The importance of "emotional baggage" for leaders

A leader recently emailed me about the importance of leaders dealing with "emotional baggage" - emotional leftovers that can arise as anger, frustration, etc. years after an event. This leader wanted to know how emotional baggage from the past might hurt him in his leadership role today.

His question got me thinking.

Whenever leaders ask me this question, I use the metaphor of physical wounds. If I'm cooking in the kitchen, and I cut myself with a knife, I may have to get several stitches. If the wound heals properly, two years down the road there will be a scar. If the cut is still festering and oozing disgusting fluids two years later, I am going to get the cut treated, because left untreated, that festering wound can make me very physically sick.

This analogy holds for leaders' psychology. If I go through an event that leaves emotional scars, what is called "emotional baggage" is what happens when our emotional wounds are festing and oozing emotional pus. The feelings of anger, frustration (or whatever feeling you experience in relation to this past events) ARE the emotional pus.

The best response when this "emotional pus" occurs is to manage the emotional wound with a coach. Working with a coach can help drastically descrease (or even remove) this emotional baggage.

So what happens when leaders ignore when their emotional wounds are oozing? They infect others around them, decreasing emotional engagement and employee performance.

Bottom Line: Effective leaders take care of emotional baggage from the past because they know doing so will make them even better leaders.

Leading the Next Generation of Employees

Some Kansas State University professors and students are creating an interesting buzz in discussing the state of students today. You can watch the video on YouTube. The KSU blog is here.

A fascinating discussion of a vision of students today ... critical information for any leader will be hiring in the foreseeable future.

Best Leadership Practices .... Part 2

In part 1 of this blog, I talked about keeping it simple. In part 2, we'll talk about another mission-critical task for leaders:

changing your consciousness.

Just as children learn to crawl, then walk, then run, so too do adults have developmental tasks they must achieve. These days, many psychological researchers including Robert Kegan and Ken Wilber are pointing out that the largest developmental task is broadening your consciousness.

Clam bake, anyone?

In a recent report in Nature magazine, scientist have discovered physical evidence that early humans held the technology to have a clambake ... over 164,000 years ago, which is far earlier than scientists had thought.

While is appears to be child's play today, the ability to have a clambake required a certain level of consciousness development. According to the article, it actually took thousands of years for that clambake technology to become widespread.

Unfortunately, we don't have 1,000's of years for new levels of consciousness to emerge. The well-established threat of global warming, and our continued use of violence to solve problems has put us on a race with the clock. There's no guarantee that humanity will survive.

Emerging levels of consciousness, referred to as post-rational (which I wrote about in my book The Way of Leading People: Unlocking Your Integral Leadership Skills with the Tao Te Ching) are what will get us out of this mess.
To be effective, leaders need to be on the forefront of consciousness development.

We'll talk more about consciousness development in the near future.


BOTTOM LINE: Best leadership practices for the 21st century include leaders developing their consciousness

New Leadership Prints!

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Best Leadership Practices: Keep It Simple

Best leaders keep it simple. In this terrific article by from The Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Virginia professor John D. Arras offers several simple and insightful leadership practices.

While professor Arras is writing about leadership in the classroom, his words can easily be applied to leadership in any organization. His thoughts on "teach thinking" (every position ... even in the same field ... needs people who can think); "Keep it Real" (every leader's goal); and "Paying it Backward and Forward" (You have great leaders in your life who taught you the ropes, didn't you?) should be required reading for every leader.

Bottom Line: Great leaders keep it simple.

How to Become a More Powerful Leader.

Want to know how to become a more powerful leader?

Be willing to say, "I don't know."

Over the weekend, I got to watch the amazing movie "We Are Marshall," which tells the story of the Marshall University (W.Va.) football team who died in a plane crash in 1970 ... and how MU rebuilt their team.

Actor Matthew McConaughy plays Coach Lengyel -- the man who took the job that nobody wanted. Lengyel had to deal with the pain and grief of those who remained after the crash ... and the conflicting emotions that people held.

At several key points in the story, various characters ask Lengyel important questions, and Lengyel has the strength to answer simply, "I don't know." No psychobabble. No B.S. Simply, "I don't know."

BOTTOM LINE: When faced with emotional turmoil and chaos, powerful leaders have the internal strength to say, "I don't know."

Cleveland School Shooting

My blogging is timely, it appears. My last blog was about "fundamental attributional error" that is often made around violence. Yesterday, there was a school shooting in Cleveland, Ohio at SuccessTech, an alternative high school. In the report by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, they report the chaos that ensued with the shooting. The Associated Press reports that the student had "mental problems."

All of which supports my previous premise that simple answers are rarely correct answers.

Leaders should understand this.