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On a day-to-day basis, in-agility is what holds employees, teams, and organizations back.
I have never met a leader, for example, who says, “I don’t care about being inclusive. I don’t care about my staff. I don’t care about my staff’s experience.” But what I have met is hundreds of leaders who struggle to translate that intention into their on-the-ground reality. Now, why does this happen? A leader with good intentions who says I want to be inclusive might be sitting in a meeting where he or she feels undermined, put upon, and criticized by one of their staff members. And that leader’s story and emotions get activated. “That person is treating me like my parent used to treat me. There’s no way I’m letting that person speak to me like that.”
When we live in a world and work in a workplace where we cannot be fluid and connected with our emotions and with the reality of what it is that we face we are likely to respond in System 1 thinking: intuitive, autopilot, conflated you did this to me now I’m going to shut you out not share, not be transparent or fire you. The leader’s intention becomes undermined in the meetings because they struggle to create the space between what they’re thinking and feeling and then how they act towards that individual.
So as leaders, we need to do a couple of things to be emotionally agile within the workplace. Firstly, we need to be able to recognize that our thoughts, emotions, and stories are here to stay. They are normal, they are pervasive and they are part of our evolutionary system which is a brain trying to protect you via criticisms, judgments, and evaluations. Your brain is doing the job that it has been doing for millions of years. And trying to pretend that you don’t have a particular thought or reaction or think positive or be positive does not work. In fact, there’s fascinating research that shows that leaders who are feeling upset or angry with a team member, but who push those emotions aside, later on in a team meeting, when you assess the blood pressure of the team members, those team member’s blood pressure will be elevated. Now, let’s just metabolize this for a second. You are interacting with a team who doesn’t even know that you are angry or upset and who doesn’t even know that you are pushing that anger aside, and yet that team’s blood pressure increases.
What’s also here to stay is the ability to harness our values and to make what I call workable choices. A workable choice is a choice that in that moment of making a decision, in that moment of choosing how to act is a choice that ultimately will take you to being the leader or the person or the employee that you most want to be. We all react in the short term in ways that can make us feel better. We might avoid a difficult conversation. We might walk out of a room when we actually should stay and be present. But a workable choice is a choice that sometimes is difficult. It sometimes moves us in a direction of something that feels uncomfortable – having a really tough conversation. But ultimately as a leader or an individual will take you closer to your values and will take you closer to being the person that you most want to be.