Let’s explore working with the emotional climate of a team.
How you think about a situation is going to impact upon how you feel and vice versa. That’s why the ability to manage emotions is so important in releasing the untapped potential of the people that you work with and in implementing change.
Neuroscience shows that mind and body are so deeply intertwined that when you do new things, especially in an emotionally resonant way, you’re rewiring your brain and so deepening your memory.
The secret here is to create emotionally engaging tasks and then practise them by stepping into discomfort, managing those emotions well and with a positive attitude. By doing this, you’ll find that people learn more rapidly. Working to master emotional intelligence is a step towards helping others to do the same.
This tool counterpoints levels of emotional engagement with the capacity for emotional management.
Emotional engagement is the way in which people are engaging emotionally with the current situation and how they’re using their emotions to drive and confidence the emotional climate.
Emotional management involves emotional awareness, reading emotions and understanding emotions, yours and those of others and capabilities around choice, making choices around how you work with and express emotions, even in the grip of strong feelings.
If the emotional level is low and emotional management is low, people will find the climate demotivating disengaging and become apathetic and they’ll be in a situation where they say things like, “I don’t care”.
If the emotional level is high, but the emotional management is low, people will be impulsive, coercive and disruptive. They’ll say things like, “I want this to stop” or “Do it my way”.
If the emotional level is low but the emotional management is high, you’ll find people will be organising, they’ll be productive and they’ll be considerate. You’ll hear things like, “I’m okay with this”.
Using your emotional intelligence well, ideally, you work towards situations where the emotional level is high and emotional management is high. In these situations, everybody will be working in an engaging way. It will be inspiring and energising for everyone and you’ll hear are things like, “I want to make this happen”.
By understanding the interplay between emotional engagement and management, leaders can create environments where innovation thrives, performance excels, and people perform at their best. It’s about shifting from a reactive approach to emotions to a proactive approach that utilises them in ways that drive collective success that unlocks the full potential of their teams through human connection and achievement.
