Be the Emotional Guide for the Journey - The Second Rule of Leadership
In my February 2010 blog on leadership, I spoke about creating direction, a true north, for the people you lead. This is the first rule of leadership.
The second rule of leadership is to be the emotional guide for the journey. As the emotional guide, the leader helps followers process and emotionally handle what happens on the journey. It is being empathetic at the same time portraying a perspective that assists the followers into moving forward positively.
How does one do so? Empathy acknowledges and accepts how another feels. It is not sympathy; being sympathetic portrays the person is justified in how he feels. By being empathetic the leader assists his staff to move beyond the present emotion; if he is sympathetic, the staff may get stuck in the present emotion.
It might be easier for you to ignore the emotional side of the journey. After all, we are all adults and should be able to focus and do our jobs. However, we are all also people and if we can’t get perspective on the journey, we drag our way through the journey or we get off the journey. What leader needs a slow team? By being the emotional guide, the leader ensures the team is moving forward quickly and is able to execute for the journey.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was an amazing emotional guide during the Great Depression. He used the fireside chat to be the emotional guide. Below is a quote from the fireside chat on March 12, 1933 immediately following the closing of all US banks (called a “bank holiday”). People were afraid of losing all of their money and had just rushed the banks. FDR needed to ease the panic.
My friends: I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking — to talk with overwhelming majority of you who use banks for the making of deposits and the drawing of checks. I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, and why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be. I recognize that the many proclamations from State capitols and from Washington, the legislation, the Treasury regulations, and so forth, couched for the most part in banking and legal terms, ought to be explained for the benefit of the average citizen. This bank holiday, while resulting in many cases in great inconvenience, is affording us the opportunity to supply the currency necessary to meet the situation. Remember that no sound bank is a dollar worse off than it was when it closed its doors last week. Neither is any bank which may turn out not to be in a position for immediate opening.
FDR does a few things:
- Acknowledges his responsibility as a leader to provide an explanation of the crisis;
- Recognizes the hardship and inconvenience the crisis has caused; and
- Provides a context for how to think about the crisis.
Being the emotional guide is not a soft exercise. It is a decisive step in management to guide your team in gaining perspective about the journey.
The Five Rules of Leadership
- Create true north; a direction that is fundamental and unchanging.
- Be the emotional guide for the journey.
- Manage to a dashboard.
- Make sure the right people are taking the journey with you.
- Create a cadence for evaluation.