Leadership

The Emotional Principles of Leadership

The third and final installment in a series about the principles of leadership

J. Bradley Houser, MBA

This is the third and final installment on the ten essential principles of leadership. In the first installment, we looked at the functional principles, the key building blocks of successful management. Next, we examined the intellectual principles, which develop in the mind and draw upon reason.

In this final installment we explore the emotional principles. Emanating from the heart, it is the emotional commitment between a leader and his followers that defines true leadership. Without that emotional commitment, the functional and intellectual principles lack the punch necessary to attract and maintain followers. To earn and retain emotional commitment requires a mutual trust that is borne from the principles we will discuss. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.”

Empathy

Webster’s defines Empathy as, “the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.” How does a leader make an empathetic connection with her followers? Employing the functional principle of careful listening is crucial to starting the process.

Beyond that, I tell my staff that every issue has at least two sides. Work with your staff and try to see each issue from their perspective. Putting yourself on the opposite side of an issue can be a learning experience for you and can lead to a greater understanding of how to motivate the uncommitted. You will not only learn from this exercise, but you will also have built emotional capital among your prospective followers.

Respect and Appreciation

In almost every enduring relationship between a leader and his followers, the qualities of respect and appreciation are mutually held and frequently reinforced. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of your staff. Know that people come to work to succeed. Play to their strengths and reinforce their achievements. Booker Washington counseled, “Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him and to let him know that you trust him.”

Respect breeds a sense of worth and self-esteem. From that, the confident staff member achieves heights often unexpected and through those achievements the fires of lasting loyalty and appreciation are stoked.

Passion

Just as integrity is first among the intellectual principles, passion is paramount among the emotional principles. As leading author and consultant John Maxwell suggests, “a great leader’s courage to fulfill his vision comes from passion, not position.”

Critical to the ability to lead and motivate is conviction in what you are doing and your ability to convey that conviction to your followers. Passionately held convictions will most readily resonate to those around you. Passion may be accompanied by emotion, but it can very effectively manifest without an emotional outburst. Benjamin Franklin counseled, “if passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.”

In most things, passion is very close at hand for me. I try to follow Dr. Jim Gills’s “three F’s”: fervent, faithful and focused. And although I find Ben Franklin’s counsel useful, sometimes an outward display of emotion can enhance the impact of one’s passion.

One of the areas about which I am passionate is controlling our costs and ensuring that our revenues are collected. Because we focus, work together at achieving the goal and celebrate our successes together, my staff is equally passionate about that same goal.

When you can encourage your entire team to be fervent, faithful and focused, that passion can be a powerful force.

Summary

I learned from little league and high school sports teams that you win and lose as a team. That is true in almost every endeavor you undertake – as completely individual undertakings are rare indeed. Certainly, leadership always involves a team, after all, a leader must have followers. The eminent business management guru Peter Drucker said about leadership: “The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say, ‘I.’ And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say ‘I.’ They don’t think ‘I.’ They think ‘we,’ they think ‘team.’ They understand their job to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but ‘we’ gets credit…This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.”

Nothing in my job, in my career, beats having someone I have mentored and lead accomplish something they thought beyond their reach. If you can convey that feeling and emotion through your words and actions, you will indeed lead a team that will follow you to greatness. OP

Mr. Houser is the practice administrator at St. Luke’s Cataract and Laser Institute in Tarpon Springs, Fl. He received his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth and an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh. He can be contacted at jbhouser@stlukeseye.com