Emotional Intelligence in Leadership: Are Your Emotions Helping or Hindering Performance?

Emotional Intelligence in Leadership: The Mirror of Performance?

Your emotions set the tone for your business. The performance of your team is like a mirror of your inner state of consciousness.? If you want to improve their performance, you need to become more emotionally intelligent in your leadership approach.?

Your team is constantly attuned to your emotional state because human brains are wired to be hyper-sensitive to social and emotional cues. This phenomenon is explained by the discovery of ‘mirror neurons’ in 1995 by neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti, which revealed how humans connect by mirroring actions.?

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How Intent Shapes Team Performance?

Mirror neurons activate only when we see someone perform an ‘intentional action’; that is an action with a specific intent behind it, like picking up a glass to drink. The same mirror neurons will light up again when we take a drink of water ourselves. These neurons help us intuitively understand others’ goals and intentions. You can observe this is real life, for example, during meetings, if one person takes a sip of water, others often follow—subconsciously mirroring behaviour.?

This hyper-sensitivity extends to emotions. If you’re optimistic and confident, your team will mirror those feelings, creating comfort and security. Conversely, if you’re tense or stressed, those emotions will ripple through the team, eroding morale and performance.?

So, what are the implications of this for you at work? Well, how clear are you about your intent as a leader? If conflicting priorities leave you scattered, don’t be surprised if your team seems unfocused or confused.?

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Managing Emotional Contagion in Teams?

Emotions in a team spread like a contagion, without anyone consciously noticing that it is happening. Positive emotions can energise and motivate, while negative ones increase stress and anxiety. What are the dominant emotions in your team right now? Are they helping or hindering performance? Are you influencing these emotions—or being influenced by them??

The key to managing this emotional contagion is self-awareness. Understanding your emotional state and its impact on others allows you to take control. Research into leadership effectiveness shows that improving how we think about our thinking can lead to dramatic results.?

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Building Trust Through Emotional Intelligence in Leadership?

The brain processes social needs using the same neural networks as basic survival needs like food and water. Rejection or social exclusion triggers the same pain response as hunger. A sense of relatedness is a primary reward for the brain, while its absence generates a primary threat response. Our default nature is to see everyone as a potential ‘foe’ until we get some positive cues that we perceive as ‘friendly’.

Think about the last time you attended a networking event where you knew no one. Your brain heightens its alertness, perceiving potential threats in unfamiliar faces. But when someone familiar arrives or introduces you to others, stress levels drop as oxytocin is released. This is one of the happy chemicals and it helps communication and collaboration.

As readers of previous articles in this series know, a primary threat response activates the limbic system or ‘old mammalian brain’ and makes it very easy to misread social cues. A joke might feel like an insult, which can rapidly erode trust and be the end of productive working relationships. Therefor leaders need to be acutely aware of the quality of relationships and relatedness within and between teams.

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Strengthening Team Bonds: The Role of Relatedness in Collaboration?

David Rock’s book Your Brain at Work highlights how shared activities like dancing or collaborative conversations release oxytocin, creating ‘safe connectivity’. Studies with surgical teams in intensive care operations show significant improvements in teamwork, even when they have only met for the first time, when people know each other’s names and job roles. This improves even more when people know something about each other’s personal life. Once again it creates relatedness.

What are you doing to strengthen relationships within your team? Are you creating opportunities for connection that improve collaboration across departments??

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Using Emotional Intelligence to Reflect and Improve?

The pressures of work can inhibit our brains from consciously noticing subtle dynamics in relationships until issues arise—like complaints or staff turnover. Taking time to step back and use your emotional intelligence to reflect on what’s happening can prevent these problems.?

Don’t neglect the basics. Are you giving your team space to review their progress—or even evaluate how you’re performing as their manager? Regular performance reviews and open conversations about their goals can act as the oil that keeps workplace machinery running smoothly.?

It’s not only about your staff. It’s equally important to reflect on your own emotional state and relationships at work. Recognising subtle feelings or triggers can provide valuable insights into improving interactions with others.?

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Try This Technique To Raise Your Awareness

A simple and very effective way to raise your awareness is to practice some basic relaxation for only a few minutes per day. Once you have learned a couple of techniques to relax you can make them your own and use them at any time to step back for a moment. This means you will be able to access your ‘inner director’ more easily and gain powerful insights about the best ways to improve working relationships and therefore performance.?

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If you would like to identify your strategic people and relatedness priorities, complete our Clarity Matrix? Scorecard. It only takes 3 minutes and you get instant feedback and tips about what you can do next. There are also a number of free Guides to help you improve your scores on the Services pages of our website: www.talent4performance.co.uk/services

You can also get in touch at [email protected] to arrange a no-obligation call to discuss how to improve working relationships in your team and learn about our robust yet practical system for avoiding common problems and driving performance to the next level.???

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Remember when it comes to Relatedness . . . Stay Curious!?

With best regards?

David Klaasen???

?David Klaasen 2016-2025?