Leaders In London

As mentioned in the post below, it occurs to me a lot of us are leading through a downturn - tough trading conditions, whatever you want to call it - for the first time. So, Douglas Adams’ advice from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, is the best of all. It’s on the button.

Part of your leadership job now is helping others not to panic, too. People panic when they feel things are out of their control. Rising energy and food prices, an uncertain economy, talk of recession, worries about their own future as some organizations shed jobs…All of these can contribute to low morale and a drop in performance just when you need a high performing organization most.

You help fix that by:

Clearly setting out what’s happening in your market. Also, listening to what your front line is telling you is happening in the market, as they are your eyes and ears and often know best what needs to be done.

Involving people on how the organization should respond to emerging trading conditions.

And doing what you say you’ll do.

‘Consulting’ doesn’t mean a long drawn-out consultation process. It means using the rapport and open communications channels you have established with individuals and people en masse to involve them in adjusting the organization or team’s path to account for changes in the market: you need their agreement and buy-in, as always, and then they’ll help you get there.

Daniel Goleman calls this ability to take the emotional temperature of the people who report to you ’social intelligence’ - part of the broader ‘Emotional Intelligence’ that he has popularized. Where EI includes knowing yourself and your emotions, SI focuses on knowing the emotions of people you work with, who report to you, and customers. This used to be called ’soft stuff’. But, as it’s critical to how you and your people adapt to the current environment - whether you thrive or not - and to maintaining high performance, the soft stuff is now clearly the hard stuff.

Goleman is coming to Leaders in London to help us lead in a way that harnesses Social Intelligence.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 9:47 am and is filed under high performance, followership, Emotional Inteligence, Social Intelligence, How to lead in a downturn, Daniel Goleman, employee engagement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.