Emotional Intelligence for Leaders: Mastering Self-Management

In today's dynamic business world, technical skills are just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to leadership. To truly excel, leaders need a well developed emotional intelligence to complement their intellectual intelligence.

But emotional intelligence encompasses several key abilities, and one of the most critical ones is self management.

Leaders who have strong self management know how to navigate challenging situations with composure and focus. This serves as a source of stability and encouragement for their teams and themselves, even in turbulent times. In this episode, you're going to learn how you can hone in on this essential skill.

I just want to quickly introduce myself for those of you who are new to the channel. My name is Doug Howard and I'm a leadership coach and consultant for engineering companies and engineering managers. A lot of the tips and tools and strategies I give here on my YouTube channel can be applied to any industry, not just engineering.

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What is Self Management?

Let's talk about what self management is because there's probably a lot of confusing or conflicting terminologies about this on the internet. I look at self management as your ability to effectively navigate difficult situations while still maintaining focus and emotional control.

This is important because strong self managing leaders know how to remain steady under pressure. They know how to inspire optimism and enthusiasm in their team when it's needed the most. They know how to keep their team energized and moving forward versus letting their team just let their overwhelm, get the better of them.

Organizations that have a high number of self managing leaders, they're going to gain a significant edge over companies that don't because self managing leaders are going to be unwavering in the face of adversity. They're going to stay true to the company's vision and the team's mission and the team's goals. They're going to foster confidence within their teams above all else, especially when they're facing unknowns and challenges, which as we know, today's business world is constantly evolving and changing. The only thing that's constant is change. You need leaders that are self managers.

Back when I was a college athlete, we always had a saying on our team. We would say, anyone can be a great teammate when you're winning but the best teammates know how to be a good teammate when you're not winning, when you're losing, when you're behind, when the team is struggling. If you ever played sports before, it's easy for people to be positive and upbeat when you're scoring a lot of points and you're in the control of the game.

The same is true with leadership. Anyone can be a good leader on a team that has things going smoothly and isn't facing any adversity or any challenges. On the other hand, it's a lot tougher to be a good leader when the team is facing problems and when the team is under stress, and when the team is facing challenges that they don't have solutions for. That's when self management becomes truly invaluable. That's when the going gets tough because a leader who knows how to intentionally stay calm and positive when faced with demanding client needs or stakeholders, pulling them in a million different directions or internal conflicts on the team. A leader that knows how to stay calm in that type of environment is going to be far more valuable than someone who thrives only in favorable conditions.

The 5 Pillars of Self Management

Self management is built on five key pillars, transparency, emotional self control, optimism, complexity, and adaptability. Mastering all five of these pillars is crucial for creating a high performing work environment.

Transparency

Let's start by taking a look at transparency. Transparent leaders share valuable information with their teams in a timely and truthful manner. They explain the reasoning behind their decisions, their questions, and their statements. When they're leading team meetings or conversations, they're going to openly share their strategies, and they're also going to share the why behind their strategies. More important, they're going to demonstrate genuine engagement with all aspects of the business. Expressing enthusiasm while also being honest about potential challenges that are coming up.

When I was outlining the topics for this episode, I was immediately reminded of a story from my experience back when I was an engineering manager. About 80 percent of our overall sales came from one client and that entire account was managed by one salesman. So naturally we were all pretty concerned when one day out of the blue that salesman gave us two weeks notice Of course, when people heard this, they were all worried, what does this mean for our company? Are we going to lose sales? Is that salesman going to take this account with him? Are we going to be able to maintain this? Who's going to manage this account now? Didn't take long for the rumors to start spilling throughout the company. People are starting to panic. People are starting to worry will I still have a job?

I saw this happening and I wanted to nip this in the bud real quick and not let this story spread and take a life of its own. So I held a team meeting and I just told everyone with transparency, what I knew and what I didn't know about the situation. I, told them that yes, the salesman is leaving. That's true. He did give us two weeks notice. I told them what the executive team and I were doing to manage that account in the interim. Who are we going to put on that account to managing the interim. I explained all the strategies that we were working on to keep that client happy.

I also explained what I didn't know. I explained that I didn't know where the salesman was going to work next. I didn't know what our clients expectations were in this transaction, but I was just very honest and open about what I knew and what I didn't know. I didn't have all the answers. I didn't work in sales. I was getting this information piecewise too. But I was pulled into some executive meetings at the top to figure out how we could create a plan to keep this client happy and make sure that we can maintain the account.

So I shared the details of what we were doing at the executive level with my team and I also explained to the team that, they could play a part in keeping this client happy. I explained, it's really important how we got to make sure that this customer is taken care of. We want to be early on their deadlines. We don't want to just meet their deadlines. We want to be early. We want to figure out how we can get things done faster. We want to figure out what are some other ways we can make this client happy with our designs.

I really switched it from thinking about how do we survive versus how do we go above and beyond for this client? I showed the team how they could have an impact on making this client happy, but it all started by being transparent. A lot of managers and companies, they don't want to show weakness. They don't want to act like they don't know what's going on. They don't want to act like they don't have the answers. They don't want to act like they don't have control over things. Instead I just had a team meeting and I said, here's what I know. Here's what I don't know and it's on us to stay together and not let rumors take over. Let's just focus on keeping this customer happy. Anyone who's working on those projects right now, just keep that in mind. If you're working on a project for this customer, focus on going above and beyond, making this project move a little bit faster or finding ways to make the design better.

People left that meeting literally thanking me for the transparency. They literally told me I've worked in a lot of companies like this, and I've never had this type of transparency in situations like this. It's really resonated a lot with my team.

The process for me as a leader made me feel more comfortable with being transparent like that and me being vulnerable. It was actually like a stepping stone for me to be more comfortable with being more honest and vulnerable in these situations. It helped me grow as a leader.

Here's an actionable tip for you with transparency. I recommend holding regular team meetings where you not only share information, but you also actively solicit questions and feedback from your team. You want to encourage an open dialogue and be upfront about any uncertainties or challenges the team may be facing. Don't hide from these things. Acknowledge what you know and what you don't know, and keep that dialogue going because when you don't have people talking about these things openly, these stories tend to take a life of their own. You can't really compete with rumorville because you don't know what's going on. But by keeping an environment where everyone's comfortable with talking about these things openly, then you don't have to worry about gossip and rumors and things like that.

Emotional Control

The second pillar is maintaining emotional composure or maintaining emotional control. Emotionally self controlled leaders remain in command of their emotions, even in high pressure situations. They're able to maintain focus and confidence, even when they're feeling anxious, even when they're feeling uncertain, even when they're facing unknowns. They know how to control impulses, and they know how to effectively manage their anger. They know how to express it appropriately, only when necessary.

If you want to improve on your ability to control your emotions, I recommend practicing mindfulness techniques like meditation or deep breathing exercises to improve your emotional self awareness and your emotional self regulation. By regularly reflecting on your emotional responses in challenging situations, it's going to help you identify areas for improvement.

Another tip for this would be journaling a lot. I recommend journaling at the end of each day, whether it's your workday or at the end of your day before you go to bed and asking yourself, When did I lose emotional control today? What was something that triggered me to have a reaction that, that stopped me from being intentional about how I was presenting myself, and then really dissecting that. What was that emotional trigger? Why did that set you off? Was it that person? Was it the topic? Was it something about you? Maybe you were hungry. Maybe you didn't get a lot of sleep that night before. You really want to dissect your behaviors and instead of being passive and reactive to situations, take inventory on your behavior each day at the end of the day.

I'm not talking about hours here. I'm talking about five to 10 minutes. Reflect on these things and then look for patterns. Are you cranky in the afternoons and you don't have as much emotional control then as you do in the morning? Is it certain people that set you off? Is it certain topics when you recognize these things and when you're aware of them, then you can start taking control over them because then you can put mechanisms in place, like reminding yourself, Hey, I know that this person always ticks me off, so I need to go into this conversation with an open mind.

Optimistic

The third pillar is optimism. Optimistic leaders are always going to be persistent in their pursuit of goals. Even when they're faced with overwhelming obstacles. They're going to operate with a mindset focused on achieving success rather than operating out of fear of failure. Those are two completely different things.

As the former, college athlete here, I always looked at it like you're either playing to win or you're playing not to lose. When you play not to lose, you never win.

The same is true as a leader. If you're fearing failure, you're not going to achieve success. In fact, you are just going to fail. Leaders that are optimistic, they're going to view setbacks as opportunities for learning and improvement, and they're not going to look at it as personal failures. They're going to understand that, success is not a linear path. It's going to be ups and downs. It's more about creating that net forward progress.

Instead of dwelling on failures, they're going to find out, how can I learn from this? How can I improve on this? What are my takeaways from this? How can I not let this happen again? So even during periods of uncertainty, Optimistic leaders are going to remain focused on long term objectives, and they're going to be looking beyond today to make sure that they're constantly moving towards that net goal, that higher goal that they're working for.

They're going to make sure that they're inspiring their team to have the same positive outlook that they have. That's the key. They're not just optimistic themselves, but they're also, radiating that optimism into their team.

If this is something you struggle with. I would recommend finding ways to frame challenges as opportunities for growth. Instead of looking at it as I don't know how we're going to get this done. This is impossible. There's no way we can do this. Challenge yourself and figure out, okay what are the things we can control? What are the things we can work on? What are the things that I can do now to get ahead of that? What are ways I can chip away at this major problem? How can I break this major problem down into miniature problems that I can tackle one at a time? How can I isolate these things? Whenever you're faced with setbacks, focus on the lessons learned and use them to develop new strategies for the next time you're encountering a similar type of problem.

One more tip on this. Make sure you're celebrating your team successes, big and small, because you want to foster a culture of optimism and perseverance. Another key for that is making sure that your team has permission to fail. If your whole team is worried about making mistakes, Guess what? They're not going to be doing their best job. They're just going to be playing to not make mistakes. I want to make sure you see the relationship between your optimism and your team's optimism.

Complexity

The fourth pillar of self management is complexity. Leaders who excel at comprehending complexity are able to see situations from multiple perspectives, and they're able to see the battlefields from a whole bunch of different angles, which gives them the best strategies towards achieving the goals that they're working on.

They're going to actively seek deeper meaning in social and professional interactions, and they're going to consider all the nuances involved in those interactions too. Whenever they're interacting with others, they're going to develop alternative approaches and engagement strategies with those people.

Back when I was an engineering manager, the department that would frustrate me the most was our sales team. They were always submitting projects with missing information. I'm talking about critical information that really prevented us from actually working on the project. But they would just throw it over the fence. Then complain about us not hitting the deadline even though they were the reason we couldn't work on it. They would do this all the time and it always felt like they were playing games trying to manipulate the system or game the system. They would get their projects in the queue so that it would get locked in for that deadline or that due date that we committed to the customer but they wouldn't give us the information we needed to actually do the project.

I would take it personally all the time. I felt like they were intentionally being lazy or they were intentionally trying to screw us over as an engineering team. Instead of just blaming them, I started reaching out to them to learn a little bit more about their day to day and what goes into their job and what type of challenges they faced. It didn't take me long to realize that their mistakes weren't personal at all. I sat on some customer calls with them and I realized that their customers were very indecisive. Their customers were always changing information on them and the customers were always sending new updates, new information, new design models. Basically the customers were making it really difficult for our sales team to manage the level of information. I'm talking about like within a 24 hour span, the customer would say, here's all the information you need, it's locked, go live. Then a salesman would be on a sales trip for a day and not check their email and then come back and find the customer unloaded all this new information on them.

To me, it felt oh wow, the salesmen are withholding this information. That's how it felt on my team as well. We'd get really frustrated with them, but when we saw what the customers were, we're doing to our sales team, we could see how it was really easy for them to lose track of information. It's easy for I's to not get dotted and T's to not get crossed. That gave me a lot more empathy for what they were going through.

When I learned about these challenges, instead of me just throwing it back over the fence at them whenever they had a missing information, I started working together with the manager on the sales team to figure out how could we revise our approval processes so that we could create more stage gates for the customer that prevented them from making changes once we got past certain design points. There was a certain stage where it didn't matter if the customer made a lot of changes on us but once we got into a further level of detail in our design, then it was very costly for us because we didn't budget intensive revision rounds in the detailing process.

By working together with sales and by understanding their perspective, we were actually able to figure out a solution that actually solved the problem versus just pointing fingers and getting frustrated with each other. That wouldn't have gotten that far if I didn't take the step at understanding their perspective.

A tip for you on this as a leader is you want to learn how to encourage healthy debates within your team. Now, in the story I just gave you, it was about me and the sales team. Instead of us having a you versus me or an us versus them mentality, I had to learn how to have healthy debates with them. A lot of times the conflicts that you're going to be dealing with a leader are within your team.

You want to learn how you can encourage healthy debate within your team. Ask for different viewpoints on a situation. Challenge your own views. Don't just judge the situation. Go with an open, curious mind and actively listen to opposing perspectives on the topic at hand. This is going to help you develop a more comprehensive understanding of complex issues instead of just solving problems the way you've always solved them before.

Adaptability

The fifth and final pillar of self management is adaptability. Adaptable leaders are going to be flexible and they're going to be able to readily adjust to changing circumstances. This is important because adaptable leaders are going to be able to analyze situations from various angles. They're going to be able to swiftly modify their responses and their reactions accordingly. So when they're faced with competing demands, they're going to be able to effortlessly shift priorities, even in the midst of rapid change.

If you struggle with adaptability a quick tip for you on this is you should develop a contingency plan for potential disruptions and challenges that you anticipate.

At the beginning of a project or some long term thing that you're trying to implement, like a software rollout or something like that, Take a step back up front and just think about what are the potential disruptions that I anticipate and then figure out at least at a high level, what are some contingency plans for that? What if someone gets sick? Is there a way we can outsource this work to keep the project moving? What's a backup plan to keep this thing moving if this thing gets stuck? Ask yourself these what if scenarios you don't have to invest in those contingency plans, but at least have an idea at a high level of what would you do if some of these realistic problems or disruptions came up? That way you're not caught off guard when they do happen. This is going to help you be pre adaptive.

From there, let's just say it's a project that we're talking about, you're going to want to schedule regular check ins with the team to assess progress and adapt your approach as needed. You don't want to be afraid of revisiting goals and priorities when circumstances change. This is a common mistake that leaders make. We set the initial plan out there and we get locked to that plan and we don't really consider how to adapt that plan along the way. So this whole idea of just constantly keeping your finger on the pulse of what's going on and not being afraid to revisit those goals and change those priorities as circumstances change.

Mastering self management takes time and practice, but the rewards are undeniable. By developing these skills, you'll become a leader who inspires confidence, navigates challenges with grace, and fosters a thriving work environment. Remember, the best leaders are always learning and growing.

If you want to learn more ways to boost your self management skills, check out my episode called 3 Ways to Improve Your Patience and Focus.

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