Bad Leadership Starts With Self Loathing

Let’s talk for a moment about emotional intelligence, i.e., understanding how people work emotionally. Since emotions drive most of our behavior, this is a very important skill to develop, wouldn’t you say? Since business success is, at the heart of it, about building win-win relationships, then it is particularly important to sustained success.

At the most basic level, we treat others like we treat ourselves. You can only share what you have. It’s obvious that you can’t share something you don’t’ have.

If you don’t have good self-care skills, i.e., love yourself and take good care of yourself, then you don’t have that love to share with others. If you’re often critical and demanding of yourself, then you’ll often be critical and demanding of others.

When you have leadership power and authority, this phenomenon is amplified tenfold. You are the culture of your organization. Your strengths and weaknesses become the strengths and weaknesses of your organization whether it’s a team, a department, or an entire business.

The behaviors you reward increase, and the behaviors you punish decrease because you have financial reward power over your team. If you demand of yourself that you work killer hours and have no work/life balance, then you’re very likely to demand that of others.

By contrast, if you believe that being happy and enjoying life along the way to financial success are important for yourself, then you’re likely to reward that for the people in your organization. Surely it’s obvious that you’ll get more sustained motivation and productivity from happy people than from unhappy ones.

Yes, lack of leadership training and knowledge can cause bad leadership and poor business results too, but much of the time that training needs to be primarily about emotional intelligence. Then everybody wins.

Don’t be a stranger. (770) 993-1129. tdockery@TheResolveFirm.com