As leaders when faced with a change challenge the first things we face are emotions. In my work I have found these initial emotions can be distilled down into what I’ve coined the five ‘front-facing’ feels of change: fear, anxiety, frustration, anger, and grief.
There has been scientifically proven research that emotion travels faster than thought. In fact, social psychologists teach us that emotional response to a given stimuli is milliseconds faster than cognitive or thinking response. These lightening fast reactions that bypass the rational brain center actually stem from the innate survival response we’ve inherited from our earliest ancestors.
These emotions are real, natural, and highly efficient. The question becomes how can we leverage the power of emotion, this prized inheritance of our species, to become more effective leaders in the face of change?
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I can remember back when I was working at Procter & Gamble leading an innovation organization in their Duracell business and I walked in one morning to the news that the business was being sold to Warren Buffett and his Berkshire Hathaway portfolio. I can remember the very first thing that hit me was grief. It was like a punch in the gut. This very grand career I had envisioned with P&G was suddenly and unexpectantly being ripped away. Grief is what hit me before I could gather a coherent thought. I’m sure you can reflect back on your own examples of emotion hitting you like a mac truck during times of change.
As leaders we experience the feels of change, feels that can drive us to not even want to get out of bed in the morning, but these feels don’t negate our responsibility to lead our teams and organizations through change. So how do we show up as an effective leader during times of change?
There are 3 tangible steps you can practice to enable you to do just that.
Step One: Embrace the emotion as a SIGNAL.
Not unlike our early ancestors gathering supplies in the forest suddenly fear-struck by a rustling in the bush, change elicits emotion. Our ancestors felt fear and in that feeling were signaled into a moment of opportunity…to either be consumed by a predator or devise a way to escape. And it’s opportunity that the feels of change present us today. Opportunity to grow and evolve. This step is all about believing and trusting in that fact, leveraging your EQ skill of emotional self-awareness. Once you’ve embraced your feels as that signal and you trust yourself to be in a moment of opportunity, you’re ready to move into the second step of this practice.
Step Two: Trust the OPPORTUNITY and list options to reach a better feeling.
Here’s where the real work comes in. After trusting you’re in that moment of opportunity list out options you could explore to begin stepping towards what I call the back-facing feels of change: Anticipation, joy, pride, and excitement. For me upon hearing the news of that acquisition, I jotted down a couple options: scornfully lament the loss of P&G or accept the change and begin exploring what this milestone would afford me and my career. The latter is what began bringing me closer to feelings of anticipation and joy.
Step Three: Consciously CHOOSE a productive action that brings about that better feeling.
For me that was accepting the change and exploring what it could mean. I began researching Warren Buffet and reached out to those in my network familiar with Berkshire for insights and perspective. Now this didn’t completely remove the grief, but it did inspire better feelings and put me in a mind space to begin authentically engaging and inspiring my organization through the acquisition.
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The feels of change are real and undeniable. Though tough at times, they are our prized inheritance serving as signals to our growth opportunities. As a leader it is imperative to leverage the power of these emotions, building awareness of and strengthening our emotional intelligence, and ultimately inspiring our teams and organizations through change. You can do this through the practice of 3 steps:
Embrace the emotion as a SIGNAL
Trust the OPPORTUNITY presented and explore options to reach a better feeling
Make a conscious, productive CHOICE towards that better feeling
Through practicing these steps you’ll be engaging in a growth cycle:
Building your resiliency muscle,
increasing your emotional self-awareness,
becoming a more effective leader, and ultimately
harnessing the power of emotion to unleash your inner rock star in the face of change.
Cassandra Worthy is Founder and CEO of We Are Change Enthusiasts LLC,
a leading Global Growth Enablement firm specializing in navigating the
emotions of change to accelerate growth. With clients spanning the
Fortune 500 including Allstate, P&G, Jones Lang LaSalle, and WeWork,
Cassandra works with her client base to build enviably resilient and
adaptive organizations through her one-of-a-kind, people-centric
growth model of Change Enthusiasm(R) and associated IP. Cassandra is
a former Fortune 100 executive, having spent more than a decade in the
M&A space, now pursuing her purpose to enable the world to unleash
the rock star within during the most turbulent of times.
Connect with Cassandra IG: @Cassandra_Worthy_speaker , FB: We Are Change Enthusiasts, LI: Cassandra Worthy
