Use your emotional intelligence and lead from the heart, with all changes and uncertainty currently going on in the world author Anne Taylor explains that leading through rational, analytical and task driven approaches is less likely to achieve results in these volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times.
What is Leading From Your Heart?
Firstly to be clear leading from the heart does not mean, not applying your logical or head based leadership skills. It is about adding skills and increasing your effectiveness.
“Courage is about doing something dangerous or facing pain or opposition. It’s about putting yourself out there, trying new things, risking making a mistake or looking silly and feeling uncomfortable“
Anne Taylor
Leading from the heart takes advantage of your soft skills and the way you interact with people.
- Know yourself – start by building the profile of you. If you work in a large organisation you will already have a wealth of information in 360 surveys, psychometric testing and various reports identifying your strengths.
- Identify your values – go beyond the values that your company espouses and become clear about your personal values. They make up a large part of who you are. You can complete an exercise from Anne Taylor’s book “Soft Skills – Hard Results” here to help identify your values.
- Show some emotions – think about how you manage and display emotion in the workplace. There are considered to be eight basic emotions: anger, fear, pain, joy, passion, love, shame and guilt.
- Give (and ask for) feedback – valuable feedback consists of observations of an individuals behaviour and qualities and consideration of the impact. Taylor recommends the COIN model which you can download here. COIN stands for context, observation, impact and next step. Focus on and practice positive feedback as best practice is that leaders should provide 5-6x the positive to negative feedback.
- Coach – coaching requires deep and active listening in a non judgemental way. Ask open questions and look for ways to empower the employee to develop ideas and grow their career.
- Balance the What and the How – bringing out the best from your employees requires a blended approach that knows when to set direction and when to enable and empower.
- Be courageous and hence vulnerable – take a risk and express your emotion. When you are a courageous leader you build relationships based on feedback and coaching. You take a risk that you will do it wrong – authentically explore the opportunity.
Key Takeaways
- The world is in a period of considerable VUCA and needs leaders who can adapt their styles to deal with the new challenges employees are facing.
- Lead from the heart is way to get in touch with the emotions that you and your employees feel and use that to balance your responses.
DIGEST of an article from Business Matters How to lead from your heart (and why you should right now) by Anne Taylor Published: 17th November 2020 https://bmmagazine.co.uk/in-business/advice/how-to-lead-from-your-heart-and-why-you-should-right-now/