People often ask us how to better understand others to be a more effective leader. Can we decipher a frown or someone’s folded arms to better understand them? Of course, some knowledge on reading people can be helpful. However, the challenge is that humans are, well, human, and that reactions don’t always follow a predefined pattern or set formula.
Consider Jill, a CEO. Having just introduced a major reorganisation in her firm a day ago, she finds herself sitting in a one-on-one meeting with Jack, the firm’s COO. Jack is frowning, which Jill could reasonably infer as him being unhappy with the restructuring. What she doesn’t know is that Jack is simply thinking about an upsetting argument he had with his son before work.
If leaders want to lead effectively and implement successful changes in an organisation, they need to inquire into the true feelings of their team and the individuals they work with. Otherwise, Jill and Jack would remain in their individual bubbles, and may never truly meet.
Inquire beneath the surface
As Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, once said, “Leaders are paid for their discernment.” When making decisions, leaders need to understand the interplay of dynamics between themselves, others and the context. To discover all of this, they need to inquire.
The capacity to inquire allows for the possibility to interpret the situation in multiple ways, to know how others are approaching it (especially in relation to the leader’s role) and to realise what we might have ignored.
Collective anxiety
One key aspect of inquiry or information-gathering is understanding and interpreting the sources of anxiety in a team. Anxiety is often about the future. The future is unknown, and that triggers feelings of concern, worry and unease. Most feel a degree of anxiety about their professional trajectories, personal relationships and whether the future will be the one they had hoped for (or feared).
But it’s not all “bad”. Anxiety might mean that you care about what you are doing, the outcome of your efforts, and others around you and your relationships with them. Bring a group of individuals together and you form a team of individual anxieties. This is further amplified by the unspoken and unconscious pressures created by joining a group: Will I belong, will I be accepted, will I be too similar or will I be too different? Anxiety can manifest in patterns of behaviours in individuals that hinder effective operations, including being late, underperforming or creating factions.
If a leader’s role is functionally interconnected with the team, leaders will feel the anxiety of the group in addition to their own. Rather than viewing anxiety as something to fix, leaders should treat it as data. Emotions are a source of data when it comes to leadership – a way to learn about the group in that context and locate the source of anxiety. This helps bring hidden and unconscious anxieties to the surface where they can be given space and discussed. The leader can then use this information when making decisions and selecting the best course of action.
To achieve this, leaders must be able to have an internal dialogue with themselves and an external conversation with their team members about the emotions in the room.
Know thyself
As clichéd as it may sound, self-awareness as a leader is important to diagnose the situation fully. The ability to engage in internal dialogue is a self-management skill that allows you to avoid auto-pilot responses and provides space for thought.
Leaders must reflect on their own reactions and anxieties, whether experienced as emotions or physical sensations. They should use themselves as a gauge to identify the causes of the anxiety in others. If anxiety arises within the leader, they need to self-manage. Some call it resilience, which we define as “the capacity to be with, and to learn through pain”. If pain is welcomed as a messenger instead of avoided, we can maximise the value of the pain experienced and benefit from it.
Know thy team
Inquiry into – and with – others requires systemic thinking. If the leader believes the anxiety is coming from the team, then motivating team members to perform towards goals is not sufficient. Instead, leaders must consider how to offer structure and containment so that anxiety can be transformed into energy for creativity.
Leaders need to have sensemaking conversations with their team to understand individual team members’ assumptions and perspectives. As with Jack’s situation, nobody really knows what issues others are bringing into the room.
For instance, leaders often see different cliques in the workplace as a “problem” to solve. They invite the people involved to a meeting to align and improve communication. The meeting is cordial (if tense), and everyone says the “right” thing to preserve an impression of harmony. And, nothing changes.
For real impact, a leader needs to understand how individuals in the group feel about the situation and each other. Using the same example, a leader could ask: “I notice you didn’t say much in the meeting. What was going on for you?” Perhaps the team member’s standoffish expression was not a sign of unwillingness to cooperate but due to a fear that their suggestion would be ridiculed. They may cross their arms because they are defensive, but they might also do so to cope with perceived stress, or simply because the button has fallen off their shirt!
We need to be careful not to make assumptions from behavioural clues and believe them to be the only truth.
Real conversations are the best policy
Leadership is successful when overall anxiety levels in a group can be managed such that the team can operate, create and collaborate effectively.
Teams that share their personal experiences freely can reduce hidden narratives and allow others to empathise with their situation. The chances of misinterpreting each other are greatly reduced when inquiry increases understanding. This builds a stronger sense of belonging as the team has a language and openness to process its collective anxiety. Additionally, when a leader can see how the pain they feel does not primarily belong to them, they can avoid being overwhelmed by the responsibility for the group’s collective pain.
Articulating emotions (including those that might feel unpleasant) is not only good for one’s well-being, it is also a window for others to understand who you are as a leader. Verbalising emotions gives our brains the signal that we have autonomy. This reduces the instinctual “alert” mode and thus prevents impulsive actions, while allowing us to expand our understanding of others and ourselves. This is a core skill we encourage our MBA students to develop during the Personal Leadership Development Programme (which we direct) and a skill that every leader who wants to be effective needs to practice.
Teams that fear articulating their emotions are depriving each other of the opportunity to build trusting relationships. They tolerate each other until they no longer can, then quit. Relationships get reduced to the transactional; groups play nice but not real.
A willingness to offer something of yourself allows others to learn about you and relate to you as a leader. If there is genuine interest in building relationships, teams need to take risks and talk about how they feel towards each other and try to make sense of this. “Inquiry” is an art of actively building relationships that evolve and require constant interpretation.
Leaders should exercise their acumen, recognise their own biases and use their emotional sensitivities to try to understand others’ subjective realities. Only then can they make better decisions according to the team’s context at that moment.
Ultimately, there is no set answer. The inquiry process might feel like a detour, and it takes time, patience and curiosity. However, the outcome is more sustainable because the group has built a culture of genuine curiosity, which helps them perform and develop.
“INSEAD, a contraction of “Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires” is a non-profit graduate-only business school that maintains campuses in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America.”
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