Peter Anderson, PhD PCC

This is always a very difficult place for a leader to be. The critical first step is to openly acknowledge the client's perspective with care. By "care" I mean carefulness in balancing nonjudgment until you can investigate. Explore what the client identifies as the "facts" of the breach, what their feelings about it are, and what need has not been met. Then, "I hear your concerns and it feels to me that this hits you hard [in this way] because [of this thing]. I need to go back to my team and check where we lost your trust." Then investigate and report back on *facts* not feelings. The truth is, trust must be repaired. But you also need to maintain trust & accountability with your team. Mistake - own it, fix it. No mistake - clarify it.

One thing I’ve noticed both in myself and with my clients is that #mindfulness is a game changer and offers a fundamental mindset shift. Two essential ideas for you to think about. 1) Productivity has to do with attention-on-task, not time-on-task. Reduce your distractions and interruptions, eliminate multi-tasking and allow a nonjudgmental return to focus when you drift. 2) Anxiety kills attention (and productivity). Reduce and calm anxiety with science-based breathing exercises, set calm conditions for work, and remove any uncertainty you have control over. It’s not rocket science, it’s brain science!

No, no, no. Seek out coaches who listen deeply, speak rarely and ask powerful questions. I feel like this prompt describes the AI version of mansplaining.

Clarity and candor in feedback are the most important element for a skillful (emotionally intelligent) response to feedback. You can also incorporate your active listening skills as a support. “I think I hear you saying …Is that correct?” This helps you make sure you are receiving the feedback correctly. Decelerating your reaction, seeking perspective, looking for the 3rd person observation - these are then action steps from EI skills to gain more clarity. The next part is candor - scary for some. “I think I hear you saying that I need to improve BLANK.” Name what you think must be done. Then, “Would you be willing to support me in doing that?” Clarity and candor run both directions. Use this clear moment to seek the support you need.

Dialogue is key, but here again some important EI skills make it more effective and more successful. The significant skill here is emotional reasoning which allows us to "depersonalize" information. That is, we can communicate and receive information in objective frames. If you've ever worked with someone who takes everything personally, you know what effective EI supported dialogue does NOT look like. Facilitators and excellent leaders know how important this is. To be able to separate content/events from feelings is CRITICAL to effective dialogue, on every side of the conversation. And when our conflict runs deep, it runs into identity - here we need excellent EI skills to maintain focus and equilibrium while challenged.

I think one of the first things to understand is that emotional intelligence skills are not a magic pill - a helluva multi-vitamin, but not magic. EI is the foundation and boost that makes other skills more effective. So, teams with high average EI support each other, be more innovative, more successful under task stress, and tend to resolve conflict easily and communicate effectively. The thing that EI skills bring a team looking for harmonious productivity is *essential* skills in emotional regulation - self and others - so time and energy/resources are not OVERspent managing the emotional experience of team work. Teams are more productive because they're not spending their energy on unproductive behaviors.