All the top clients were in the room and all eyes were on the CEO. He walked up with a smile and began “It has been a great year for us. We have grown and continue to grow. We are looking at Asia to grow.” and continued in this vein for ten minutes. I am not sure if he noticed the luke warm applause that followed his self-centered speech that could have been delivered easily by a junior intern ! In this defense he did learn a few words in the foreign language of the audience in an attempt to connect with them but I could not help but think it is emotions and not linguistics which is the international language of leadership.
It is the language of emotions that leaders must develop greater fluency and agility in, if they want to connect people to a vision or inspire them to action. They must develop emotional agility to leverage the privilege of the platform that leadership provides to them. I define emotional agility as the skill a leader has to tap into the right emotion at the right time for the right purpose. One can think of it as a specific subset of emotional intelligence which taps into a larger domain of the management and regulation of emotions. The more I look around the more evidence I gather of lack of emotional agility in leaders around the globe . One has to only look at the recent ill fated MH370 Malaysia flight that disappeared to see the lack of emotional agility of the team. They informed people of having lost their loved ones first via text messages. Leadership is not just about management of information but also management of emotions.
How can we acquire and display emotional agility?
1. Learn more about yourself:
Like most things in leadership the fluency begins with self awareness and discovering what is our own level of comfort with dealing with emotions – that of self or others. Some of us are more expressive and willing to be vulnerable in the moment while others hide behind personas by adopting masks that prevent people from seeing the real you. Needless to say the former have an edge in being emotionally agile but even in the latter situation it is a skill that can be learnt. In the day and age of flat structures the emotional accessibility of the leader help connect them with the people they lead.
If you observe a pattern in the situations where you often encounter an impasse for instance, it may be time to step back and consider if expression/acknowledgement of emotions of the parties involved was in anyway at the root of it all. We all have blind-spots about the way we deal with emotions and those must be overcome for developing emotional agility.
2. Learn more about the culture seek to influence:
Different cultures deal differently with emotions. While smiling even at a stranger or greeting them as you meet them on the street maybe common in some western countries, it may be seen as intrusion and be met with distrust in some Eastern ones. In Japan for instance, customers service reps have had to be taught to smile by holding pencils between their teeth as traditionally smiling has been equated with the attempt to hide something. Casual banter from senior leaders may be acceptable in the US but is not so common in China. So the context of the expression of emotion matters. Incidentally, you don’t have to go East or be in China for this to apply. Given the global world we live in, your colleagues might treat the expression of emotion differently than you.
3. Learn to be a great storyteller:
Given my work on corporate storytelling, I have come to the conclusion that there is a strong correlation between great storytelling and emotional agility. Being a good storyteller requires you to go beyond the knowledge of story structures, formulas and scripts to the wisdom of which story to tell, when to tell it and to whom. Stories harness emotions like no other expression. They cut across cultural and functional boundaries.
The best example I see of this is the relationship between India and Pakistan where both parties have been at war more than once and the relations can become strained on many issues but Pakistani plays are highly popular in India as are Bollywood films in Pakistan. When immersed in stories we experience a safe space for connection and so adding storytelling to your repertoire increases your emotional agility. As Christina Baldwin famously put it – words are how we think but stories are how we link.
Logic may lead us to a conclusion but it is emotions that move us to action. And a leader that can inspire action is a force to reckon with anywhere in the world!
What do you think about emotional agility? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.
