Bad moods, behavior at the top can sour workplace

COOL HEADS PREVAIL: Career coach Leslie Long helps clients identify triggers that they can work through instead of engaging in unproductive behavior. / PBN PHOTO/NATALJA KENT
COOL HEADS PREVAIL: Career coach Leslie Long helps clients identify triggers that they can work through instead of engaging in unproductive behavior. / PBN PHOTO/NATALJA KENT

Everyone has bad days.
In business, professionals are told to leave their problems at the office front door. The workplace is no place for emotional meltdowns, bad moods and distractions.
But what happens when a high-level professional does their best to compartmentalize whatever personal stresses they’re facing and fails? What happens when, despite their best effort, a grumpy mood prevails and they aren’t even aware of that?
“This could rub off on others in terms of their body language, in terms of what they’re likely to say, in terms of what they might be listening to, in terms of behavior,” said Frank Eyetsemitan, associate dean of social sciences at Roger Williams University. “Emotion is very, very powerful in terms of affecting the workplace climate.”
Emotional intelligence was defined in a 1990 paper on the subject by psychologists from the University of New Hampshire and Yale University as the “ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.”
Its importance as a leadership quality has long been studied by academics, psychologists and executive coaches.
According to Talent Smart, a California-based provider of emotional-intelligence training programs, 90 percent of top performers have high emotional intelligence and emotional intelligence is responsible for 58 percent of job performance.
The company’s website says emotional intelligence determines how a person manages behavior, navigates social complexities and makes personal decisions for positive results. Having a high emotional intelligence means a person is self-aware and has good self-management skills, which means effectively using emotional awareness to control your behavior.
When leaders aren’t able to do this is when problems can occur.
“The first important thing is self-awareness and recognition of a set of behaviors. Closely related is not only recognition but recognition that it’s not leading to optimal results,” said Tony Saccone, managing partner of Leadership Development Worldwide, a Providence-based company that provides, among other services, executive coaching and development and conflict-resolution counseling. “ Saccone said he sees poor leadership related to emotional problems in three degrees. He very infrequently encounters an executive who is genuinely emotionally unstable.
More common is a leader who is having trouble controlling emotions under pressure, which results in temper outbursts, and can be attributed to an executive maturity problem.
Most likely, he said, is that a leader’s mood takes a downturn when they are under great stress. That permeates down through the ranks, creating a stressful work environment fueled by impatience and micro-managing that no one wants to be in.
“There’s the potential for retention issues. People could leave. If [a leader] gets impatient and over-controlling, the quality of decision-making may not be as good,” Saccone said. “It tends to create more passivity in a group because they’re waiting for their boss to tell them what to do. They could [become] trained to not provide an answer and it restricts their development.”
Leslie Long, an independent career coach in Providence with a corporate background in human resources, said anything can bring about bad emotional behavior that would leave a leader feeling anxious, depressed, shamed, angry, and even with a sense of failure they aren’t used to as successful businesspeople.
“For them to not be able to handle something can be very upsetting. It’s not how they see themselves,” said Long. “They’ll use the workplace to compensate for that.”
Work could be used as a distraction for an emotionally upset person, Eyetsemitan said, and gave the example of a worker who has had a loved one recently die. That person may not want to sit home and be alone in their grief.
“You’ve got to understand the complexities of all of these in terms of emotions,” he said. “[Some] might go the extra mile of acting out on someone else. The prevailing climate is set by leadership [and] could affect motivation or morale.”
Saccone said executives must first recognize their unproductive behavior in order to correct it. That, he said, can come from what is called 360 degree feedbacks, in which stakeholder groups give anonymous feedback on their peers and supervisors.
Once a leader knows they may be creating an unproductive workplace through emotional ups and downs, they need to be motivated for change.
“They need to get better equipped to manage stress,” Saccone said. “Different people respond in different degrees. When pressures are renewed, they might cycle back. It’s the voice of experience.”
Saccone said his firm advises executives to evaluate the trust they have in team members to combat micro-managing and to create a buffer for responsibility overload.
Long said she also favors a 360-degree review system, which, she said, can help create a corporate culture of being able to recognize and report when an executive is not leading effectively.
She advises employees to go to their human resources department with such concerns.
She helps clients identify triggers that they can then recognize and work through instead of responding immediately and engaging in unproductive behavior, such as lashing out at co-workers.
“It’s more than a coaching process. If there’s a clear context that it’s personal, we’re going to explore how it’s affecting [work],” she said. “A willingness to explore what’s going on to become self-aware is therapeutic in and of itself. It is very, very likely that someone who is willing to take a look at themselves is going to have positive outcomes.” •

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