Power of Connection
✅ Connection builds trust.
✅ Connection builds empathy.
✅ Higher levels of trust and empathy in a team increase effectiveness, foster development and innovation, and can grease the skids through many an inevitable rough patch.
All of us of have heard these statements and most of us truly believe them, and yet how many of us are part of teams where trust and empathy are the norm. How can a team create those connections?
💡 Leaders first. . . . . it has to start with us.
I have a lot to say about the power of connection and I expect to come back to this topic again and again in my coaching and my writing. There are many ways a leader can build connections. To kick off the conversation today, let me offer this post from Harvard Business Review that gives some great tips for leaders who are trying one way to make all-important connections with others: sharing emotion.
This article espouses the benefit of leaders who can be selectively vulnerable by acknowledging and sharing their emotions appropriately. Underdoing it leads to a stone-cold, old-school “leader as general.” Overdoing it risks leaders who overshare fear, uncertainty, or worry, amplify those emotions to the team, and undermine confidence in their ability to lead. Most of my clients fear the latter impression so much that they lean too far into the stone-cold, emotionless side. But there is a better, middle way.
The first two tips from the article provide the foundation for the others. Yet in my experience leaders try to skip these:
1️⃣ Figure yourself out
2️⃣ Regulate your emotions
Without a deep understanding of our own feelings (What am I feeling right now? What does this emotion tell me about our situation? How does this emotion serve me?) we cannot hope to regulate the emotions, especially in public. If we cannot regulate them, we won’t successfully acknowledge them to the team (what the article calls “addressing [the] feelings without becoming emotionally leaky”), instill confidence by providing a path forward, avoid oversharing, and notice (and empathize with) the emotions coming from the team (“read the room”).
If instead we suppress our feelings, we can avoid appearing frightened, uncertain or worried, but then we miss the benefit that comes from listening to our emotions and connecting with the team. Knowing ourselves and learning how to manage ourselves is the essential work. Through this work we build critical connections to ourselves first, before we try to connect to others.
Why neglect this most important connection?
To connect, message me here or email john@aconnectedcoach.com