Real Leadership is Emotional

If you read LinkedIn posts as often as I do, you probably find that many of them that purport to be about leadership are reposts of someone else's original thought. I think that's a waste of your available mental bandwidth. Today, for example, I saw a cow being attacked by lions until another cow came and gored one of the lions. So what? Will that make you want to go out and kick ass for your boss or your co-workers? I doubt it. It's fake. It's not genuine. And ultimately, it's forgettable, because it's a contrived emotion, not a real one.

In my new life as a "senior strategic advisor" (emphasis on "senior") outside of traditional corporate life I have begun to see the tremendous impact of emotional intelligence on members of an organization. The truth is that I have always known of this impact, but once an organization reaches a certain size, emotions are co-opted by - and outsourced to - "HR", who then become the thought police and arbiters of all things "emotional", filtering the message through whatever corporate culture cheat sheet they have been provided. So, unfortunately, I haven't been a party to true emotional intelligence for some time because I have been a prisoner to these agents of thought control.

I have now shed that oppression, and one of the joys of my career has been working with a small WBE in Washington State called FirstRule Group. I have known Shelley, the FRG president, since 2000, and she has assembled a team that is tremendously effective by - for the most part - using her emotional intelligence. As an example, I can offer the following, real-life email Shelley sent to all FRGers last Friday after a week of both tremendous accomplishment and not-so-tremendous "opportunities for improvement".

From: Shelley McDermott <[email protected]>

Sent: Friday, June 23, 2023 3:08 PM

To: FirstRule Group

Subject: Grateful

Hello team – we made it to Friday!

We’ve had a very busy week and I’m getting ready to sign off for the weekend. Before I do, I want to offer up a gratitude moment for all of you. Thank you for making FirstRule Group the best consulting firm around. I couldn’t be more excited about our present and our future and thank you all for working hard, representing us well, creating value for our clients and basically knocking it out of the park every day.

Summer is my favorite season and I’m loving all the beauty around me. Everything is lush and green, my flowers are looking good, and the air is fresh and clean. We Washingtonians earn this…ah, summertime.

Love you all –?

Shelley

This didn't come from "HR", or the "Vice President of Administration", or whoever else had it in their Outlook calendar to-do list. It came from the boss, and it wasn't about her, it was about us. She used the word "grateful" about us. That's a real leadership lesson, my friends, and it's the world we should all be fortunate enough to live in.

#thatisall