Coaching Employees Through Intense Emotions

In an increasingly polarized and uncivil world, it is frontline employees who often endure the brunt of rude customer behavior. According to research from Harvard Business Review:[1]?

• 76% of frontline employees and leaders experience incivility at least once a month?
• 78% believe that bad behavior from customers toward employees is more common than it was five years ago?

Facing rude behavior takes a cognitive toll, interfering with working memory and decreasing performance.[2] To ensure their team can remain healthy and work effectively in any environment, frontline leaders must be able to coach employees through intense feelings resulting from customer-facing work.?

Strong interpersonal skills, such as active listening, empathy, and managing one’s own emotions can help. As you think about enabling your frontline leaders’ social and emotional intelligence, we hope you find the below resources helpful.

?The Unique Needs of New Leaders: 4 Trends?

Harvard Business Publishing polled nearly 200 full-time employees on LinkedIn to understand the unique experiences first-time frontline leaders face. Four themes emerged, confirming the need to support and develop new leaders in those areas. Read more.?

The Social and Emotional Skills New Leaders Need Most: Insights from Harvard Business Publishing?

Researchers have studied the tactics used by frontline leaders to parse out which emotionally intelligent practices offer optimum results. In this piece, we offer three tactics that have proven effective across a variety of industries. Read more.?

What do you believe is the biggest hindrance that frontline leaders face in helping their teams navigate incivility??

Let us know in this anonymous 1-question poll.??

Citations

[1] Porath, Christine, “Frontline Work When Everyone Is Angry,” HBR.org, November 9, 2022.

[2] Christine L. Porath, Trevor Foulk, and Amir Erez, “How incivility hijacks performance: It robs cognitive resources, increases dysfunctional behavior, and infects team dynamics and functioning,” ScienceDirect, 2015.

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