Great leaders don’t just manage performance, they expand capacity. A key component of that is emotional well-being. Chronic stress and unhappiness drain mental energy and create a negative spiral toward low engagement and burnout.
Too often, the directive is to improve financials quarter over quarter and certainly year over year. Less often, there’s space to ask how the people driving those numbers are doing.
A recent GALLUP article (What Is the State of the World’s Emotional Health?) speaks to an underutilized leadership capability – recognizing emotional health.
“The global rise in unhappiness over the past decade has been well-documented, yet many leaders have overlooked it because they rely on economic indicators while ignoring daily emotional health.
This oversight matters because negative emotions do not just reflect distress; they narrow people’s focus and erode their coping capacity. When these feelings become chronic, they leave individuals and societies more vulnerable to instability.” – GALLUP
It’s not about coddling employees. They really aren’t looking for that anyway. It’s about creating an environment where they can do their best work and grow. We have many dashboards for sales, operations, and customer success. You may also have engagement survey results – but do you use them?
Negative emotions aren’t inherently bad. They signal something matters. When they are left to fester unresolved, it is an organizational problem. That pressure, uncertainty and disconnection don’t just linger. It becomes inattention, lower productivity, and limited innovation. Focus wavers and defaults to tunnel vision and problems and risks aren’t identified much less addressed.
What can a leader actually do?
Emotional well-being isn’t a perk and it’s not solved by ping pong tables and free snacks. If you are a leader who believes you can’t slow down or the metrics won’t be met, it’s time to reflect on how that belief is limiting you. Stress, especially chronic stress, forces the brain into a reactive mode. It predicts the stress ahead and no longer creates new ways of thinking. Creativity is lost because the brain seeks out the lowest risk solution and that is “the way I’ve always done it”. You need to understand the barriers to success so you can shift forward with solutions that work for the team – and those metrics.
How might you slow down to go fast?
Take a moment in meetings to check the energy in the room.. An energy check can be inviting a team member to share something they are trying to solve and having you mirror back what you heard. You didn’t solve it and you don’t have to do that. They simply have a chance to be heard and will likely hear something helpful as you reflect back using their words. When people feel seen, their brains shift from defensive to creative mode.
You can also take it a step further by acknowledging and celebrating strengths in their thinking.
I often ask for a celebration from my clients as we begin a coaching session. There’s a deep pause sometimes because the problems are more front of mind and they have to shift the lens. Whether you point out a positive or they do, it’s named as a step forward. Even if there’s a long journey ahead, that recognition of a positive outcome is rewarding.
Leadership isn’t only about what gets done. It’s about how people feel when they are doing it. Employees who are exhausted, stressed, and struggling cannot do top quality work. When you tune into emotion, you are tapping into a key influencer of the team’s energy. Certainly, that’s worth the time a brief check-in with the team members takes?