What might be possible if everyone on your leadership team could regulate their emotions under pressure – both individually and together?
On a recent catch-up call, a former client told me: “I watch the leaders around me struggling with their emotional reactions. I’m handling it differently now.”
We’d worked together about a year and a half ago when she was getting pulled into every piece of drama her team brought her. She has high empathy, and felt responsible for fixing everyone’s problems, which meant she was inadvertently training her team to rely on her instead of building their own capability to manage through difficulty.
We spent six months working on her not taking ownership of other people’s emotions. She learned to recognize when anxiety showed up in her body, name it, and choose to respond differently. She discovered the value in supporting her team to solve their own problems rather than rescuing them.
Now her organization is going through turbulent times–personnel changes, operational stress, uncertainty–and some of her colleagues are very worried. But she’s noticed something about herself: she can sit in those conversations without getting pulled into the spiral. She feels the anxiety starting, recognizes it, and reminds herself she’s not responsible for their feelings. Or she’s able to stay present without attachment and coach from a place of support instead of fix.
One leader, individually capable of emotional regulation in the middle of organizational chaos.
Now imagine an entire team with that capability.
It’s common for teams to try to solve chaos and uncertainty with better processes or clearer structure. Those things matter, but they don’t address the human element at risk: leaders who can’t regulate their own emotions create teams that can’t navigate difficulty together. The anxiety compounds. The drama spirals. Trust erodes because people can’t be honest about where they actually are.
What I’m building in the teams I coach is two-fold connection.
- Each leader builds connection to themselves: self-awareness, self-management, the ability to feel what’s happening in their body and choose their response.
- The team builds the trust and connection that allows them to have honest conversations about where they are individually and collectively, how it’s impacting results, and what needs to shift.
Connection to self. Connection to each other. That’s the foundation for everything else.
If one leader can learn to observe turbulence with equanimity instead of reactivity, what becomes possible when an entire team can do it? And what’s the cost of never building that capability together?
Hey there! I’m a leadership team whisperer, executive coach, and speaker. I guide leadership teams in high-growth companies to achieve rapid growth in a healthy, sustainable way. I coach senior leaders to discover the path to lead with ease.
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