Today’s leaders are managing the most complex workforce at the most demanding time in history. Our labor force is made up of people from multiple generations, across different ethnicities, religions, genders, sexual orientations, and cultural backgrounds, people who bring their life experiences and expectations from global environments with them to the job. The work environment has also drastically shifted, thanks to a combination of technology and the new realities brought by COVID-19. We no longer have to be in the same country as our colleagues, never mind the same office. Today’s employees are less willing to spend their lives commuting to crowded offices and instead want to work remotely and in virtual teams. Isn’t it fitting then that when dealing with such fractious, uncertain, and challenging times, we have, inside each of us, a superpower that can create trust bonds and make us happier, healthier, and more likely to succeed?

Before we are employees, managers, or senior leaders, we are human. As humans, we have feelings, and those feelings—if we learn to identify them, accept them, and act accordingly with them—can become the superpower we need to thrive, personally and professionally. This superpower can be the factor that leads to more engagement, collaboration, creativity, innovation, and happiness.

An emotionally intelligent leader realizes this underappreciated and unrecognized potential inside themselves and their colleagues and treats their employees as humans first and foremost. People are not simply task completers; they are emotionally complex and remarkably resilient. Learning cognitive strategies to be bigger than our emotions is critical for success in school, business, and life. We need to learn to be observers of our emotions and take the emotional charge out of situations. We need to learn to look for the incredible gift emotions provide us and what they tell us about ourselves, others, and the world. And we need to learn to be in command of our emotions, so we have the strength and stamina to be more powerful than our feelings, learn mental strategies on how to regulate them, and not let them take over our life. Emotions should not be feared but celebrated. A wealth of amazing possibilities are available if we learn to harness our superpower.

Excerpted from The Emotionally Strong Leader: An Inside-Out Journey to Transformational Leadership by Carolyn Stern. Copyright © 2022 by Carolyn Stern & Associates Inc. Excerpted with permission from Figure 1 Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher

September 13, 2022

Previous / Next