Leading During Tough Times
How to lead when you're lagging, dealing with emotions and getting vulnerable
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When you’re in charge of a team, your team look to you for answers. They expect vision, drive, inspiration and for you to be the role model they can aspire to. It can be a tall order.
Particularly when you’re flagging and or having a tough time yourself.
Throughout my career, having served as a trusted confidant to numerous leaders, I've come to understand that leaders are, fundamentally, human. It's an easy detail to overlook when we compare ourselves to those we perceive as more successful. Each leader I've encountered possesses a remarkable set of strengths that have led them to where they are now. Yet, they too have their blind spots and days—or sometimes months, or even years—of struggle.
The leaders I've worked with often place more pressure on themselves than anyone else does. They can be exceptionally hard on themselves when things don't go as planned.
Leadership demands vulnerability—the courage to admit to yourself and to those around you how you're truly feeling. And it can get you a long way. Leaders who are open with their teams are trusted more, develop deeper relationships and are also seen as having more charisma.
Sharing that you're having a bad day can be beneficial, but allowing this sentiment to infiltrate your meetings, decisions and interactions is not.
It is a fine balance. Emotions are infectious. Your enthusiasm, passion and energy are what will help your team drive forward even in adversity. And if you're feeling pessimistic and struggle to maintain optimism, your team will quickly pick up on these feelings and mirror them.
One-off bad days, triggered by factors outside of work perhaps, are manageable. But maintaining optimism amid ongoing internal challenges, changes, or downturns is a different ballgame.
Finding the balance between sharing authentically whilst not letting your emotions overcome your team can be a challenge.
Over my career, I've seldom witnessed leaders oversharing their emotions. In fact there's a long standing underlying belief in leadership that to show emotion is to show weakness—we're conditioned to appear in control, strong, and confident.
While it's true that allowing emotions to heavily influence decision-making can introduce subjectivity, concealing your feelings from your team can actually make you seem inauthentic and diminish your ability to connect.
Intentionally and thoughtfully communicated emotions can be incredibly powerful. Emotion lies at the heart of leadership—it builds trust, connects us to others, and motivates and inspires. Communicating without emotion—or worse, with insincere emotion—can prevent us from being seen as genuine and erode trust among those we lead. But the key words here are intentional and thoughtful.
And to do that it is essential to recognise our emotions before they inadvertently surface. Start by identifying and naming the emotion. For instance, you might think, "I'm really frustrated that our hard work isn't yielding the results I expected."
Naming your emotions this way makes them easier to articulate and share. The goal is to balance and focus the emotion on the future, considering how it can help those around you progress. It's about sharing your feelings, empathising, and then finding a path forward together—not dwelling on negative emotions.
Acknowledge the challenges while remaining optimistic about overcoming them.
It might sound like this: "I'm really frustrated by our current workload, but I'm confident that once we get through this, we'll have learned a lot and be in a better place for it."
Using optimism wisely is crucial.
In difficult times, leaders often feel compelled to demonstrate optimism and positivity. However, an excess of optimism can disconnect leaders from reality, making them seem unrealistic or even dishonest.
True leadership involves presenting yourself authentically while providing your team with what they need.
It's not always easy and requires continuous effort and practice.
Here are five things to help you.
Reflect: This could be the most powerful question ever. Because everything starts from here.
If you’re having an off day, or having a great start to your day, your emotions will be visible, both in your tone of voice, the words that you say and your body language. We are much less good at hiding our emotions than we think. And if you’re having a bad start to the morning, and you go straight into a 1-1 with your team member, how do you think that will go?
So start every day by asking yourself this question, and answering it honestly. It couldn’t get easier.
Review: Facing personal challenges while trying to retain your poise and ‘professionalism’ can be isolating. Reflect on the moments when you've felt vulnerable or struggled in silence, and how your perception of vulnerability as a leader influenced your actions and decisions during tough times.
Can you recall a situation where showing vulnerability might have led to a more authentic connection with your team?
What held you back from doing so?
What practical steps can you take to integrate vulnerability into your leadership style, ensuring it becomes a strength rather than a perceived weakness?
Name it: One of the biggest challenges with emotion is that we often don’t take time to really acknowledge how we’re feeling. If we don’t know or don’t have the words to explain it, there are tools that can help pinpoint our emotions. Evolved from the work of, among others, American psychologist Robert Plutchik, The Wheel of Emotion as presented here by the Junto Institute helps categorise the human emotions in a logical way.
Ask yourself:
What emotions are you feeling today? Are you in the yellow, pink, blue..?
What could be driving that?
How might that help, and equally hinder you in your interactions today?
Review: The dynamic within leadership teams can profoundly impact the broader team's morale, performance, and perception of leadership authenticity. Consider how emotional transparency is currently navigated within your leadership team - and discuss amongst you as a team the questions below:
In what ways does your leadership team openly share successes and struggles with each other?
Where could greater emotional transparency within the leadership team could have positively impacted a decision or outcome. What prevented this level of openness?
What collective commitments can your leadership team make to foster an environment where vulnerability and emotional honesty are valued and practiced?
Watch: If talking about how you’re really feeling at work doesn’t come naturally to you, this four-minute clip by Liz Fosslein for TED’s The Way We Work Series, called How to Embrace Emotions At Work will help.
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