Leading with your emotions

Objectifying Wellbeing 

One of the hardest things to do in the workplace is objectifying the challenge of wellbeing. 

Wellbeing is often found in the small moments, where human emotion is met with a human reaction. These moments only come when you have the right culture where people have the freedom to show empathy. 

One of the best ways to directly support the wellbeing of your staff is by ensuring that your managers and leaders have the training they need to perform this role. 

When you give your managers and leaders the tools to be effective coaches, showing emotional intelligence, they become more capable of supporting wellbeing directly.  

Performance and wellbeing management 

Leading any team makes you responsible for two things;  performance and wellbeing. 

Gone are the days when we only drive performance to meet organisational goals. To sustainably succeed, organisations must meet the challenge of meeting performance goals while supporting both physical and mental wellbeing. 

 It is no longer possible to treat people simply as vessels for delivering performance. 

Performance in a role is someone’s potential minus the interference they face. When you only focus on organisational goals, you miss aspects of interference linked to wellbeing. 

If you want to have empowered people who are creatively meeting the challenges in your organisation, then you must empower your managers to ask the right questions in the right environment. 

One of the models we talk about when we train managers is the 20% manager. A 20% manager is somebody with a relationship with their team that is 80% human and only 20% manager. 

What we look to show people is that being a good leader is mostly about being an empathetic, humble and emotionally intelligent human. There is only this tiny 20% of the time where you have to be a manager, challenging, leading and giving critical feedback to your team to reach desired results. 

What can we do now? 

It is the senior leadership within an organisation who are responsible for the structure. And it is this structure that makes or breaks the ability to manage effectively. 

To effectively manage the performance and wellbeing of individuals, team sizes can be capped at 6-8 people; there is simply not enough time for a manager to effectively manage more heartbeats than that. 

Regular performance management must also take place. Every employee must be offered at least an hour of face-to-face time with their manager each month. 

Wellbeing-focused organisations know that their most valuable asset is their people, and they encourage their people to be creative, communicate and think critically about their roles. This can only happen when adequate performance management takes place. 

Creating an organised structure and encouraging the performance management of staff is a step toward becoming a wellbeing-focused organisation. 

When you start to meet the basics and create the right environment, you allow for well-being to grow.  

And when managers ask the right coaching questions too, well… then you are beginning to empower your people. 

Develop your leadership skills

We know how tough it is to lead a charity in ordinary times. For most of us, these times are far from ordinary. So join DSC at its Good Leadership Matters – Online conference on Thursday 23 November, and develop your skills with your peers. Find out more and register here.