Emotions at work: Empowering others to express themselves
Encouraging your team to express their joy is just as important as talking about the harder to handle feelings. Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
“Employee Engagement”, “Psychological safety” and “Wellbeing at Work” are just a few of the popular trends that we often have teams wanting to explore with us. But all too often it is a surface-level desire without really understanding the intense self-reflection and deep team conversations that are required to truly achieve it. Understanding and expressing our emotions with our teams is key to building a workplace that empowers individuals to be truly engaged, authentic and confident.
Last week I shared just a handful of ways you can understand and use your emotions on an individual level. I personally believe that the best way to make change within a company or team is through role modelling the behaviour you want to see. But you could also introduce some team interventions to start making discussing our emotions at work more commonplace.
Make space for team reflection
Maybe it’s thanks to growing up with magazines full of personality quizzes and agony aunt columns, or maybe it’s just down to my innate desire to explore and understand the complexities of the human brain, but when I became a manager I suddenly realised just how much self-reflection I made time for in comparison to others.
I quickly saw the benefit of introducing explicit space and time for others to build their own self-awareness and empathy for their colleagues. This may be as simple as encouraging your team to fill out a ‘user manual for me’, running a more in depth exploration session comparing what drives your behaviours at work, or investing time & money into developing manager’s coaching skills so that they can confidently (and regularly) hold space for others to build their awareness and explore their potential.
Optimise for clarity, not just decisions
One of the pitfalls of the modern workplace is how obsessed we are with optimising for the perfect speed and approach for making decisions. No matter what size or age the company one of the frequent challenges brought to me by teams is that decision-making process is too slow or that it involves the wrong people.
Whilst I have seen teams successfully introduce many effective processes to help with decision-making, all too often we focus far too much energy on building process rather than building clarity.
Emotions are just one way of gaining clarity. But unfortunately processes can sometimes squeeze all emotion out of it. If you have to help a group of people come to a decision before ploughing through the process you might take to do that - whether that decision is made through a brainstorm, an email thread, a vote, or a pitching panel - make time to pause and unearth how people are feeling.
When decisions are complex a single individual involved in the process may be feeling hugely conflicted and uncertain, if you have a whole group of people who need to be consulted on a decision the amount of emotions that might be conflicting increase exponentially. Often if we simply get the space to air our emotions it allows us to see the options with much more clarity. One practical way of doing this is running a structured workshop using techniques such as the six thinking hats.
Importantly if you invest time optimising for clarity once a decision is made it will be a lot simpler to motivate the team to act upon it.
Encourage colleagues to describe feelings instead of opinions
One way we often obscure our feelings is through using the phrase ‘I feel’ in the wrong context. For example you might find yourself or others saying things like “I feel like we’re unprepared for our upcoming client meeting”. The problem with this is that you aren’t actually stating what you are feeling - your stating an opinion. When we do this depending on who you are working with people can either become combative and try to argue why this opinion is incorrect, or bend over backwards to pacify you by jumping to all of your demands to change your perspective.
Imagine instead if you were to say ‘I feel anxious about our upcoming client meeting’ or ‘I’m fearful that we’re going to lose this client’. Not only can people not argue with the emotions you feel around a situation but when you are clear about your feelings you can then work with others to start to unpick that emotion. You can encourage a conversation around what is causing you to feel that way and decide together if there is any need for it to influence your work or decisions. We can often still feel anxious or fearful no matter what level of preparation we might do so acknowledging the emotions at play may actually stop the team from getting into a wheel spin and burning out.
Next time you hear a colleague say ‘I feel that X’, why not ask them to expand upon what emotions they actually feel in order to help you understand what’s driving their opinion/perspective on a situation?
Invite a mediator or facilitator into your conversations
Often when two people that are passionate about a project, but perhaps have conflicting opinions or emotions around it, it can become difficult to make progress in conversations. Either they get into an unnecessary deadlock, or they seem to reach an agreement only to find it keeps unravelling throughout the project.
This is because people aren’t great at truly listening to one another or saying what we mean, plus our understanding of the world is often clouded by our past experiences. We can often find ourselves in situations where we interpret something our colleague has said in completely the wrong way. For example one person might say “Let’s wait until this project has finished before we make any changes to our processes” and the other person might hear or interpret that as “I don’t like your ideas”.
One way of addressing this is to invite an impartial person in to mediate or facilitate conversations. This could be someone internal or external and their job is simply to listen to and understand the perspectives of the pair or the group, and replay that to ensure everyone involved is truly heard.
Share moments of joy
It’s great working with teams that are aware of the problems they have. When people have a strong desire to work together to be constantly improving it can create a really productive and positive environment. But we need to make sure that striving to be better doesn’t come at the detriment of celebrating our existing successes. Encouraging your team to share what brings them joy both on an individual and group level will not only give you valuable insights into what people find intrinsically motivating about their work but it also empowers people to keep going through the more challenging moments in their work. You can foster these moments of joy by providing specific feedback on things you are proud of your team/colleagues for, as well as creating moments (such as all-hands meetings) where people can shout about and promote their own personal wins and excitement.
This is the last of our “Emotions at Work series” for now but we’d like to keep the conversation going. If you’ve got some tips to share, or an experience others might be able to learn from, we’d love to invite you to write a guest blog on the topic of Emotions at Work - send your ideas to tessa@collaborativefuture.co.uk.
Plus if you want to join us in learning more about this topic we’re hoping to kick off a Collaborative Future bookclub by reading “No Hard Feelings”. Register your interest if you’d like to participate.