Emotional resilience

Unfortunately, many executives and managers fail to recognise this need and remain oblivious, to the long-term disadvantage of the institutions and themselves too. The excessive belief and reliance on traditional methods of motivation like rewards, bonuses and promotions leads to good results, but not the ‘best’ and not the ‘enduring’. Undoubtedly, rationale and logic produces results, but those are limited; emotional performance knows no boundaries, it far extends beyond the realm of expectations.

Imagine that you buy the most expensive car that has just come out of the assembly line. You gather all the workers who had partial contributions, being on the assembly line in the ultimate product, and then set the car on fire in their presence. What reaction would it evoke? They may very well laugh, clap and look at you and declare you fit for the closest mental asylum. Against this go to a pottery maker and buy all his wares at the highest price and then before his eyes, start breaking his pottery work! What reaction would it evoke? Most likely he would throw the money on your face and possibly get physical too. Why? The marked difference being, the assembly line workers have no ‘emotional attachment’ to the product; the pottery maker puts his heart and soul, into his creativity. One has emotions and the other is devoid of it.

David, Peter and Stephen, all leadership experts, in their collective work, ’Head Heart and Guts’, say, ‘as important as the head is to leadership, it is insufficient for the demands leaders face today. The inability to exhibit compassion and display character for instance, alienates many employees and cause then to disengage, sometimes executing a great strategy but in an uninspired way that lacks creativity and fails to generate commitment’.

The most distinguishing feature amongst a set of managers would be the quality of their ‘emotional maturity’. Those in possession of it, would only be able to relate to the emotional needs of their staff. It is most unfortunate that organisations fail to develop managers, who can without any problem, integrate business performance of their colleagues with emotional requirements. There is dire need for managers to develop, polish and use skills that are inclusive of softer qualities than just harder ones; they must recognise the importance of having emotional capacity to understand their own self and also be aware of its effect on others, ie those they supervise.

What also needs to be evaluated is that having recognised the need of resilient emotional status of colleagues, how far and how intrusive should the manager be when it comes to determining each individuals particular needs. In creating a fine balance between people and business demands, a good manager would remain focussed on budgets achievements, numbers and the obsessive need to find what the competition is doing. Such managers achieve and do well in a short term display, but their approach lacks sustainability, because such an attitude leads to a plethora of problems in the long term like staff turnover, lack of enthusiasm, erosion in over-all morale and shredding level of commitment to bits and pieces. As against this, a manager/leader with a combination of the stated skills, arms himself also with a conscious realisation that colleagues need emotional drive, which is most likely to have more sustainable results. Never to be understood is the fact, that the heart has influence over understanding.

Robert Browning: where the hearts lie, let the brain lie. And Pascal had remarked the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. I have personally seen and experienced that good and stable emotional balance in a manager invariably leads to reasoning and reasoning wisely. Emotional management can make the mountains move. The only proviso here is that managers, who would astray themselves lopsidedly towards, management by heart only, would find that they have a ‘happy’ team but no achievement of targets. And to quote again, the leadership experts, ‘if your main focus is being empathetic, you soon won’t have anyone to receive your empathy... and the ‘happy team’ might actually begin to search for your successor.’

I would emphatically implore upon the need for managers to not look at business demands and people management as separate and unrelated tasks. These have to be wholesomely integrated. Management Guru’s in the past decade have spoken and written so much on emotional intelligence, and the need to connect a managers ability to imbibe, inculcate and infuse within his ‘team elements of trust confidence, enthusiasm and faith’, yet we find corporations shying away from making an emotionally resilient team, a major goal and objective of the leader/manager. This trait should be on the list of objectives a manager must achieve. I have witnessed that engaging with colleagues on the emotional plane has created far better results than the traditional usage of carrot and stick theory.

The true and stable power of any manager lies in his ability to recognise that it would be suicidal to think that ultimate form of power lies in independence. Nay, power and influence involves relationship between people who could be your seniors or juniors. A successful manager would find that a reverse independence is more enduring ie your colleagues grow fonder of you, or in other words they just grow to be dependent upon you, for their emotional well being. ‘Thus a wise prince will think of ways to keep his citizens of every sort and under every circumstances dependant on the state and on him; and then they will always be trustworthy’ (Niccolo Machiavelli). From the Prince, it is expected a negative approach for a positive result. A manager can achieve this state without being devious, in contrast to Machiavelli’s opinion.

Without sounding to be Dickens’s artful dodger, a wise manager will gather around himself with co-workers who would have disdain for the logic and rationality to a task, but would perform par excellence based on a call to their ‘emotions’. These managers have hypnotic powers, more like a powerful magnet attracting people, to their cause, who have their personal belief systems to surrender before the demands of giving great performance. Even the basic instinct of a lion is tamed by its trainer, as we often see in any circus. A manager who spins out of oppressive forces of market reality and its challenging dynamics, a culture of emotional resilience towards it will always have on his side a formidable team.

Emotional insecurity or instability in any team will render it to vulnerabilities of inaction, unsure confidence and a general lack of enthusiasm. No wise manager would exploit emotional weakness of others for any such move, could also lead the most timid to bold action harbouring on dangerous results and outcome. Remember the more emotional weakness you witness in a colleague, the greater the potential danger. Emotional passion, if unleashed without control and direction can prove to be lethally disastrous for any organisation. Such passion over time will gather within itself the susceptibility of great misuse by the unwise. Those who cannot control emotions will find in quick time that there is someone else controlling and managing their emotional vulnerability. Managers who exploit people’s emotional weakness must know of the greatest danger, they may invite, stir up an action, that they as manager cannot control.

Experience shows that most colleagues do not ask or demand for facts in clearing up their thinking or making up their minds. They would instead and rather have one good soul and heart satisfying emotion than a dozen facts.

A good manager will have for himself a team that displays great emotional stability and resilience. Winds may scatter all forms and formats of blossom but the blossom of the heart, no one can wither, fade or confine. All my decades of working life, I have consistently and sincerely subscribed to the following: ‘All the knowledge I possess, everyone can acquire, but my heart is all my own’ (Goethe in the Sorrows of Young Werther).

The writer is a senior banker