Hi! Welcome Back. I’m continuing my review of Deepak Chopra’s acronym for a leader, last time we looked at the letter L which Mr. Chopra says stands for Look and listen today it’s the letter E which stands for emotional bonding. Below is Chopra’s take on emotional bonding between a leader and their followers, excerpts taken from his book the Soul of Leadership.
E = Emotional bonding.
Leaders bring out the best in others, but successful visionaries go even further: they form lasting emotional bonds. They are the kind of leaders we hold in our hearts. When people are emotionally bonded to you, they want to have contact with you. They want to be of service and share in your vision. Deep motivation then develops. True, lasting loyalties are formed.
To create such bonds, you must be willing to build real relationships. Share yourself. Take a personal interest in others, and notice their strengths. At the most basic level, you must display healthy emotional energy yourself. Avoid the three toxic A’s: authoritarianism, anger and aloofness.
In every situation, make it a habit to ask yourself the key questions of emotional intelligence:
· How do I feel?
· How do they feel?
· What are the hidden stumbling blocks between us?
A leader who can answer these questions will be in a position to create lasting emotional bonds.
Reinforcing the strengths of others: Again and again it has been shown that the best leaders focus on the strengths of their followers. They build a team by assessing who does what well. They encourage each person to develop his or her best qualities. But that’s just the beginning. People want to be praised for their strengths, specifically and personally.
One of the takeaways that I get from this post one is that leaders become emotionally connected in some way with their followers. I don’t know about you but think back over your career (if you are a fossil like I) and ask yourself who were the best leaders I knew or worked with? Hopefully you’ve had a few, in my experience I had two but unfortunately I only worked with them for a short time less than five years in a thirty year career. However for whatever reason I think back on these two men Jim Bidlingmaier at Madison Gas & Electric Company and Bob Nash at College Cooperative Southeast with fondness even though I haven’t seen these fellas in years, why?
I believe that both men encouraged me and allowed me to grow during my time with them. I can still see the poster behind Bidlingmaier’s desk which read “All the Aardvarks are going west. I’m traveling East”, as a young Supervisor at the time the poster puzzled me but as I think about it now it meant that you should be your own person and come to your own opinions and decisions, don’t follow the crowd but follow your own intuition and “blaze your own trail”. That was quite a statement for a management person to promote in the Gas & Utility business back in the mid 1980’s.
Bob Nash allowed me to see into his decision making process. Bob was assigned to head up a new project which brought higher education to rural parts of Southeastern Indiana and he was “making the rules up as he went along” because there was no rules and he had to carve out how this organization should and would operate going forward. He allowed me and I believe some of my colleagues at the time to enter into his thinking process and give input into how things should work going forward. Needless to say after over thirty years of work experience I rarely saw that kind of support or candor in any other supervisor I had after them.
How about you? What about Chopra’s thoughts on emotional bonding and staff development, do you agree with him? Do you have examples of individuals that you’ve worked with or known from your past that you developed an emotional bond with? What did these people do to solicit your support? Please feel free to comment, thanks for reading and until next time all my best! Jer.
No comments:
Post a Comment