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"I prefer when things remain fact-oriented in a professional context. Whenever things get emotional, I feel overwhelmed."
While enthusiasm for the job, commitment to the team and the company as well as contentment about success are desired or even demanded, anger, rage, sadness or helplessness remain unwelcome guests in a professional context. However, as Laloux describes in his book Reinventing Organisations, if you want employees who invest themselves in the company with their minds and hearts, the darker side of emotions cannot be cut away or suppressed. Everything is needed, and studies show that companies with a healthy conflict culture are more innovative and therefore more profitable.
The goal is to take responsibility for your own emotions. This requires occasional support from those around you as well as self-coaching.
Self-help author Robert Kiyosaki says, ‘Emotions are what make us human,’ and yet we usually wait a long time to learn how to deal with them in a healthy way. I was the more pleased to hear recently that schoolchildren are being trained as playground mediators and that mindfulness training has become part of the school curriculum. It took me longer to develop the skills to deal with emotional moments in workshops or to cope with my own feelings. Perhaps you are the same, and the following summary on dealing with emotions will either confirm that you are already on the right track or inspire you to further.
When I become emotional myself...
SSomething builds up, you do not want to deal with it, which increases the pressure even more, and then the dam bursts. The resulting release of repressed emotions, also called catharsis, usually manifests itself in the form of tears, occasionally in anger, rarely in silence, and always results in momentary overwhelm. The suppressed emotions take over and often one feels ashamed for having shown oneself to be so incapable of acting in a controlled and thus professional way, when in fact an important step of cleansing is taking place and we are showing ourselves as human beings.
If you are not fortunate enough to have emotionally trained people around you, you need your own back-up plan: it is about having a moment for yourself to regain your composure. Getting up, drinking a sip of water, going out into the fresh air or simply taking a deep breath are possible options to prevent you from getting stuck in your emotions. The next step is to share the reason for your outburst with the others and reveal the associated need. Too little support from the team, resulting in frustration and subsequent venting, translates into a desire for a different distribution of tasks and a joint discussion about how to deal with overload.
Even though such an approach turns emotions into an opportunity, it is still desirable to deal with them in a more planned manner. For this reason, it is recommended to practise self-check-ins: at regular intervals, ask yourself how you feel and how you are doing. Naming your emotions out loud makes the whole process even more effective. Should you wish to go more holistic: locate the emotions in your body, describe the physical sensations, explore the associated emotions in detail, and then, breathing calmly, feel them until they dissolve. Then look for the emotion behind the emotion, e.g. the disappointment behind the anger, describe and feel it again, and continue until you reach a state of neutrality. Once you have tried this yourself, the process becomes as easy as brushing your teeth, and the anticipation of the inner peace that results becomes the motivation to take the time to do it.
When others become emotional...
When you witness an emotional moment in others, you usually feel somewhat overwhelmed or simply embarrassed, knowing how you would feel in the same situation. Accordingly, you want to get out of the situation as quickly as possible, which is why you offer advice, comment that it cannot be that bad, or try to ignore it. As a result, you feel left alone, which is why the following reaction is more helpful.
The first step is to restore your own ability to act calmly, as well as that of the person affected by the emotion. If you first share that you feel a bit overwhelmed, yourself that would be very okay, because you can afterwards focus on the other person to normalise the situation and to describe the shown emotions. Phrases such as ‘I see how this affects you, which I can understand’ or ‘it is completely normal that this makes you sad and it shows how important this issue is to you’ are helpful because they leave the responsibility for the emotions with the other person while you at the same time show understanding. 'Rescuing' the other person with phrases such as ‘that is soooooo bad, we have to help you right away’ or ‘that is unfair and should not be allowed, I will sort it out for you’ may be well-intentioned, but they leave the other person feeling helpless and therefore emotional.
After this initial stabilisation, everyone usually needs a break to take a deep breath to then do a debriefing; questions such as ‘what support do you need?’ or ‘what could help you now?’ are just as appropriate as ‘what led to this situation?’ or ‘would you like to tell us what happened to you just now?’. When doing so, it is important to focus on the issue at hand to prevent people from sinking back into their emotions and to adopt a solution- and future-oriented attitude.
It is not always possible to let go of emotions immediately, which is why such a follow-up can also be planned for later, just as support is sometimes needed in developing solutions. If you sell your own recommendations and advice as the ideas of third parties, they can be developed further by the other person without restraint or may be rejected more easily in favour of their own ideas. The debriefing is usually concluded by everyone sharing how they feel and what they have taken learnt the sequence, to make it clear that the emotions shown are an opportunity for everyone to reflect and develop further.
Would you and your team like to explore the topic of emotions? Then I have a few easy-to-implement ideas for you!
Check-in with a wheel of emotions, mood meter or emojis
Arranged as a wheel, a simple overview or in the form of emojis: during a check-in, you choose the emotional state that best describes you and explain the reasons for your choice and the needs associated with it. Alternatively, you can randomly select an emotional state and think about when you last felt that way and what it was like. This not only diversifies your emotional vocabulary, it also allows you to perceive your own emotions in an increasingly differentiated way and to understand how others really feel.
Guessing each other's feelings
With or without exaggerated emotional facial expressions, you try to guess how the other person is feeling. You can consciously choose an emotion and display it, or you can simply be yourself and listen to the observations of others.
Reflecting on how emotions are handled within the team
As part of team development or during a team meeting, you can reflect together on how emotions are handled. As an icebreaker question, you could ask how easy it is to show emotions within the team on a scale of 1 to 10. This is followed by questions such as ‘how do we feel when things get emotional?’, ‘how much emotion should there be?’ or ‘what do we need to feel really comfortable in a team?’. The resulting exchange shows where a follow-up may be needed on the topic itself or on psychological safety.
"We want to build a feedback culture in our team!"
Teams and managers come to me with such requests and ask for feedback training: “We want to give each other regular feedback, learn from each other and evolve.” There is often a difference in understanding what feedback is, and when clarifying the request for support, I ask whether feedback is understood as an information on something that I may not yet be aware of (blind spot), or whether it is more about offering criticism with an included desire for behavioural change. Once the understanding of the term has been clarified, the focus of the ‘training’ quickly becomes clearer, and it is usually less about how to give feedback but about building motivation to do so.
"When do you need team development as a team?"
If one has never experienced team development and the associated added value of it, it can remain unclear when a team needs such a team-out. However, the experiences associated with team development are not always positive, as my own first experience many years ago shows: the external facilitator had not been informed about the team-internal conflicts, the day’s agenda was as a consequence chosen inappropriately, the tensions exploded an hour before the end of the day, and on the same evening the team leader resigned.
Maybe that is why it is important to me to repeatedly explain what good team development can be, as I hear too often from teams that a day ended in tears, that individuals felt exposed, or that team dynamics were even worse afterwards. Yet, with the right set-up and the appropriate methods, great things can be achieved.
"Whenever an ambulance drives past me, I know I have to be careful today!"
I remember this statement and the exercise that went as if it was yesterday. 2016 in Berlin on a gloomy Friday afternoon during my training as a change process facilitator. We were given the task of choosing a question that was currently on our minds. To then go outside. To completely clear our minds and connect with the world. “Flirt with the world, and the world will flirt with you!” was the invitation. I do not remember the question I chose, nor do I remember my attempts to flirt with the world. But the subsequent debriefing and the comment made by a fellow participant “When an ambulance passes me on the way to a workshop, I know that today I have to be careful” is still with me today.
"It should be possible to use a few questions to find out where a team's strengths lie and where the areas for development are!"
"It should be possible to use a few questions to find out where a team's strengths lie and where the areas for development are!" A participant in the ETH leadership seminar asked me this in a slightly demanding tone. I thought for a moment and replied: "There are various questionnaires and models for teams and team dynamics, but they each focus on one aspect of a team. As far as I know, there is no collection of questions that looks at a team as a whole. But something like that can be developed.".
Feeling a bit like Heidi Klum!
A little Heidi Klum feeling: an impressive CV and the skills required for the next step in your career. An assessment center as a stopover to achieve this goal. Me as a coach at my side, helping with the preparation and suddenly feeling a little bit like Heidi Klum sending her models onto the catwalk.
Can you kiss the frog prince?
Can you kiss the frog prince? This question stuck with me and I still differentiate between HR and organizational development based on this logic today. While HR development is about helping employees realize their potential and turning them into princesses, organizational development is about a system that cannot be kissed.
"Since I turned my vocation into my profession, working feels like leisure time!"
This feedback pleased me particularly, as I feel the same way since the change into my current role but also because the starting point for the coaching regarding a professional reorientation had not been the easiest: a position that had been achieved through a lot of effort and personal investment, with the prospect of a next career step. Further education in a field that did not immediately promise career change opportunities combined with the desire for more meaning and fulfilment at work.