Having the self-awareness to understand and recognise our emotions is at the heart of emotional intelligence. What we do with that awareness is the next, crucial stage. Emotional self-control helps us to live with, reflect on and regulate our emotions.
There exists a certain romantic ideology about the emotionally volatile but intellectually gifted leader. These pacesetting pioneers leave their teams in a state of constant anxiety, their peers moan about them in the safety of the pub and their direct reports are often to be found in tears in the bathroom.
And yet. Their disregard for other people’s feelings in pursuit of their vision still leads the company to achieve great things.
Thankfully, this is all just a myth.
People like this are deeply awful to work with. And when they do succeed, they generally achieve things despite their emotional shortcomings, not because of them.
That’s because they lack a critical leadership skill increasingly recognised as one that separates the leadership wheat from the chaff: the ability to recognise, manage and deploy our own emotions in the right way and at the right time.
Emotional self-control is a crucial Daniel Goleman emotional intelligence competency. The ability to understand, live with and regulate our emotions is a key to creating cultures at work that support and nurture wellbeing, creativity and performance.
Research into the power of self-control has a long history. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel began a series of studies designed to test the concept of delayed gratification.
In what have become known as the marshmallow experiments, children were offered the choice of one treat immediately or the chance to receive, after a 15-minute wait, two.
In follow-up studies, researchers found that those children who were able to exert enough self-control to wait for the larger reward tended to have better life outcomes as teenagers and then as adults. It seems that willpower – self-control, the ability to manage our immediate emotional response to a situation – is an important life skill.
Despite subsequent criticisms of Mischel and his marshmallows, the experiment offers a fascinating insight into the power of self-control. It’s an attribute that has been lauded and critiqued by philosophers and psychologists throughout the ages, exploring how we master our emotions in the face of our impulses and desires.
Hostages to our impulses
Indeed, for psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the ability to exert at least some minimal amount of mastery over ourselves is the precondition for living in a civilised society.
For Goleman, emotional self-control involves “the ability to keep your disruptive emotions and impulses in check, to maintain your effectiveness under stressful or even hostile conditions.”
It’s the quality that “liberates us from living like hostages to our impulses”.
Strong words. But if we think about leadership through the lens of controlling these impulses, we move from simply being aware of our emotions – important as self-awareness is – to using our thoughts and emotions as positive tools to use them appropriately.
Goleman, for example, has identified that people who are skilled in self-control possess a number of traits we generally consider positive in our leaders:
they are good at managing conflict and diffusing tense situations
they are thoughtful about how they influence others
they are able to take responsibility for their actions
they have the capacity to adapt well to change.
To be clear, self-control is not about suppressing emotions. It’s about having the ability to see our emotions clearly and choose when or if to express them appropriately.
Mind the gap
Our emotions are all too frequently driven by biological impulses. When our brains detect a threat, what Goleman calls an “amygdala hijack” can take us straight to survival mode, when our 'fight-or-flight' impulses take over to the exclusion of all else.
While we’re very rarely faced with physical threats these days, even more symbolic dangers can trigger the same impulses. We may feel frustrated by the behaviour of one of our team members in a meeting. We might feel challenged by some feedback we’d rather not have received from someone else’s boss.
The result: a tendency to react emotionally in the moment in ways we tend to regret later.
While these impulses may be beyond our control, how we respond is not. That’s where self-control comes in. It’s about taking advantage of the gap between impulse and action. When our amygdala sends out that anger or panic signal, we have a window to handle it well – or not.
With practice, and a healthy dose of self-awareness, it’s possible to identify and anticipate our own personal triggers, understanding when our destructive emotions are starting to build and an amygdala hijack is likely.
Then we can intervene to manage them, minimise negative feelings and retain our equilibrium.
Back to those nightmare leaders.
Many of us have had one: bosses who blow their top at the least provocation, moodily stalking the office, publicly berating underperformance or sending us passive-aggressive emails late at night.
It’s not nice, and the chances are that the effects are felt long after any single outburst or incident. Hardly the kind of environment to foster much-needed collaboration, creativity and innovation.
Leaders who are especially unpredictable in their emotional responses, who become volatile as emotional pressures pile up, will in turn throw their people off-balance, leaving them wary about sharing difficult or challenging information or challenge the status quo. It makes us all much less likely to behave as we might wish.
That’s because the effects of self-control (or lack thereof) are amplified for leaders, who have a responsibility not just for their own behaviours and actions, but also those of the people who work with them.
The tone really does come from the top. There’s plenty of evidence that more positive attitudes from leaders means more positive attitudes throughout the organisation and, crucially, improved performance – with the reverse also true.
Research by management professor Sigal Barsade has charted a significant “ripple effect” of emotional contagion – the transfer of moods between people in a group – in workplace dynamics.
Barsade allocated participants into simulated teams, with leaders either in a bad mood or a positive one. Over the course of working together, the members of those teams caught whichever mood the leader was in.
With downbeat, negative leadership, team performance suffered.
In contrast, positive emotional contagion meant improved co-operation, decreased conflict and increased performance.
Leaders, it seems, are more contagious – for good or ill.
Re-wiring for emotional intelligence
Writing in Harvard Business Review, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee are clear that a leader must “first attend to the impact of his mood and behaviours before moving on to his wide panoply of other critical responsibilities”.
As with Barsade’s ripple effect, the authors suggest that moods that start at the top tend to move the fastest because everyone watches the boss, actively looking for emotional cues to follow.
Depressed or ruthless bosses create toxic, low-trust environments staffed by negative underachievers who are wary of contributing new ideas or taking risks.
Upbeat, inspirational leaders nurture and cultivate positive people prepared for even the toughest challenges through high levels of trust and cultures of learning.
That doesn’t mean that, as leaders, we always have to be in a good mood, or relentlessly positive, whatever the circumstances.
But we do need to think about how our moods might impact others and how they should be in tune with the situations in which we find ourselves: what Goleman calls “dynamic resonance”. Optimism is one thing: being defiantly upbeat while making people redundant is quite another.
And, as no-one is likely to confront a moody boss with his or her unacceptable behaviour, it’s up to us to look out for and control our moods ourselves. Goleman again:
“An emotionally intelligent leader can monitor his or her moods through self-awareness, change them for the better through self-management, understand their impact through empathy, and act in ways that boost others’ moods through relationship management.”
With a healthy dose of EQ, we can take an honest look at ourselves and work on keeping ourselves on an even keel.
The extraordinary impact of emotional contagion is highlighted in a piece of research undertaken by Google’s People Operations team (HR to you and me) in 2015.
The team spent two years looking at what made their teams successful. Of the five key dynamics that set successful teams apart, their number one factor was psychological safety.
The safer team members felt, the more likely they were to admit mistakes, to partner, to take on new roles – and to create together an impressively successful team.
Champion of psychological safety Amy Edmondson defines such safety as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes”.
And like emotional contagion, it’s not just a matter of being 'nice'. Creating work environments in which people feel comfortable taking risks is a key to innovation and performance; feeling able to speak up can prevent problems from becoming major headaches.
For Google, providing a safe environment has become a competitive advantage. High levels of psychological safety mean that people are less likely to leave the company more likely to contribute a range of ideas, generate more revenue and rated as effective twice as often by their managers.
Edmondson describes as “fearless” organisations that provide such psychological safety. That safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able to speak up, share information and be candid, even when things go wrong.
These enabling and learning cultures are the fuel that powers success – and it’s for us as leaders to lead from the front, setting clear expectations and purpose; inviting active participation so that people feel empowered to contribute and responding productively when people do speak up.
Circles of safety
Simon Sinek similarly exhorts us to create “circles of safety” that build trust and co-operation. We may not be able to control events outside our organisations, but we can control the conditions inside them.
For Sinek, leadership is a “choice, not a rank”. It’s leaders who set the tone: we may need to course correct from time to time, but real leadership is not built on authority alone.
Instead, it’s about bringing people inside those circles of safety, providing the opportunities and education to help them build the confidence they need to make the most of opportunities that will drive performance.
Unpredictable bosses: take note. Impulsive behaviours – a lack of self-control, a blindness to the need for psychological safety – are likely to have far-reaching, negative consequences for our people and our performance.
In 2017, a team of researchers reviewed a range of findings on employee self-control. They concluded that leaders with low self-control were a particular problem, more likely to verbally abuse their people, to form weak relationships with them and to lack charisma.
Researchers have also estimated that the cost to US companies of this kind of negative and abusive behaviour is in excess of $20bn a year. In contrast, leaders with high levels of self-control display more effective leaderships styles and are more likely to inspire and intellectually challenge their followers.
Imagine a scenario at work when things haven’t gone as well as they might.
Perhaps our team has screwed up and we’ve lost an important client. Our knee-jerk reaction might be bawl out the people involved, slam doors or bang on tables. But is this likely to get the results we need, to get to the root of the problem or improve performance next time around?
Pausing to reflect – minding the gap - before acting in a situation like this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t acknowledge or tackle less than optimal performance. Nor does it make us look weak.
Good self-control will help us to bring the team back together, explore the reasons for the problem and plan for what happens next. Chances are it’ll lay the groundwork for the psychological safety that might make us successful next time round.
A very simple test might be for us to ask ourselves: how do people feel after spending time with us?
Do they leave feeling energised and ready for the fray or do they try to keep interaction to the bare minimum lest it leave them feeling demotivated and demoralised for the rest of the day?
If we’re not confident we can answer positively, then we need to find out and work on our equilibrium. Practising a range of techniques while the going is good will help us to mind that gap when we’re under pressure or the stakes are high.
Plato was just one of the ancient philosophers to declaim upon the power of self-control when he said “The first and best victory is to conquer self.”
It’s a mantra that still has plenty of resonance for leaders in the average workplace today.
The next time we’re tempted to go with our first reaction when something goes awry or triggers us, we all need to take a moment to reflect and reconsider our first impulse. Minding the gap really can make all the difference.
Understanding and building self-control will help us to become more self-aware, emotionally intelligent leaders.
Explain why emotional contagion is a particular issue for leaders
Outline what Amy Edmondson means by psychological safety
Reflect on how you feel after spending time with your boss – and how your team might feel after spending time with you. How might these insights affect your behaviours and actions at work?