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Wednesday, 19 February, 2025

Learn how to navigate emotions at work

Have you ever seen a team member lose their cool during a business meeting? Next time, instead of ignoring or judging emotions at work, be the leader who can respond to feelings constructively to foster a supportive environment.
Express Desk
  11 Oct 2024, 03:53

 

The scenario I’m about to describe is easy to picture because we’ve all been there. Imagine you are sat in a management team meeting where everyone’s buttoned up and the atmosphere is formal. Then out of the blue, a team member’s usual business-like demeanor cracks.

The teammate’s face becomes flush, their brow furrows, body language tightens and their tone of voice gains an edge. They become defensive or frustrated and then perhaps withdraw. And everyone pretends not to notice, or worse, pretends not to notice then quietly judges the person afterwards for ‘getting emotional’.

Mindfulness meditation is a fantastic tool to help you encounter work’s (and life’s) rockier moments with equanimity, clarity and calm.

Many of us learned early in our careers that emotions have no place at work. Yet emotions are part of the human experience. If we can’t work through them with people we trust, they just build up and surface in other, often less constructive ways.

So rather than avoiding them or quietly judging them when they arise, why not equip yourself as a leader to create conditions where your team can feel heard and supported? One way is to use the ‘GREATT’ model for navigating emotional leadership situations, which I developed earlier this year.

Get your mind right

Emotions are neither good nor bad; they simply exist. The less we recoil at the idea of emotions surfacing at work, the better we can handle them positively. They give us the opportunity to show our people we really care about them as individuals, which research increasingly shows is the key to employee engagement.

There is a real business upside to being a caring, warm leader to the people you supervise.

Regulate your own emotions

When we stop viewing emotions as something to avoid, it becomes easier to identify, recognize and regulate our own feelings, including the ones we don’t even realize we are expressing.

When one of your followers becomes emotionally charged, do your shields go up? If they do, take a deep breath, find your equilibrium and respond to the situation calmly and fairly. That’s the key to turning the moment into a net positive between you and your employee, one that could benefit their productivity in the long-term.

PRO TIP: Mindfulness meditation is a fantastic tool to help you encounter work’s (and life’s) rockier moments with equanimity, clarity and calm. It requires only five-to-10 minutes a day to experience positive results. And you can gain larger benefits quickly, within weeks. Give it a try if you haven’t.