emotional state, you need to know what you are dealing with - you wouldn't try to repair a car knowing nothing about engines, would you? Block 2 - Controlling and influencing your own emotional state Being emotionally intelligent means being aware of the impacts negative emotions have on you and being able to limit it and react to it. We’ve seen that if our emotional life is unconscious, we often let negative emotions manage our life - when we do that, though, we know we won't be as focused, balanced, sociable, energetic - and that takes a toll on ourselves and on people around us. If instead we know how to recognize what is happening (Block 1), we can react to it. We can follow specific pathways and techniques to put a positive spin on our state. Reality won't change, but our approach to it will and we will be able to use our energy in a much more constructive and controlled way. Block 3 - Reading the emotional state of people around you A key aspect of emotionally intelligent people is being able to communicate at an emotional level with others, influence them, inspire and uplift them. As it was the case for Block 1, though, before we fiddle with something we need to know what that “something” is. The more precise we are in recognising what someone else is going through, the better we can empathize with that person, relate to them and establish a link. Your score in this Block indicates how able you are to recognize emotions in others: the better you are at it, the more effectively you will be able to use your emotional intelligence skills in practice (Block 4). Key aspect here, there is a link between Block 1 and Block 3: the better you can recognize your own emotions, the better you can recognize the ones of other people. Block 4 - Using emotional intelligence skills in practice: This Block measures your ability to interact with others at an emotional level. Simply put: we all have emotions, whether we like it or not - and for some reason we have been taught to limit them, or repress them in our professional environment. That is just wrong. What we should be doing instead - and even more so if you are in a leadership position - is learn how to use them appropriately to interact with others, communicate with our team, drive others and be a source of inspiration for people around us. There are ways of doing it, and very precise triggers that elicit emotions. If you follow them, and are already solid enough in the other three Blocks, you will see the effects on your leadership persona and on your team dynamics in no time. Next steps Now, all these four areas are tightly connected, and even though you may be proficient in one or more already, I still suggest you follow the course and keep on working on them in order. The reason is that working on each area will automatically improve your competence in the ones that follow it, and even if you’re already skilled on one area, doing some extra work to frame it within a structure can’t hurt, and it will help you for what follows next. The next four chapters go through each Block in detail, always using the same structure: · What this area of emotional intelligence is and what it does · Why it is relevant to develop this area · How to do it – this includes both the theory behind it and exercises or templates to aid you in your learning process and give you a structure to follow to work on it. SOURCES Goleman, Daniel. 1995. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books.

4.1 Recognizing what you are feeling What The first step to develop emotional intelligence is learning to understand what you are feeling and why you are feeling it.[1] If this sounds weird because, well, you already know how to do it, I get where you’re coming from. You know the difference between happy and sad, for example. But in your everyday, how aware are you of the difference between being feeling happy, joyful, serene or ecstatic, for example? Or how about sad, pensive, disapproving or remorseful? Or take these two emotions for example: shame and guilt. Though they feel fairly similar, they are very different. Shame is an overall feeling of not being worth much, being less than what should be acceptable (“I do not value myself”) Guilt is similar, but specific and linked to the consequences of your actions, voluntary or involuntary (“I do not value my actions in that context”). Shame is telling yourself that you are awful. Guilt is telling yourself you have done something awful. Knowing whether you are feeling guilt or feeling shame can make a world of a difference. Again, you know the difference between happy and sad of course, and it’s not hard to grasp how different guilt and shame are… but chances are you don’t always go into this level of detail or self-reflection in your day to day. Also, chances are you seldom reflect on why exactly you feel in a specific way vs. another: the tendency is to notice the general feeling and roll with it without paying so much attention to it. This difference between a general, loose perception of your feelings, and a deeper reflection on them is exactly what I mean about recognizing your own emotions: giving them precise labels and knowing why they occur, what’s behind them – and being able to do it on a daily basis. Why The reason why you’ll want to do this is simple: before you work on something you need to know what you’re dealing with. You wouldn’t start working on a car if you don’t know anything about engines. You wouldn’t fix a website if you have no idea of how to code. You wouldn’t try surgery if you haven’t studied medicine. And by the same token, you shouldn’t try to influence or manipulate emotions if you don’t know how to identify what that emotion is, and how to trace it down to its cause. SOURCES Goleman, Daniel. 1995. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books.

4.2 Mapping and logging emotions The way to go about it is good, old, basic self-awareness and self-reflection. Basically, keeping an eye on your feelings throughout the day and checking in with yourself every now and then. Self-reflection and self-awareness are your two best friends here. I suggest that for a few weeks you check in with yourself once or twice a day and answer four questions: “What am I feeling exactly right now?” “Why am I feeling this? Is something or someone making me feel like this, directly or indirectly?” “Was I feeling differently before? What drove the change in my emotional state?” “How does this emotion feel? Am I breathing differently, holding a different posture, feeling more or less tension somewhere?” It will be hard or even awkward in the beginning, as most of us are not used to being so in touch with what we feel, but if you are serious and consistent about it, and you move past your sense of discomfort, I can guarantee you will get noticeably better at pinpointing both your exact emotional state and its root cause. To help you out in the process, I’ve prepared two resources for you. The first one is a template you can use to log your answers and progress. The second one is a tool that can help you to use the template in the beginning. The template You can find the template below. Print out 30 copies and fill one every day (or save a document on your computer if you want to save paper). The point of the template is: To act as a reminder to check in with yourself and your emotional state To guide you for an extended period of time – a month – and give you a way to see how your answers evolve and become more precise and detailed the more you keep at it. It’s not about getting the right answer; it’s about being consistent in your work to develop this first Block. The reference tool A key tool that can help you out in the beginning is Plutchik’s wheel of emotions: one of the most famous diagrams that attempts to classify all emotions one can feel in one place[1]. There is a lot more work behind this simple diagram[2] than what we can cover here, but for the use of it we are interested in right now, here is how to read it: In the centre you have 8 primary emotions, some positive, some negative. Those are the basic emotions anyone can feel. If you take any emotion on the central circle and compare it with the “slice” opposite to it, you will see that they are opposites. For example: Admiration is the opposite of Loathing. Terror is the opposite of Rage. The second and third circles show the intensity of an emotion. The closer to the centre you are, the stronger the emotion’s intensity. For example: Annoyance is a less intense version of Anger Ecstasy is a more intense version of Joy The lesser the intensity, the less clear the boundary of each emotion is, that is why beyond the third circle you have combined emotions. For example; Aggressiveness is the combination of Annoyance and Interest Submission is the combination of Apprehension and Acceptance Now, there are other classifications, each one – this included – with their pros and cons, so feel free to explore if you are not convinced by this one. It doesn’t matter what diagram you choose, the key point is that you use it. A classification like this can become an extremely useful reference to identify and log your emotional state. Let’s be clear: if you’re not used to it, it can be confusing to be in touch and read your emotions in detail. There’s nothing wrong with it finding it difficult. Not everyone is used to it and it becomes easier with practice, like everything. So if you find it difficult or weird to think about how you are feeling, you can rely on this diagram and use it as a map to figure out how to describe what you are feeling. You don’t have to be strict and limit yourself to what’s written there if what you are feeling doesn’t match or is a mix of 2-3 emotions – again, no right or wrong answers here – so feel free to move around it if you want or need to. It’s more to give you a reference structure to get started, a set of training wheels if you like. And just like riding a bicycle, the more you do it, the less you’ll need to rely on an additional support. Key Points the first step in developing emotional intelligence is being aware of what you’re precisely feeling and why to get there, you need to train yourself to do it, one way is to assess and log your emotions a couple of times a day for a sufficiently long period of time (a month). To do that, you can use the template below. a tool to help you describe more precisely what you are feeling, at least in the beginning, is Plutchik’s wheel of emotions SOURCES Plutchik R. (1988) The Nature of Emotions: Clinical Implications. In: Clynes M., Panksepp J. (eds) Emotions and Psychopathology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-1987-1_1 Emotions Journal Use the following pages as a reference, print it out and answer these questions every day. Do it for 7-30 days in a row and go through all your answers at the end. If you’ve done this well you should notice how precise and detailed your answers get as you go along. You can use Plutchik’s wheel of emotions as a reference in the beginning, or any other classification you like. What emotion or emotions am I feeling exactly right now? Is it a straightforward emotion or a mix of emotions with contrasting feelings? Why am I feeling this specific emotion or emotions? Is something or someone making me feel this, directly or indirectly? Has my emotional state changed today? How many times? What drove the change? How does this emotion feel? Am I breathing differently, holding a different posture, feeling tension anywhere? [1] Plutchik, R. (1988) [2] Image Credits: Machine Elf 1735, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

5.1 What and why Once you’ve learned to recognize your emotions better and in more detail, you can start acting on them to control and influence your own emotional state. [1] Again, more often than not our usual attitude when we are having a bad day or going through a rough patch of negativity is to just let it pass. In other words: we let our emotions manage us, and when it’s negative emotions we are talking about, the effect is that we won’t be able to think clearly, to judge well or to focus on what we need to do. Being emotionally intelligent means doing exactly the opposite of that. It means: Recognizing your emotions and what is driving them (Block 1) Knowing how to maintain a positive outlook and how to break out of a loop of negativity you may be stuck on Knowing how to not fall back into that loop, redirecting your energy, enthusiasm and focus elsewhere, and maintaining that focus This chapter is about points 2 and 3. One objection I often hear when talking about this Block is that it looks like I’m suggesting you ignore your emotions, turn a blind eye to them and just move on. Actually, it’s quite the contrary of that; it’s about having a choice on what to do. If you want to overcome the negative emotional effects of something that happened because you’ve had enough time to process it, or because you are tired of being brought down, you can. You have the skills and means to handle negative thoughts and emotions, and to focus on what is important and right for you. It’s not about necessarily doing it; it’s about having the choice to do so, and of doing it if that’s the right thing for you at that point. SOURCES Goleman, Daniel. 1995. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books.

5.2 Happiness and thankfulness These are the two steps you can follow to manage your emotions[1]: Knowing how to maintain a positive outlook and how to break out of a loop of negativity you may be stuck on Knowing how to not fall back into that loop, redirecting your energy, enthusiasm and focus elsewhere, and maintaining that focus These steps are complementary, meaning that you need to do them both to get the outcome you want. Skip one and you are back to square one. Step 1 - Maintaining a positive outlook Think of this step as literally “taking the first step”. It won’t be enough by itself, but without it you won’t go anywhere. The idea is to understand the importance of keeping a positive and optimistic attitude in your everyday, and being able to do so consciously. Having this attitude in general is a great place to start, but it’s not infallible of course: something may happen that throws you off balance, that makes you displeased, irritated or plainly sad – and at that point being positive and optimistic is not as easy. It doesn’t need to be anything specific, or even overly dramatic – sometimes you’ve had a bad wake up and that’s that, no big deal. What you can do in this case – if you want to – is give yourself a brief boost, a break from your negative attitude and its consequences: clouded thoughts, judgement, energy drain… To do that, you can rely on two resources: happiness and humour. Happiness Happiness is effective, obviously: being happy always helps! You already know you can make yourself happy, probably, but did you know you have direct control on 40% of how happy you are? Putting all the numbers on it, a study published in the Review of General Psychology back in 2005 shows that your level of happiness is genetic for about 50%, 10% has to do with your environment – your income and personal life for example – and the remaining 40% depends on you, on what you do.[2] In other words, if you influence the 40% you have control on, you will feel happier, and you have full power to do so if you know what to do. When it comes to it, there is one way to tap into that 40% and feel happier effectively and quickly: write on a piece of paper one thing in your present or past life that you are genuinely thankful for.[3] In other words this means “count your blessings” – not a phrasing I particularly like, but it gets the point across… Only thing: you need pen and paper to do it, you cannot just think or talk about it (it doesn’t work). That’s it. Nothing else. You don’t need to log it, reread it, save it. You can throw the piece of paper away if you want. What this does is tapping into thankfulness, [4] which is proven to tap directly into that 40%:[5] being thankful activates that 40% and makes you feel better about yourself and your life. It’s remarkably simple, and remarkably effective. Honestly, I’m quite surprised it’s not common knowledge. If you are not sure of what to write, it can literally be anything, like: Thank you mom for giving me an education; Thank you friends for supporting me when I needed help; Thank you bus driver for waiting for me when you saw me running towards you; Thank you sun for shining and giving me a nice day. Etc. As deep or as superficial as you want – just as long as you use pen and paper are genuinely thankful for what you’re writing about. (Don’t believe me? Try it. Do it now, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, I guarantee you’ll notice the difference!) SOURCES Emmons, Robert A., and Michael E. McCullough. ‘Counting Blessings versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84, no. 2 (2003): 377–89. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.2.377. Goleman, Daniel. 1995. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books. Lyubomirsky, Sonja, Kennon M. Sheldon, and David Schkade. ‘Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change’. Review of General Psychology 9, no. 2 (June 2005): 111–31. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.111. [1] Adapted from Goleman, D. (1995) [2] Lyubomirsky, S. et al. (2005) [3] Emmons, R. et al. (2003) [4] Emmons, R. et al. (2003) [5] Lyubomirsky, S. et al. (2005)

How happiness and visualization are key component (only when used appropriately)

5.4 Humour The second resource you can rely on is your very own sense of humour. Hearing about humour in this sense may be strange… but strange as it may seem, using humour well can have tremendous effects on your mood and emotional state. Simply put: when you’re looking at the negative side of things, force yourself and try to see the ironic side of it, find what’s funny about it. If you just lost two projects and on top of that you have personal issues keeping your mind occupied, and maybe on top of that your bike broke on your way to work… well it sucks! No point in hiding it: this has all the markings of a bad day. At that point you have two choices: be miserable about it, spend all your energy thinking about how bad everything is and be caught in a downward spiral; or look at the irony of it, of how you’ve got all of that dumped on you at once, stack over stack. Reality won’t change either way, but looking at the ironic side of it will reframe how you place yourself in all this, and at the very least give you a push.[1] Still not sure? I understand – not everyone is comfortable with this approach. If you’re not comfortable with it, a reason may be that your own sense of humour doesn’t really “function” the way I’ve put it above. It may very well be, but just to be sure, I suggest you first test how your humour works (next paragraph), and second you just give it a shot – I’ve prepared a small tool for you to help you out below. Just like the emotions journal I’ve given you for Block 1, take this tool, print it out and give it a spin a few times, you’ll get the hang of it soon. Testing your humour Now, we all have different ways of using humour, and that’s fine: there’s no right or wrong in what you should or should not find funny… but when we talk about using humour to lift yourself up, there is a right way to do it: being able to see the irony in things is the only thing that works. How able are you to do it? The best way to find out is to head over to humorstyles.com and take their test. It’s a research-based assessment that will show you what your preferred humour style is. Without going too much into detail – the test results will give you a good explanation about it – there are four basic styles of humour, and your personal style is a mix of those four in different percentages. What you want for humour to be a tool as I’ve described it is a high score in self-enhancing humour. If you get it, great, you’re already able to see the ironic side of any situation and can use this to lift yourself up. If you get a low score instead, try to work on it, notice the strange, the unusual in whatever situation you find yourself in, and see if you can find the irony in it. The little guide I’ve put below should be able to guide you in the beginning. Again, may sound strange at first, but like anything, keep at it for a bit and see how much easier it becomes. SOURCES Martin, Rod A., Patricia Puhlik-Doris, Gwen Larsen, Jeanette Gray, and Kelly Weir. ‘Individual Differences in Uses of Humor and Their Relation to Psychological Well-Being: Development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire’. Journal of Research in Personality 37, no. 1 (February 2003): 48–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00534-2. Find the irony in things The better you are at finding the irony in any situation, the better you’ll be at using humour to regulate your emotions – and the way to go is to train it. Keep these two questions as a reference and remind yourself to answer them regularly, just like you did for your emotional journal. Think about your situation, what’s absurd about it, so absurd that it’s funny? Is it too crazy? Is it way too plain and normal? Or what else is it? Take that absurdity, that unusual aspect you found, and make it worse in your head! What would make it even weirder? Can the irony be even stronger? What would make it even more absurd? [1] Martin, R. et al. (2003)

5.5 Focus and engagement – part 1 Now, let’s assume you managed to handle whatever was bringing you down and you managed to get a grip – brief as it may be. That was step 1, well done on making it! That’s not the end of it though… whatever it was that moved you away from your positive mood is still very recent, and step 1 alone is not enough to distance yourself enough from it – there is a real risk you may just fall right back into your previous negative state. Sure, if you do you can go back to Step 1 and repeat it, but my guess is you also don’t want to go back and forth with it the whole time. And that’s where Step 2 comes in: in order to really distance yourself from that event, and move past the emotional block that it caused, you need to keep moving and get invested in something else. More specifically your focus needs to be on: Setting yourself a short-term goal and focusing on it Getting engaged and being enthusiastic about what you are doing.[1] The combination of these two steps (again, you need to go through both) is what will help you keep away from whatever was bringing you down and redirect your energy somewhere else – effectively helping you move past it. 1 – Setting yourself a short-term goal and focusing on it To get started, all you need to do is decide what you’ll be doing for the next few minutes, and simply doing it. Set yourself a short-term goal – literally anything, like cooking a recipe, finishing a chapter of a report, building a shed in your garden – and do it. And while you do it, keep your focus on it: deny any impulse to stop focusing on it and take a break. This is the key. Personally this is almost impossible for me, I get so easily distracted and even while writing this book I had to keep myself from checking social media, checking the news, taking a coffee break… I want to do all of that, badly, but I also know that if I interrupt what I’m doing I will lose track, waste time, feel bad about it and all of a sudden I’ll be back to square 1. If keeping focus is hard for you as well, the good news is that it’s a matter of practice. Here is an exercise for it: Put your phone on airplane more and set a timer for 5 minutes; Open a text editor on your computer; Start the timer and write, anything you want (work, your diary, a letter…); Do not, for any reason whatsoever stop writing until the timer goes off. This includes re-reading, correcting spelling mistakes, structuring the document. If you don’t know what to write anymore, write you don’t know what to write – and then keep going. You CANNOT interrupt your writing until the timer goes off. SOURCES Goleman, Daniel. 1995. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books. [1] Adapted from Goleman, D. (1995)

5.6 Focus and engagement – part 2 This is an extreme example, but doing it will show you what I mean. It’s an exercise in self-discipline in focusing, and the reason I’m sharing this exercise with you is that by doing it you will experience how it feels to force full focus on one topic, and one topic alone. Once you know what it feels like, you can replicate it better in your own work. It’s experiential learning, simple as that. I have very little self-discipline personally, and that is why I use this technique regularly (it’s also a great way to put your thoughts down on paper if you need to write something down for work and you don’t know where to start – that’s where I learned it), and if I manage to deny my impulse to get distracted and go through with it, I’m sure that so can you. Long story short: set yourself a goal and work on it, non-stop. Once you’ve started working on that goal, the way to follow up on it is finding a way to get invested in the process: force yourself to be enthusiastic about your task, or maybe make yourself a bit anxious about what would happen if you don’t work enough. Whatever works for you to keep yourself engaged, or even better enthusiastic about it. This for me has also been one of the hardest things to apply. You need to find a way to force yourself and that’s never nice, but I guarantee that if you push through and deny your impulse to let go, you will find what makes you tick and helps you focus. Just remember that the hard part, the really hard part is the beginning, the first 10 minutes give or take. If you manage to get invested in what you are doing by then, you’re rolling. And once you’ve done that, congratulations, that’s a massive accomplishment – by the time you get to this point, it is very likely you’ll have moved past whatever was holding you back: you’ll be more focused, more energized, and will have regained your positive outlook on life, which is what we were aiming at to begin with. Now, if all of this sounds hard… it’s because it is (I never said it was easy!), but the satisfaction you’ll receive from getting better at managing your emotions and experiencing how much control you have over them is insanely gratifying. Personally, I think this is the hardest of the four Blocks, but once you master recognizing and managing your own emotions well, you’ll immediately see a change in how you recognize emotions in others and how able you are to influence them, skills that will build directly into Block 3 and Block 4.

5.7 Key points Once you know how to recognize your emotions and what drives them, you can start managing them. The risk is that if you don’t manage and curb your negative emotions, you will keep on reinforcing negative thoughts and have your negativity consume most of your energy. To avoid that, you need to go through two steps: Maintaining a positive outlook using humour or hacking your happiness Not falling back into a negative emotional state by setting yourself a short-term goal, focusing on it and getting engaged in what you are doing. With time and training, you will be able to influence and control your emotional state, be more solid, more positive and more efficient.

6.1 Reading others What So far we have that that emotional intelligence is made up of four areas, and we’ve gone through the first two: Labelling your own emotions: being aware of what you are feeling exactly and why. Managing your own emotions, especially negative ones that can drag you down. I take you’ve gone through the previous chapters and done the work, and that you’ve got to a point where you are fully aware of what you are feeling at any given time and proficient in controlling your emotional state. You’ve got your emotional self-leadership covered: when you notice you are having a bad day, you know how to control it and make sure that it does not weigh on yourself and especially on your team. That’s good leadership already if you ask me. In this Block we start getting to your team because let’s face it, that’s where the kicker is. So far everything has been focused on you, on controlling and influencing your own emotional state. The thing is, part of your role as an emotionally intelligent leader is to extend your influence on your team, both in the day-to-day and in specific situations that require your attention (e.g. conflict resolution). There is a lot to it, as you can imagine… Just like in Blocks 1 and 2, though, before you get to the core of it, you have some background to cover. In this instance, this means building up your ability to read and understand in detail the emotional state of a person you are interacting with or you see interacting with others – and that is precisely the focus of this chapter. Why If something is wrong with someone in your team at an emotional level, you know what you can expect: low energy, blurred focus, clouded thoughts, i.e. exactly the same that would happen to you. And if that’s the case: it’s your job as the leader to make sure you do something about it. I mean it both from a professional and a personal perspective. Again, you are in a position where you can and do something for three reasons: First of all being in a bad emotional place for an extended period of time is not healthy, and as you represent your company – whether you like it or not – you share part of the responsibility for that person’s health, so it’s your job to notice and do something. Second, you should care personally about this person’s well-being. If you absolutely don’t care about how your team members are doing, maybe there’s a bigger issue to discuss. And third, someone in that state won’t manage to get much done, so there’s also a strategic aspect to it: the quicker you notice, the earlier you can act and get our team’s back to full performance.

6.2 4 Elements to read others To read others well, you have three resources at your disposal, and the good news is: you already have two of them in your pocket. Here they are: The work that you have done in Block 1, understanding your emotions in detail and their drivers Your life experience in observing others Additional input to improve your understanding basic body language – another book or the points I’m giving you below. Obviously when I say you already have two in your pocket I’m talking about 1 and 2. The core of the matter is still that most of our emotional life is unconscious, and you can apply that statement to your own emotional state or to the one of others. In other words: you have already spent your whole life looking at and processing all verbal and non-verbal signals that are clues to someone’s emotional state – most of the time, though, they go straight to your unconscious. This, though, doesn’t mean you are clueless about it. Quite the opposite actually: you have already stored a huge database of emotional signals and their connected meaning, but you just may not consciously access that database that often. The difference, now, is that with all the work you’ve put into Block 1, you have developed awareness about those emotional signals – and if you were aware of your own ones, I can guarantee you will also be more aware of the ones of others. So you can notice signals, and those signals are already quite familiar to you. What is still missing now is some way to structure what you know, some reference to assign a specific meaning to a specific signal – just like Plutchik’s wheel of emotions helped you give structure to feelings you already experienced. My suggestion for it is to find a basic book on body language with lots of photos and go through it.[1] As much as I would love to give you a full catalogue of non-verbal clues and their meaning, I have to remind myself to stay on focus because we’re talking about emotional intelligence, not body language! Even without leaving you a whole catalogue, I still want to give you something to work on. So here are four elements I often use as a reference in my workshops when it comes to communication and non-verbal signals. Whenever you interact with someone, be on the lookout for these four. They will help you out at least in the beginning to read who is in front of you. Those elements are: Shape Rhythm Intonation Dissonance [1] For example: · Joe Navarro: What Every BODY is Saying · Barbara and Allen Pease: The Definitive Book of Body Language

6.3-6.5 Shape By shape I simply mean: look at the other person’s whole body posture, expression, movements. What visual cues can you recognize just by observing someone’s shape? Are they standing straight or hunched? This could mean more or less confidence in any given situation. Are they in a closed position or an open one? A closed position (e.g. arms or legs crossed,) could indicate refusal, embarassement, need for protection. Self-contact is also a clear sign (e.g. holding a hand on the opposite arm above the elbow or on the opposite shoulder) as it can indicate unease and need for comfort. An open position, instead (e.g. shoulders relaxed, showing palms, facing you) could indicate confidence and acceptance. The general rule here is that our brain perceives unease or discomfort as a sort of danger, and whenever we feel in danger we want to protect ourselves by putting up our barriers. This is why we go into a closed position: our arms or legs, crossed in front of us, act as a physical way to protect ourselves – so if you see someone suddenly adopting a closed position, you know that something has just happened that triggered that person’s need to find comfort or a feeling of safety. Are they facing towards you or away from you? If you interact with someone and their whole body faces you, it could mean that you have their attention, if instead their face is towards you but their feet, legs or even their whole body is facing elsewhere, it could mean their attention is on something else or that they don’t want to interact with you at that moment. Practical examples of this: Whenever you and others are speaking in a group while standing, look at everyone’s feet – where are they pointed? Almost invariably, someone’s feet will be pointed towards the person that he or she finds most interesting in the group – and that can reveal a lot about underlying group dynamics. If you are speaking with someone and a third person arrives, how does the person you were talking to react? Does his or her body remain fully facing you or does the person turn away from you? If they only turn their head away to face the newcomer, the interest is still on you. If instead they turn away, it’s obviously not. Are they fiddling or moving incessantly? That may be a sign of unease, nervousness or excitement, depending on the context. Are they in a closed position and caressing or scratching themselves? These may be a form of self-contact. Often people search comfort when they are on edge, and self-contact may be a good indicator that they are. This is particularly interesting to observe when someone is being accused or something or is lying. A fairly famous example of this is when someone touches the back of their neck with the palm of the hand – usually that element is associated with a liar, so watch out for it. Sometimes, self-contacts may also be associated with a romantic interest (all depending on the context of course!). Facial cues can also reveal an awful lot: Eyes Looking down and away can be a sign of embarassement. Looking up and away instead can be associated with thinking or imagining something. Lips Biting your upper lip or bringing your lips inwards and biting them both can be a sign of tension Biting your lower lip is usually a sign of focus, interest or attraction Pushing your lower lip out (as a toddler would do) can indicate refusal of what you are hearing Holding your lips in a round shape (as if you were giving a kiss) can indicate interest, focus or approval Facial self-contacts Scratching your nose, passing your hand through your hair above your ear is usually a sign of nervousness, depending on the context of course.

In this lecture we cover elements related to body language and direction

In this lecture we cover elements related to body language and facial expressions

6.6 Rhythm and intonation Rhythm Rhythm is the rhythm of the conversation and of the other person’s breathing, You can tell a lot by someone’s tempo: How are they breathing? If their breathing is paced and constant it can indicate confidence or ease. If instead it’s tense, superficial and rapid it could be liked to some sort of stress. If it’s deep and calm it could indicate focus, and if instead it’s deep and strong it could be a sign of bottled-up anger. How is their way of interacting? Are they listening and letting you finish your sentences? That can mean appreciation, ease or respect. Are they instead interrupting you, speaking over you, interrupting their own sentences in the middle and jumping across topics? That can mean wanting to dominate the conversation, aggression or insecurity. Intonation Connected to rhythm: listen to someone’s intonation as they speak: What does the voice of who is in front of you tell you? Is it normal? Is it blatantly angry? Do they maintain a constant pitch or can you notice their pitch going up and down? A stable pitch can indicate calm and confidence, a pitch going up and down could be connected to being nervous or afraid (like trembling).

6.7 Dissonance And last: dissonance. Dissonance can be extremely important in understanding what is going on with someone at a deeper level. It may well be the case that people not want to show a negative emotional state (sad, angry, aggressive, etc.) and in case they will compose themselves and try to force a more positive appearance. Thing is, it’s extremely difficult to force an outlook that is not coherent with your emotional state. You couldn’t fake being furious if you are in a happy, relaxed, blessed state. Or you could, but it’s likely that it won’t be as credible as when you really are. So while you look at shape, rhythm and intonation, ask yourself: are these elements coherent? Is the person in front of you holding a good shape, rhythm and intonation, or do you notice that something is out of place? For example they may have perfect rhythm and intonation but hold a very closed posture and look away. Or they could force an open posture and relaxed breathing, but have an unstable rhythm when they speak or an irregular pitch.

6.8 The 4 elements in practice These are four elements you can use in the beginning as a guideline, tools to help you out just like the wheel of emotions was. And just like for the wheel of emotions, I don’t expect you to rely on them forever, but only until you get the hang of it. To get started, my go-to strategy is to incorporate these observations in your one-on-ones and weekly meetings (which are two tenets of management you should incorporate in your practice if you haven’t got them in yet). During a one-on-one you get to speak with one person in your team for 15-20 minutes give or take, and it’s a great setting to look for clues on their emotional state, and maybe see how it connects to their performance. You’d be surprised how much more you can read and understand about the context once you bring the emotional dimension into play. During weekly meetings, instead, you have the chance of doing exactly the same, but looking at interactions from an external point of view. How do others react when someone is speaking, how does an emotional state affect others? Start trying to read other’s emotional state, in detail. You won’t ace it from the beginning of course, so give yourself some time. The more you work on it, the better and more precise you will become at reading others – and of course the better of a leader you’ll become in the process.

6.9 Key points Once you have learned to manage and control your own emotional state, you can move on to working with others and develop your skills to communicate at a deeper (emotional) level. Before you get there, you however need to refine your skills to recognize other people’s emotional state. You can already count on a lifetime of experience reading other people’s signals. Having done the work on yourself (Block 1), will have helped you become more aware of those signals already. Having a structure to rely on will enable you to become even more precise. One way to gain this structure is to rely on another body language or NLP book, the one that appeals to you. Personally I have found these four elements to be good reference points at the very beginning. Shape: what the person’s basic body language says Rhythm: what the person’s voice, conversation and breathing rhythm says Intonation: what that person’s stability and pitch in their tone of voice says Dissonance: whether the other three elements are coherent or not Using these four elements along with the skills you developed by working on yourself on a daily basis will enable you to become better at reading other people’s emotional state and get you ready for Block 4.

7.1 Emotional Intelligence in practice What This Block is about how to achieve the most practical outcomes for emotional intelligence as a leader, i.e. using your new skills to improve collaboration, drive your team, inspire your team and create a good working environment. In addition, we’ll look at how to double down via these skills when you need to intervene more heavily, for example when you need to solve a conflict or when you need to improve your team’s focus and drive after a setback. Putting it upfront, the only way you’ll manage to succeed in this endeavour is if you’ve gone through the previous three steps: learning how to recognize precisely your own emotions what causes them learning how to manage your negative emotions and not letting them bring you down, but knowing how to bounce back learning how to identify and recognize precisely other people’s emotions Only once you have all that, and you notice something is off with a person in your team, you can get to work. And I hope it’s clear why you need to have those three other steps down: to communicate with others at a deeper emotional level and influence their emotional state, you need to know exactly what you are doing – if you don’t, you’d be navigating blind. Why In the end, the largest value in being emotionally intelligent as a leader is enabling others to do better. Being able to use everything you have learned up to this point in practice allows you to communicate at a deeper level with your team, sometimes literally opening up a whole new channel. Think of it in terms of bandwidth… communication is the amount of information you are able to exchange with others. If you just rely on basic verbal communication, what you can transmit and receive will be limited – but if you expand to the nonverbal, emotional channel, you will literally be able to give and receive more from everyone. And that’s only at a surface level. Using emotional intelligence in leadership taps in several other key areas. It taps on trust, which is the number one driver of performance in a team, and an incredibly strong source of energy and motivation.[1] It taps on physical and psychological health, which in turn creates a better environment to work in for everyone, allowing for a stronger drive and a faster, more intense pace, more resilience.[2] And it taps into your leadership persona; in helping you understand the type of leader your team needs and becoming that person. SOURCES Dutton, J. et al. “How to be a positive leader” (2014) Martin, Robin, Yves Guillaume, Geoff Thomas, Allan Lee, and Olga Epitropaki. ‘Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) and Performance: A Meta-Analytic Review: ROBIN MARTIN ET AL.’ Personnel Psychology 69, no. 1 (February 2016): 67–121. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12100. [1] Martin, R. et al. (2016) [2] Dutton, J. et al. (2014)

7.2 Your day-to-day and special situations I’m not going to make a secret that this is where things get delicate, and if all I’m about to say sounds advanced, it’s because it is. As I’ve said before, emotional intelligence is a skill, and building it is a process. The more you keep at it in your day to day, the better you will become and the more you will have a positive impact on your team. So especially in this last Block, focus on doing just a small bit every day, for three to six months, and I guarantee you will start seeing the outcomes you are looking for. When it comes to the practical points, there are two areas you need to consider when dealing with your team. The first one is your day-to-day: how to incorporate everything you’ve done so far into your social interactions. The second one is about specific cases, situations in which you need to intervene more heavily, like solving conflicts. Two very different situations, and in the next few paragraphs, I’ll give you a few tools to address each one well.

7.3 Your day-to-day approach The main reference point for your day to day is a phenomenon called “emotional contagion”. The quickest reference to it is for example what happens when you and your friends are having a good time at a bar and another friend in a foul mood joins the party: as soon as that person gets in the group and starts interacting, you’ll feel how their mood brings everyone down. That’s emotional contagion in action. This happens because in a group, mood flows from the more emotionally charged person to the less charged ones.[1] It can happen between friends at a bar, and it can happen with a team member in your team: if someone starts the day in a heavily negative state, emotional contagion will kick in, and everyone else in the team will also converge towards that state. Emotional contagion though doesn’t just work with negative emotions, but also with positive ones, and that’s where it becomes useful for you. If someone (i.e. you) always has a positive outlook, is constructive, empathic and optimistic by default, he or she will spread those emotions to the group and be a source of inspiration, motivation and drive, helping the group work better together, with lower conflicts and better performance. [2] On top of that, if your emotional state is solid enough, others won’t be able to bring you down. Instead, you will always be the one influencing others and uplifting them. That’s your goal, so what I want for you is to use your self-regulation skills to be the most positively charged person in your group at all times, and to be so solid that you will become their emotional reference point, their source of emotional well-being and inspiration – basically the person you’d like to have as your leader. For this to work, you first need to be 100% in control of your emotional state (that’s what you get out of Blocks 1 and 2 of this course): you need to be solid by default to be a source of influence. Secondly, you need to be comfortable showing positive emotions, like kindness or gratitude, and bring them into your daily interactions with others. The great thing about this is that there is a tool to do it better and properly: High-Quality Connections (HQCs) SOURCES Barsade, Sigal G. ‘The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and Its Influence on Group Behavior’. Administrative Science Quarterly 47, no. 4 (December 2002): 644. https://doi.org/10.2307/3094912. Stephens, John Paul, Emily Heaphy, and Jane E. Dutton. High-Quality Connections. Oxford University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199734610.013.0029. [1] Stephens, J. et al. (2011) [2] Barsade, S. G. (2002)

7.4 High-quality connections (HQCs) HQCs are short interactions between you and one or more people that are positive, transparent, uplifting or playful. [1] For example: Holding the elevator door open for one of your team members and smiling. Getting coffee for everyone. Openly or privately recognizing someone’s success. Empathizing with someone. Making a good-natured joke in the meeting room, bantering. Showing authentic gratefulness. Sharing a personal story. Building on someone’s ideas, being constructive. Sharing something personal with someone in your team. None of the above examples are major or deep interactions, but they all carry some positive emotional value, and that’s all you need. HQCs are a brilliant and low-maintenance way of showing positive emotions to others and make others feel your positive outlook and take on work and life. It doesn’t take much, as long as they are short, positive and genuine. Consciously using them in your daily interactions is a gradual process, but the more you do it, the more people around you will like you, relate to you, open up, be receptive to your guidance and most importantly trust you – all of which are brilliant vehicles for emotional contagion to take place. In practice, here are a few triggers that lead to HQCs. Any interaction that incorporates any of these points can count as an HQCs, so go through them and think what you could do via each one.[2] SOURCES Burke, C. Shawn, Dana E. Sims, Elizabeth H. Lazzara, and Eduardo Salas. ‘Trust in Leadership: A Multi-Level Review and Integration’. The Leadership Quarterly 18, no. 6 (December 2007): 606–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.09.006. Stephens, John Paul, Emily Heaphy, and Jane E. Dutton. High-Quality Connections. Oxford University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199734610.013.0029. [1] Stephens, J. et al. (2011) [2] Stephens, J. et al. (2011), Burke, C.S. et al. (2007)

7.5 Trigger 1: awareness Showing awareness means letting people know that you see them. You can take it literally, as in “I physically consider your presence in my environment” (e.g. say hi, hold the door open, appropriately compliment someone on their appearance), or you could take it in the sense of “I am aware of your contribution to my work environment” (e.g. listen, show that you are listening, consider their ideas when making a decision). Either way, the end effect is the same: you let people around you know that you are aware of their presence and of who they are. Just knowing that they are on your radar will encourage people to open up and want to build a rapport with you.

7.6 Trigger 2: perspective-taking Throughout your interactions, put yourself in the other person’s shoes as well as you can. Do it on the basis of what you can observe: try to understand their personal and professional context, empathize, read their emotional state and use all that information to understand more how they see things. The more you get better at it, the better you will be able to make accurate hypothesis on how they would react to your actions and behaviours. Knowing how they would react will help you make an informed decision on how to act around them, for example how you can best show genuine concern and care for them so that they will react positively about it.

7.7 Trigger 3: thankfulness Thankfulness, or gratefulness is a weapon, it can do terrific things for you and your team, and the best way to leverage it is to simply show it. Show others that you are thankful for something they have done or for the way they work, privately or openly in front of others. From the other person’s perspective: it’s nice to be thanked, to be appreciated, and if your leader does that, you will want to reciprocate and relate to him or her – and that will in turn help build a strong and healthy relationship. Also, feeling grateful is one of the main triggers of happiness[1] – so if you double down on it, you’d hit two birds with one stone. SOURCES Lyubomirsky, Sonja, Kennon M. Sheldon, and David Schkade. ‘Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change’. Review of General Psychology 9, no. 2 (June 2005): 111–31. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.111 [1] Lyubomirsky, S. et al. (2005)

7.8 Trigger 4: actively show positivity Translated, this means being optimistic and showing it to trigger emotional contagion. Remember that the group always takes the emotion of the most strongly emotionally charged member. In this case I’m obviously not talking about being a clown for your team, but more keeping a solid positive state when you interact with them, so that come hell or high water your positivity will be a reference for them, and emotional contagion will kick in. Also, if you manage to successfully bring others to your positive state, you tap on something called mimicry. Simply put, mimicry means being more in sync, tapping on similarities and echoing someone’s emotional state or body language. We like what is similar to us because it makes us feel comfortable, so if your team feels they can relate to you because they feel positive around you, they will want to connect more and feel more strongly linked to you.

TEXT & IMAGES Edit 7.9 Trigger 5: actively show empathy Empathy means being able to experience accurately what someone else is feeling – and you should be able to do it at this point! Key factor here is that when you read others correctly, when you show them explicitly that you understand them and can feel what they are going through, they will notice it and appreciate it, and will want to reciprocate and like you – basically, they will want to come towards you and connect more deeply with you.

7.10 Trigger 6: respect When I say “respect others” I mean it beyond the basic idea of being polite... I mean that people around you should feel like you see their professional and personal value, that you appreciate them and that you want to see them grow. It’s one step beyond basic awareness, and in practice, you have four ways of showing respect: Be helpful When you notice that someone is struggling, help that person out – a simple act that pushes reciprocal commitment to the relationship. Ask for their input and consider their ideas Seen from your team member’s perspective, having your leader consult with you on a topic or a decision and seeing your input included in the final decision is a massive sign of trust, and it shows explicitly how much your leader values you and your professionalism. Care for them and be supportive of their growth In the medium to long term, plan a growth path with them for where they want to be and what they want to achieve, assign each team member work that is coherent with that plan, and offer them learning opportunities targeted to their goals. Reward efforts consistently Be fair in how you reward everyone’s effort – each person in your team should reasonably expect you to behave in a way following a specific behaviour. For example, if someone manages to close a project well, that person will expect you to follow up with the same type of praise that someone else has received for the same reason. If you don’t do it, you will come across as unfair or untrustworthy, and that will invalidate everything you’ve built so far.

7.11 Trigger 7: play and humour Someone, somewhere, must have thought that play and humour have no place at work – and luckily that is changing! Humour and play are tremendous weapons for leaders and powerful vehicles for emotional contagion.[1] The bone-dry version I can give you in a paragraph: playing and using humour helps you be more free and flexible in how you interact with your team, and helps you learn so much more about them, and them about you. Plus, it taps into happiness and helps establish that as a reference emotion for the team. All of this happens of course as long as you keep a healthy level of humour, balanced, uplifting and respectful. Or in more direct terms, steer clear of crude, vulgar, sexist or racist jokes… SOURCES Romero, Eric J, and Kevin W Cruthirds. ‘The Use of Humor in the Workplace’. Academy of Management Perspectives, 2006, 13. Romero, Eric, and Anthony Pescosolido. ‘Humor and Group Effectiveness’. Human Relations 61, no. 3 (March 2008): 395–418. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726708088999. [1] Romero, E. et al. (2006), Romero, E. et al (2008)

7.12 HQCs - Review Wrapping it up: all these elements are under your direct control and each one of them can trigger a high-quality connection. The more you use those triggers, the higher the amount of HQCs in your daily interactions. HQCs, as we’ve seen, are a great vehicle for positive emotions to travel on, and for emotional contagion to take place. And since emotional contagion is your best bet to drive, inspire and influence your team at an emotional level, with all the awesome benefits that come with it, these seven triggers are an incredibly powerful way to go. There is only one key point: all of it has to be genuine. Whatever you do… it has to be true and it has to come from a strong and solid emotional place. If it doesn’t, and if you’re just faking it, people will read right through you and the whole thing will backfire heavily on yourself, on your team, and on the overall mood and performance. So by all means, do it, do it all, but be genuine and real about it!

7.13 Special situations: uplifting others Targeted use of Emotional Intelligence Until now we’ve talked about your day-to-day: what you can do to build a more emotionally intelligent leadership style by working on yourself and on how you interact with others. Sometimes though you will need to step in more heavily, and the most common situations are when you are in a conflict (or are called to solve one) and when one of your team members needs your emotional support. We’ll see both situations below, one by one. Emotional support One day one of your team members will show up at work in a really, really bad place emotionally. You know what that means: This person won’t be able to get anything done, will have clouded thoughts and judgement and will be stressed and irritable; [1] This person will not have enough emotional control to be able to snap out of it; [2] Because this person is extremely negatively charged, emotional contagion will kick in and affect the rest of the team. [3] At this point, the situation is clear: you need to do something to get the person to react and snap out of it. Luckily for you, you already know exactly what to do. There is a way to snap out of your negative thoughts and refocus your energy where it matters, the one you’ve applied it on yourself in Block 2 of this course. Those steps that worked for you will also work on anyone else, and that’s the case, you just can just follow a similar process. Briefly: 1. Empathize with them Understand what they are going through, show them you understand they are going through something, show them that they are not just a number for you but that you are there to support them and that you care for them. Do that, genuinely, and give them a genuine reason to feel thankful towards you listening and understanding. Feeling thankful taps into happiness, so let their genuine happiness do the rest of the work. 2. Break them out of the negative loop they are in Your best option? Use humour. If you tested your humour styles, go for self-enhancing and affiliative humour. Make them see the irony in the absurdity. Slowly use the benefits of using humour at work to pull them out of their misery. 3. Keep them engaged and redirect their energy elsewhere Give them a short-term, urgent task to do, something that they need to focus on for 20-30 minutes non-stop, and get them engaged and enthusiastic about it, show them that it’s important and key that they do it, and that they are the best person for the job. If you do this correctly (and know what you are doing) you’ll have the person back on track in no time and avoid a massive hit on everyone: on that person, on yourself and on the rest of the team. SOURCES Goleman, Daniel. 1995. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books. Stephens, John Paul, Emily Heaphy, and Jane E. Dutton. High-Quality Connections. Oxford University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199734610.013.0029. [1] Goleman, D. (1995) [2] Goleman, D. (1995) [3] Stephens, J. et al. (2011)

7.14 Special situations: handling conflicts and anger The second situation you need to actively use all your new skills is conflict resolution. For this I will share with you one of my favourite techniques – and yes, it’s an advanced one.

TEXT & IMAGES Edit 7.15 Key points Communicating at an emotional level with your team means practically opening up a new channel, a deeper, more personal, and highly effective one. To do so, you need to first be fully in control of your own emotional state, and be able to recognize well someone else’s emotional state. In practice, you will be applying your skills in two instances: in your day-to-day and in situations where you need to intervene more heavily (solving conflicts and providing emotional support) For your day-to-day your reference point is emotional contagion: the fact that in a group, the mood always flows from the most heavily emotionally charged person to the others. Your goal is to make sure that you always have full control of your positive state, so that your mood can be the one flowing to others. A way to aid emotional contagion is using high quality connections (HQCs): short-term, quick, positive interactions between you and your team. The best way to use HQCs is to embed them in your everyday interactions: doing a little at the time and reaping their benefits as you go along. To provide emotional support, you can follow roughly the same system you used to influence your own emotional state: empathize with the other person, break them out of their negative thoughts, assign them a short-term task and redirect their energy elsewhere. To solve conflicts, start by understanding the deeper motives that drive someone’s behaviour, empathize with them, repeat to them what they told you and follow up with an assumption about their deeper motives. If you use this all correctly, you will have shifted the attention from the trigger of the conflict to the person’s deeper motives, and that’s something you can work on.

8.1 Conclusion If you were to ask me why there is such a need to be more emotionally intelligent, I’d say it’s because we are, across societies, made to be very uncomfortable in showing how we feel – but if we are communicating with others at an emotional level we need to be able to do it. From my personal perspective, I have become more comfortable over the years in expressing my emotions. Yet and still, I was brought up with the idea in my society that “boys don’t cry”, and as such I’ve been taught in some way or another that your feelings are something you should keep extremely private, not show them, not put them on display (and whoever you are, I’m fairly sure you can connect to something similar from your own life experience). For example, some years ago I was in a park with a friend, having a chat after something quite sad had happened in my life, and at some point I started crying, heavily. Now, my friend’s first reaction was to ask me if I wanted to go somewhere more private. That was extremely well intended, and I did appreciate his offer, but it was also very revealing of our approach towards displaying how we feel. I have no problem in showing that I am sad and that something is wrong, but this can go against the general idea that I’d be better not showing it in public – and in all honesty had I not worked on myself and on how I show emotions, I would have probably taken that offer…. Another example: after I had given a workshop a woman approached me to comment on how where she came from, you were expected to leave all emotions out of the office and just focus on your tasks. Basically she was saying that in her work culture emotions had no place whatsoever as they were not directly related to the job to be done – and while I could understand where that reasoning came from, that sentence for me remained something remarkably stupid to hear. At the other extreme: it would be just as pointless as saying that you should bring all your emotions and feeling into the workplace with no restraints. That’s also not ok, so why is removing emotions all together acceptable? Both of these are extreme examples of course, so do take them with a pinch of salt – but even with that the message remains: find some place in the middle, where you are comfortable in showing a certain level of emotions and that is ok with the environment you are in. Find your natural way to grow into it, and to be ok connecting with others at an emotional level. I think this is a major step in leadership, and I hope I have been able to pass on something to you with this course, I really, really do.