Self-Awareness: A Need To Know for Managers and Leaders

7 February 2017

In the field of public service, justice advocacy, integrity, morale, and a well-balanced temperament are essential qualities to manage and lead others. Current societies, where multiculturalism is the core of our civilization, every public administrator has the undeniable and indisputable responsibility to encourage, empower, and sustain a bias-free organizational environment.

In contemporary professionalism, management and leadership responsibilities seem to be used interchangeably in scope and frameworks. However, I must mention that there is an underlying difference between management and leadership. Leadership is the action of leading, motivating, empowering, engaging, guiding, directing, and influencing people. And while management could overlap with leadership from the framework of opportunity, choices, and applicability within the responsibilities of both, managers perhaps could be a tenth more focused on the operational processing of regulating, monitoring, and governing the organization as a whole.

Managers have the responsible of making decisions about the organization’s operational executions. They are responsible for the achievement of organizational excellence, and the accomplishment of short and long terms goals. Management has the responsibility to ensure that every decision is relevant to the organization’s well-being. Leaders have the responsibility of ensuring that management decisions are not negatively affecting their team. Leaders are responsible for motivating and empowering their team working in coordination and collaboration toward the same short and long term goal. Management establishes operational procedures and the leader ensure the team works within the pathways and boundaries of it.   

I guess the question here is how important do you think the emotional balance of a person in a position of power—management or leadership—is for the well-being of the organization and its people?

The answer is clear: It is fundamentally and primarily important.

It is correspondingly essential for managers and leaders to be self-aware of their emotional competencies and the way that those emotional competencies influences their decisions. Managers and leaders must know that self-awareness help them to recognize their own emotional responses to other. It is not the same to solve a conflict based on facts than solve a conflict based on facts that have been influenced by an unawareness of one’s and others’ emotions. Managers and must understand that their lack of emotional awareness has an effect not only on themselves but also in the way that they perceive and process the information in their surroundings.  The lack of self-awareness affect their decisions, and it has an overpowering impact in the way that they process thoughts and behave.

For managers and leaders, it is not only essentially important to be aware of their emotional intelligence competencies. They also need to learn how to recognize the “what’s” and “why’s” of the problems, because of the impact that emotional intelligence competencies have in the way they communicate and interact with others.

Emotional self-awareness in the workplace influences the way that managers and leadership process policies, build relationships in the workplace, perform, and communicate with their team. It is that emotional awareness that allows individuals to step back when they recognize that they are about to make a decision based on an Amygdala-highjack (the Amygdala is the part of the brain limbic system responsible for survival instincts, emotions, and memory).

With that being said, I would like to share some of the skills and abilities that have been proven to be indispensably important skills for managers and leaders across the board. Leaders and managers must have a constantly and consistently well-balanced emotionally intelligent personality. The ability to make bias-free judgments, and the skills to positively influence the organization and its people.

Here are some recommendations: Perception, decision-making, and transformational abilities.

Perception: Manager and leaders must have the bias-free ability to sense, see, hear, recognize, and grasp the understanding and comprehension of their environment without being judgmental of first impression or actions. Everyone in an organization has the right and justice of a due process, a fair and impartial treatment that can be applicable not only to the judicial system but also to our organizational settings. In emotional intelligence theories, perception influences the manager ability to solve problems and to be realistic about their environment. It also influences managers’ emotional expressions, their stress tolerance, the way they regard themselves, and their optimism. All of which may also influence the manger’s actions and decisions. 

Decision-making: Managers and leaders must understand that making the wrong decision can impair a person’s professional career, hence, their personal life and the life of others. While managers are not in a position that requires being influenced by an individual’s personal problems, the reality is that personal problems can influence the individual’s performance in the workplace. Therefore, while it might not be important, in contemporary society and professionalism, the way a person manage with their personal problems should be taken into consideration when making a decision, in the workplace. 

Managers must be able to make decisions based only on the truth, certainty, actuality, and veracity of the facts. It has been scientifically proven that decision-making in the workplace could be influenced by the individual state of being and their emotional balance. The truth is that managers’ emotions in the workplace could influence their skills and abilities to be flexible, solve problems, manage conflicts, and be assertive about the reality of their environment.

Transformational abilities: In leadership, transformational leadership is the ability to influence positive social changes in their followers, while influencing them to change strategies and frameworks, redirecting their motivations to achieve their professional goals. Well, a transformational manager should be one who identifies and influences positive organizational changes in an organization. Transformational managers must promote organizational justice, equal development opportunities, equal respect for everyone one working within the organization regardless of their title, and a well-balanced organizational policy framework.

To archive organizational excellence, managers and leaders must be equally influenced and equally sensitive to their commitment to the organization and their commitment to their constituents.

Iberkis Faltas, Ph.D., (ABD)

Public Policy & Administration

Public Management & Leadership | Law & Policy

Certified Emotional Intelligence Coach

Reference:

Bar On, R. (2012). The impact of emotional intelligence on health and wellbeing. Emotional intelligence – New perspectives and applications, pp 30-50. Accessed from http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs-wm/27238.pdf

Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2013). Primal leadership. Unleashing the power of emotional intelligence. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press.