Emotional leadership

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This friend of mine told me something interesting today. He had heard a podcast where a military leader states that a leader should bring emotional balance to their group. This also happens when leading a group of researchers. 

In leading research groups, there is an important part of the role that is not based on knowledge transfer or experience, but on being an emotional counterbalance: they are too excited, you have to calm them down to avoid over-motivation; they are too nervous, you have to downplay and relativize; they are anxious, you have to stay calm; they are under-motivated, you have to show excitement and positivity; they think "they are shit", you have to show extra appreciation,...

If emotions are too high, you have to bring them down; if they are down, you have to bring them up. The toughest part, though, is to not get infected by their emotional state. For example, it was hard for me to be with a student that showed high signs of anxiety. In the beginning, I could not even determine why it was so tough to interact with that person. The answer was simple: their anxiety was making me anxious. Once I understood this simple truth, it was easy to deal with the situation. I would not get infected by their emotional state and just be my calmed self. 

People under your care will get anxious, sad, excited, angry, and overwhelmed; they will feel lost, worthless, superior, not good enough, or too good, and feel that everything is unfair. You will get it all, and many times to the extreme. And nobody has been trained to manage their emotions; it is something that you learn on the way - or you don't. As a leader, you have to help them: they do not have perspective; they give way too much importance to some things; they do not understand recurrent psychological patterns that we go through during the research process. 

Experience is key to understanding emotions and their patterns, but they will never get to have the experience if along the way we lose them: either because they drop out of frustration, or they do not get a job because they block themselves emotionally and underperform.



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