Mood Matters

why change:

Distress not only erodes a person's mental abilities - impacting their work - it decreases their emotional intelligence - impacting those they work with. People who are upset have great difficulty in reading the emotions of others leading to increased conflict, decreased productivity, and a host of other entirely avoidable problems.

The exact opposite is true when people are happy. Feeling good enhances mental efficiency, actually making people better at understanding information and making complex judgements.

The balance between these factors determine what is referred to as GroupIQ: the sum total of every team member's best talents, contributed at full force. 

Whether or or not a team reaches peak GroupIQ has very little to do with the talents of each person. The largest factor is harmony - how well the group can get along.

Mood directly impacts harmony. Create a positive mood, it becomes contagious, harmony increases and GroupIQ follows suit. Create a negative mood, it too becomes contagious, harmony is disrupted, and GroupIQ goes away.

GroupIQ does more than just make people productive. It also increases a team's service climate. Simply put, employees who feel more emotionally upbeat have shown a measurable tendency to go the extra mile for their customers, thus improving the bottom line.

How much improvement?

Well for every 1% improvement in a team's service climate - there is a corresponding 2% increase in revenue.

Again mood matters, and it has a greater financial impact than most leaders realize.

why now:

"Today's employees, at all levels, spend 50% more time collaborating than they did 20 years ago...Nearly everything we value in the modern economy is the result of decisions and actions that are interdependent and therefore benefit from effective teamwork."
Dr. Amy Edmonsdon - Harvard Business School

In previous eras, economies were simpler. This meant two things: workers were highly independent and the work they completed was very straightforward. Leaders needed little more than speed and repetition from from their workers and nothing created that better than the threat of consequence if a worker's productivity suffered.

You lead in a different era. One where people must work together. This increase in teamwork, creates an increase in proximity. People work with more people more often than ever before - creating an environment where one person's mood can and will impact the output of everyone else on the team.

Why you:

Of all those who can possibly affect someone's emotional state, you as their leader carry the largest influence.

Whether they actively wield it or not, all leaders hold power relative to those they lead.

They determine and assign rewards (Reward Power), they determine access to resources (Information Power), they consider and deliver punishment (Coercive Power) and their title and position often comes with an unconscious assumption of obedience (Legitimate Power).  Again, a leader does not need to actively use or abuse these forms of power to hold them - they are largely assumed in the social contract between a leader and a follower.

As a result, roughly 50-70% of how an employee perceives their climate can be traced to the actions of their leader.

As Goleman writes, "leaders' emotional states and actions do affect how the people they lead will feel and therefore perform. How well leaders manage their moods and affect everyone else's moods, then, becomes not just a private matter, but a factor in how well a business will do."

How to manage your emotions:

To review: 

• Emotional states are contagious.
• Positive versus negative emotions impact the GroupIQ of a team.
• The GroupIQ of a team directly impacts the service climate of the business.
• The service climate of a business directly impacts its financial performance.
• The emotional state of a leader has a higher contagion level than any other person on a team.

Learning to control your emotions is therefore one of the most important things you can hope to master as a leader.

So let's learn how to do it. The process involves three steps, and leverages two tools: - the Uncommon Consciousness Canvas and the Uncommon Culture Canvas.

For this demo, I'll be using my own Uncommon Consciousness Canvas, and I'll be using CultureSmith's Uncommon Culture Canvas. If you are missing either of these tools, book a call with me and I'll walk you through how to create them.

Step One: Check Your Moods and Identify Your Trigger(s):

Step Two: Understand Your Struggle and How To Overcome It:

Step Three: Reconcile Your Behaviours Against Your Team's Values:

The truth is… I can become any of these people. No matter which one I choose however, I'm permitting or inspiring my people to become that person too.

In the email that contained this week’s tip I discussed the sentence-forming experiment and showed how it wasn’t the negative words that caused the subjects to shock people more severely but the fact they had to form sentences with those words. Sentences are patterns and our brains love patterns. Once they saw the pattern of hostility, their brains were primed to continue it.

Again, all eyes are on you. Your behaviour is a pattern all your people see. What pattern are you creating, and what is it priming your people to do?

the rocks in the road:

With luck I’ve convinced you that your mood matters enough that you will begin to be more mindful of it.

Of course I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the biggest threat to you following through on this - that being the fact that you are a person, you have a brain, and therefore you’re prone to ‘catch’ other people’s emotions as well.

As a result, you must become more intentional regarding the people you surround yourself with.

• STOP tolerating behaviour in your teams that is misaligned with your Values. This will only stand to trigger you, allowing your behaviours to become a risk factor. Call out misaligned behaviour quickly and celebrate values-aligned behaviour loudly.
• START hiring better. Thanks to emotional contagion, one bad apple can absolutely spoil the bunch.
• CONTINUE to invest in the emotional intelligence of your people. Once you’ve mastered the technique in this week’s tip, teach it to others. EQ is the ultimate ‘circuit breaker’ when it comes to preventing a bad mood from spreading.

And of course, keep up with the coaching calls. The inconvenient thing about bad moods is it often takes someone else to make you fully aware of the potential fallout when you’re in one.

Have a challenge?

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