Latest psychological research tells us that our emotions drive and guide our behaviour, develop or ruin relationships, guide attention and help us store memories. Put simply our emotions control our performance and quality of life. They even have a dramatic impact on our health as negative emotions lead to the release of toxic chemicals that damage our body. Intensive care units have shown that patients who are comforted by others have lower levels of stress hormones, lower blood pressure and even have lower secretion of artery clogging fatty acids.
Obviously emotions have a big impact on you, but do your emotions affect your environment?
The reality is that emotions are carried through your organisation like electricity through a cable.
Put another way your emotions are contagious. The question is are your emotions worth catching?
A closed loop system is one that regulates its self and is not influenced by the outside world. Your emotions/mood is an open loop system meaning that the environment affects them. This open loop system allows a mother to console her distraught child, or a manager to rev up their sales team.
This means that our mood affects the mood of our team. In 2000 Caroline Bartel at New York University and Richard Saavedra at the University of Michigan found that people in meetings adopted the same mood (good and bad) within 2 hours. They also found that teams of nurses and accountants tracked the same emotions over the week, even though they varied in terms of external stress and challenges.
Depending on what sort of emotions you bring to work you could be quite literally killing your co-workers. Pause for a moment and consider how do you affect the mood of your team? We so often only focus on the role of the leader, however we all affect the mood of our team.
Having said that the greatest influence on a team is the mood of the leader. It is so potent that many leaders should consider their primary task as the emotional leadership of their team. This is not to say that leaders cant have bad days, however research tells us that teams perform best and solid culture is built when the leader regularly has an optimistic, authentic and high energy mood.
Can we change our mood? In a word YES!. A person’s emotional state and attitude are not genetically hard wired, they can be changed. However we all have a bias towards a certain style and emotional set point.
The more we act in a certain way be it happy, cranky or sad, the more we reinforce that pattern in our brain and the more we act that way.
This is where emotional intelligence matters. An emotionally intelligent person can be self aware of their mood/emotions, change them for the better through self management, understand their impact through empathy and act so that they improve the emotional state of those around them.
Steps to improve you emotional state:
1. Picture it up!
What emotional state do you want to be in? Picture how you want to act, be perceived, what is the mood of your team like. Get a clear understanding of how you want things to be.
2. Take Stock!
Find out your starting point. Many leaders do not know how they affect their team and environment. I have spoken to many leaders to have them inform me of the great “vibe” in their team and how their team loves their leadership style. Only to be informed by the team that they see them as a “tyrant” and unapproachable. Park the ego and ask your team for feedback. The best way to do this in anonymously, you might also consider getting formal 360-degree feedback. In addition make it ok for your team to give you feedback on your emotional leadership. Relax we are not as perfect as we think we are.
3. Bridging the Gap!
How do you start to develop your leadership? First step is to up-skill yourself. Here are some things I have seen other leaders do in the past.
a. Simply start to research and educate yourself on this area through books and courses.
b. Take time to reflect, some of the best leaders I have worked with spend 30 mins a day reflecting on their emotional leadership. They analyse different situations during that day and examine how they reacted and how they could have responded in a better way.
c. Some look outside of work, they develop empathy and emotional regulation by coaching their children’s soccer team or devoting time to a local charity.
4. Practice Makes Perfect!
Choose one emotion to work on. For example you may choose to practice more patience with your co-workers, more empathy, greater optimism or simply look at removing anger and judgement from your leadership style. The way we change our behaviour, is to do and redo the new behaviour, over and over again. This breaks old neural patterns. An added bonus is that we can fast track this with visualisation. Imagining something in vivid detail fires the same brain cells and neural pathways that are actually involved in the real life task. Before a meeting or on the way to work start to run through your head and picture how you want to lead and manage your team.
5. Get some Help!
Find a coach or a colleague who you can debrief you activity with. I have encouraged many leaders in large corporates to form coaching groups where they discuss their challenges and how they handled them. The feedback has been that they are exceptionally beneficial.
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Are you killing your co-workers?
Adam Fraser - Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Sleep Deep
Adam Fraser - Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Sweet Dreams, Sleep Tight, Succeed!
Many hard-charging managers pride themselves on their ability to work long hours and get by on five or six hours of sleep. But the truth is that they’re shortchanging themselves—and their companies.
“Sleep is not a luxury,” says Dr. James O’Brien, medical director of the Boston SleepCare Center in Waltham, Massachusetts. “It’s a necessity for optimal functioning.”
When you sleep, your brain catalogues the previous day’s experiences, primes your memory and triggers the release of hormones regulating energy, mood and mental acuity. To complete its work, the brain needs seven to eight hours of sleep. When it gets less, your concentration, creativity, mood regulation and productivity all take a hit.
HOW SLEEP WORKS
To understand why the right amount of shut-eye is so important to performance, it helps to know how sleep works.
Healthy sleep is divided into four-stage cycles. As we progress through stages 1 and 2, we become increasingly unplugged from the world until we reach the deep sleep that happens in stage 3. In deep sleep, both brain and body activity drop to their lowest point during the cycle, and blood is redirected from the brain to muscles.
The fourth and final stage is named for the rapid eye movement—REM—that is its defining characteristic. Our brains become busily active in REM sleep, too, even more so than when we are awake. Dreaming happens at this stage.
In a full night’s sleep, we experience three or four such cycles, each lasting 60 minutes to 90 minutes.
THE WORK SLEEP DOES
Different yet equally important restorative work happens during deep sleep (stage 3) and REM sleep (stage 4).
Deep sleep is crucial for physical renewal, hormonal regulation and growth. Without deep sleep, you’re more likely to get sick, feel depressed and gain an unhealthy amount of weight.
In REM sleep the brain processes and synthesizes memories and emotions, activity that is crucial for learning and higher-level thought. A lack of REM sleep results in slower cognitive and social processing, problems with memory and difficulty concentrating.
A DEFICIT IN SLEEP LEADS TO DEFICITS IN WORK PERFORMANCE
Performing complex tasks and navigating complicated relationships—the heart and soul of a manager’s work—both become much harder to do when REM sleep suffers. And when you cut back on sleep, your REM sleep suffers the most. There are two reasons for this:
1. Your brain, when confronted with sleep deprivation, opts for lighter sleep and hence less REM sleep.
2. Later sleep cycles tend to have longer REM periods than cycles earlier in the night. When you sleep through only one or two cycles instead of three or four, your REM sleep is disproportionately affected.
When your brain is starved of REM sleep, concentrating on a single activity is challenging. Multitasking—an inescapable bane of managerial work—becomes exponentially more so.
A deficit of REM sleep also makes it tougher to pick up on nuances in discussions or negotiations.
“When you’re listening intently to someone, trying to understand the main meaning as well as the subtext of what’s being said, your brain is multitasking on several levels—an activity that requires lots of mental horsepower,” says Dr. Gandis Mazeika, head of Sound Sleep Health in Seattle. “If you’re sleep deprived, that’s hard to do.”
In addition, recent research shows that sleep deprivation takes a toll on decision-making ability.
GETTING MORE FROM THE SLEEP YOU GET
Given the demands facing managers today—working in a 24/7, always-on environment is a big one—a full night’s sleep is sometimes an impossible dream. Fortunately, there are ways to get more out of the time you do manage to spend in sleep:
Avoid caffeine. Cut out caffeinated coffee, tea and soda ideally 10 hours before bedtime—and chocolate, too.
Although some antidepressants can help you feel drowsy enough to fall asleep, they also tend to compromise REM, says O’Brien. A more healthful approach for some is to meditate a half-hour before hitting the sheets.
Darken the room completely. Your brain creates a hormone called melatonin that senses when it’s dark out and primes you for sleep. If you try to sleep amid too much light, your brain may decide you’re not ready for bedtime after all.
Sleep in a restful environment. Make sure the room is quiet and your BlackBerry is out of hearing range. Sleep on a comfortable mattress; Mazeika advises not to skimp on quality and plan on getting a new one every eight to 10 years.
Article written by Ms. Anne Field and was published at the Perspective Section of the Business Mirror, January 10, 2009.
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