Why Your Brilliant Team Isn’t Innovating (And What to Do About It)

One of the tensions that surfaced during our first Leader Lunch Break last week feels like it’s becoming a common refrain. It goes something like this: I lead an incredibly talented team of people who do great work, but I need them to innovate. I’m asking them to think outside the box, but it seems like they either can’t or won’t.  

It’s a theme we often hear in our coaching work with senior leaders. They describe teams that are competent, reliable, and focused. Their teams check the boxes and are doing good work. But the leaders are frustrated by what’s not happening. The people they lead are not taking initiative, pushing ideas forward, or offering new solutions. They’re not innovating.

Often, in these conversations, we find ourselves reminding leaders: the people on your teams can’t innovate right now because their brains are in survival mode. They have no headspace. They are likely experiencing chronic stress. Their nervous systems are activating their threat response, flooding their bodies with cortisol and adrenaline, and rerouting brain activity away from the prefrontal cortex (our center for reasoning, planning, and creativity) toward the amygdala (our center for fear and vigilance). This is known as an “amygdala hijack (a phrase coined by Daniel Goleman),” and it’s designed to keep us safe from immediate danger. All that time and energy spent hanging out in fight, flight, or flee leaves no space for the higher-level cognitive functioning required for problem-solving. 

So it makes sense that when people are worried about the world around them feeling like it’s on fire, and they’re concerned that layoffs are coming, struggling with burnout, or juggling relentless demands, their capacity for innovation is compromised. Creativity requires cognitive space. It requires a regulated nervous system.

Creativity also requires psychological safety within the boundaries of the work space. Even when leaders acknowledge and tend to the external stressors, the way they’re asking for innovation can add barriers. They’re sometimes making calls for more creativity, or outside-the-box thinking, without offering specifics. Innovation is amorphous - it feels like a lofty goal rather than a tangible, achievable ask.

That lack of clarity fuels more anxiety. When people don’t know what success looks like, they’ll default to playing it safe, or staying within the bounds of their job description and known tasks, to prevent failure.

So what can leaders do?

• Bring your people together, ideally over food. Tight budgets and far-flung teams make it harder to gather. But if there’s a critical mass in one location, bring folks together for a lunch where everyone makes a dish, or where you all cook together in one kitchen (maybe yours?). You might even use the experience as a microcosm of what you’re asking for if you challenge folks to tackle and experiment with new recipes.

• Name the climate. Acknowledge the toll that stress and uncertainty are taking. Let people know you’re not expecting brilliance from a burned-out brain, but you are building conditions where it’s safe to try.

• Ground innovation in specificity. What kind of ideas are you hoping for? What part of the process needs rethinking? What constraints are non-negotiable, and where is there room to play?

• Break it down. Instead of asking for innovation writ large, invite experimentation in bite-sized ways, and on short cycles: one new approach to an old problem, one process you could prototype and iterate.

• Make a plan to check on progress. Come back together on shorter cycles than might be typical to ask the core questions of an After Action Review: What does the innovation intend to solve for? What actually happened? Was there a difference between our intention and what actually happened? Why? What could we have done differently, or better? What can we learn?

• Acknowledge and celebrate. Even if the outcome doesn’t achieve what it was intended to, acknowledging and celebrating the effort toward innovation is so important. Make sure your people feel good about the work they’ve put in, and ask what they need to stay engaged for the next round.

As leaders, demanding creativity won’t suffice to create the conditions necessary for creativity to thrive. Instead, your work is to build the emotional and cognitive scaffolding that makes creativity possible. That means tending to stress before it calcifies into shutdown, naming the uncertainty instead of pretending it’s business as usual, and translating big-picture hopes and dreams into clear, bite-sized invitations. When you create a space where it feels safe to think out loud, test, maybe fail, assess, celebrate, and try again, you might unlock habits around innovation that are not just reactive, but also regenerative for your team’s soul and spirit.

From Stress to Action: Lead With What You Can Control

This is a love letter to our clients and friends working in the Democratic campaign (and campaign-adjacent) world right now. It’s a 2-parter: Solid Practices for Stressed Teams is also a snapshot of what we’re seeing and doing, in real time, with clients who are working hard to navigate stress and, you know, preserve democracy.

We know you’re holding a lot. You’re operating in an environment where everyone around you is keenly aware and constantly reminding you (in loud, urgent screams) of what’s at stake in November’s elections. Truth is co-opted and twisted. Democracy is on the line. We are, as a society, proving completely unable to balance multiple perspectives and experiences. And, while all of that is happening, you’re also managing complex teams, many of which include folks just entering the workforce.

In our conversations with individuals and teams in movement spaces over the past six months, we’ve found ourselves coming back, again and again, to the importance of managing energy via Stephen Covey’s circles of concern, influence, and control. The premise is straightforward, and grounded in three key questions: 

What is outside of our control? The outermost in the series of three concentric circles, the Circle of Concern encompasses everything we care about — issues and situations that affect us — but over which we have no direct control. Within our circle of concern right now might be the ever-rising death toll of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, climate change amidst hurricane season, and the general disbelief and disinterest in news and truth.

What can we influence? The middle circle is the Circle of Influence. It exists inside the Circle of Concern, and it encompasses the areas we can actually affect through our actions. These are things we can impact through our direct behavior and choices, such as our relationships, personal habits, and work environment.

What can we control? The innermost circle is the Circle of Control. This is the smallest circle and lies within the Circle of Influence. It includes things over which we have direct control, primarily our own thoughts, actions, and reactions.

Covey and his team think and write about being proactive. Here’s the roadmap we take our clients (both individually and in teams) through to adopt a proactive posture, along with highlights from a real-life team session.

Step 1: Put Feelings on the Table

Feelings. We’ve all got them, and when we’re stressed we tend toward negative, or difficult to manage, emotions. Naming feelings, both for ourselves and out loud, is foundational to building emotional intelligence. Naming feelings increases self-awareness, helps us be seen by others, and creates space to more effectively regulate and co-regulate. It is key to building resilience in ourselves, and to building empathy and connection with the folks around us. 

Over the last few months, we’ve facilitated the leadership team of a large and critically important nonprofit through a series of scenario planning sessions to prepare for a potential Trump win. It’s everyone’s worst nightmare, and we knew we needed to deal with both the very real trauma of 2016 and the impending doom that scenario presents today.

We asked folks to name the feelings emerging as they considered this scenario, and we used Mentimeter to collect responses. Participants witnessed each other’s feelings — they noticed what folks wrote, where folks were, how folks experienced feeling through the scenario of a Trump win. We held time and space for participants to notice their own feelings in response to each other’s feelings, to see and hear, and also to be silent. 

Here’s where that group landed:

Step 2: Articulate (Biggest) Fears

Remember how, as a kid, the fastest way to get back to sleep after a nightmare was to tell someone what you dreamt? (Shoutout to our currently parenting readers who do this now.) We follow the same premise with teams. Articulating fears, and their deepest consequences, can provide emotional relief. It can help us normalize, gain perspective, and sometimes even give us a sense of agency. 

Back to our big leadership team tackling a scenario in which Trump wins the presidential election. We asked them to name their biggest fears and the possible impact:

“I’m afraid of …”

“If my worst fears materialize, it will mean … is happening.” 

Folks spent 5 minutes in full release mode, and then things got pretty dark. We shared. It was ugly. There were long, quiet pauses. Lots of deep breaths.  

Step 3: Sort Fears Across Circles of Concern, Influence, and Control

Now the fun part. We’ve released our feelings into the world. We’ve articulated the absolute scariest stuff, the worst-case scenarios, the full manifestation of our fears. What’s left? Figuring out what we can do with all these feelings and fears.

We asked the leadership team to sort out all the fears they identified into three buckets: What is outside of our control? What can we influence? What can we control?

Beginning with the outer layer, we asked folks to name the things they’re concerned about that they felt are completely outside their control. Next, we moved into naming the things they can influence. And, finally, we heard folks articulate their thoughts on what they can directly control.

Here’s how it looked on paper: 

From here, teams can begin moving toward action on the things they can control and influence. The team with whom we worked went off to build plans that they’ll be ready to execute in the coming months and in the months following the election, regardless of the outcome. They’re operating in proactive ways, and it’s making space for folks to both feel their feelings and to keep moving forward.  

Could your team benefit from this kind of exercise? We’re ready to help. Let’s have a conversation about how we can supporting your team. 

Solid Practices for Stressed Teams

Campaign teams and adjacent organizations that support candidates, issues, and voters are wonders to the nerds like us who spend our time thinking about how teams work. They are built and torn down over the course of the election cycle. The folks who bring their talents work tirelessly together and then, win or lose, disband shortly after the election. Along the way, these teams - and the people who manage them - weather incredible stress. 

Campaign work is a roller coaster ride for the nervous system. It is filled with unexpected turns that happen completely out of the scope and control of most of the folks working behind the scenes— we saw these turns over the last few months with Biden's departure from the race, and with the Democratic party enthusiastically coalescing around Kamala Harris. Deflation and a sense of impending doom have turned into energy and joy in the span of a few weeks. That wouldn't be happening without a lot of hard work and long nights from campaign staff working to shift the narrative and, along with it, our collective experience.

And while those good folks working to inform and energize us have their eyes on the prize of protecting democracy (no big deal), they’re also doing the intricate work of leading teams with the emotional intelligence this moment requires. They’re working to communicate effectively, to inspire and motivate, to navigate challenges, and to make decisions that consider the emotional well being of the folks around them. 

In Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, Emily and Amelia Nagoski explore the concept of burnout and how it affects women in particular, who experience a unique confluence of stress and societal pressures. They explain stress vs. stressors: 

Stressors = external events that trigger stress, like that boss with whom you just cannot get on the same page, or watching swings in poll numbers (even though we know better than to pay too much heed to poll data). 

Stress = the physiological and emotional response to these stressors, like how you seem to be getting more headaches these days and you are finding yourself feeling really tired even after a good night of sleep (what’s that?). 

Emily and Amelia Nagoski urge us to complete the stress cycle in order to alleviate stress. Completing the stress cycle means engaging in activities that will allow your body to process and release stress, like physical exercise, deep breathing, and positive social interactions.

Our coaching conversations with folks leading campaign and campaign-adjacent teams often center the tactical. These leaders carry a near-impossible responsibility to create and hold space for their teams to feel their feelings, and to care for themselves, while continuously delivering at a breakneck pace. We’ve been talking with these leaders about how they can help themselves and their teams complete the stress cycle as individuals and collectively. Here’s a roundup of some of the practices we’re seeing these leaders use to help their folks manage stress and connect. (Shoutout to them: They know who they are, and they rock!) 

Name and See Feelings

It starts with feelings. Our capacity for feeling is the great uniter of our human experience, and yet it is often the one most feared. Feelings come in an immense range of shapes and sizes. In today’s world, it seems like negative feelings are at an all-time high, and managing those feelings can be even more challenging. Increasing your awareness of your own emotional state, acknowledging what you’re feeling and sharing that feeling out loud, is at the foundation of developing your emotional intelligence. Increasing emotional intelligence on a team creates space for individuals to have a human experience, to be connected to themselves and others, to provide an opportunity to regulate and co-regulate. Empathy and connection are critical building blocks for team and individual resilience.

Try starting a meeting with a moment for folks to settle in. If you’re gathering virtually, ask people to name how they’re feeling in the chat. Set a timer for two minutes. Encourage them to watch each other’s responses. Maybe name some out loud as participants type. And then: Do nothing. Sit in quiet together, witnessing each other. Close with a breath or two. Acknowledge that you see your people, and you see their feelings. 

Use Check In / Check Out Rituals

When a 24-hour news cycle brings an endless cascade of news that feels both urgent and important, gathering your team first thing in the morning to check in, and again at the end of the day to check out, can be deeply centering. 

Check ins allow members of your team to share their current status, feelings, obstacles — all of which promotes transparency and support. Check outs provide a space to reflect on the day’s achievements, anticipate challenges, and set intentions. This routine helps create space where folks feel heard, and can even open pathways for collaboration when folks are listening for where they can support each other. 

Dig Into Fears

More specifically than naming feelings, articulating fears and their deepest consequences goes straight after those most negative spaces. Creating opportunities for folks to engage with each other about their worst fears helps to normalize, and can help build perspective, ultimately (hopefully) paving the way for more of a sense of empowerment. 

Ask your folks to think through their responses to the following prompts: 

“I’m afraid of …”

“If my worst fears materialize, it will mean … is happening.” 

Then allow for some time to share, to release, to build resonance across the group, to hold each other’s fears in focus in an effort to lighten the load. Take a few breaths together.  

Invite Questions 

Inviting your folks into opportunities explicitly designed for them to ask questions demystifies so much (namely power and authority) and promotes a culture of continuous learning and improvement. Having folks ask questions, ideally out in the open, can make space for innovation and collaboration in ways not possible when asking questions feels fraught. 

You can work an invitation to ask questions into your check in / check out agenda, or into your weekly team meetings. Start by modeling questions that operate at multiple levels, and maybe even model both technical and tactical questions and more philosophical questions that require nuance and conversation. Keep track of these questions in a shared document, encourage folks to respond so that it comes to life, and continuously revisit the question round-up with opportunities to add more questions. 

Go Outside and Move

In the first chapter of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, the authors write: “Physical activity (literally any movement of your body) is what tells your brain you have successfully survived the threat and now your body is a safe place to live. Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle.” 

If getting outside and moving your bodies is accessible to your team, moving with the group can tackle multiple strategies to complete the stress response cycle. Physical activity + positive social interactions = so many wins for the day. One of our current campaign team leaders encourages team hikes, and we have suggested that they schedule those hikes right on into the work week. Go outside if you can. Move if you can. We promise you’ll feel better. 

Plan for Joy 

Is it any wonder why your favorite standup’s latest routine feels extra funny right now? Or why you had an especially amazing time at that summer concert last weekend where you danced your ass off? Back to the Nagoski sisters: You were closing the stress cycle. Laughter and joy trigger the release of endorphins that make us feel happy and relaxed. So no, it’s no wonder. 

Ask everyone on your team to identify one thing they’ll do today to experience joy. We’re looking for things like: I will blast music in my car and sing as loud as I can during my 20 minute ride home. I will put my phone in a drawer and play a round of Sleeping Queens with my 7-year-old before bedtime. 

Better yet, plan for some shared joy. Get your team out for an afternoon at the park or the lake and bring some silly games. Go to a museum. Meet up for a great meal. And no matter what: Ban cell phones from these events. The world will not end if you don’t see your social media alerts, but you will have connected and (hopefully) relaxed together.  

Need some help building practices to help your team complete the stress cycle? Go buy yourself a copy of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle because it’s SO good, and then let’s have a conversation about scheduling a session to support your practice.

Navigating the Election Tide

What a difference a day makes. 

Campaign season brings hope, anxiety, excitement, worry, a sense of expansive possibility, and deep uncertainty to the social impact sector. We’re thinking about how these last few days have us feeling the full emotional journey of the campaign season. Maybe (hopefully) you’re breathing a little easier, your shoulders have unlocked a little tension, and you’ve been able to join in on what feels like a collective sigh of relief as we let the possibility and excitement of Kamala Harris’s candidacy wash over us. Take in all that positive energy when it comes. 

These are the ups and downs of the season, and your task - if you’re leading a team - is to continue weathering the storms for yourself and for the folks you support. It’s on you to find and hold onto hope and possibility in these high moments, and also in the most uncertain moments, in order to connect with and inspire your team. 

Along with the ebb and flow of the news cycle, your team is going to ebb and flow emotionally, spiritually, psychologically. 

How are you staying in tune with where they are? Whether it’s elation thanks to a new and energizing candidate or the grind of heads-down work, are you checking in with them? Do you have your finger on the collective pulse? Are you motivating them to connect with each other? 

The organizations we work with stake positions on some of the most critical social issues of our time. They’re not on the political sidelines; they’re in the game. The election outcome carries serious repercussions for their missions, and for the people they serve. These repercussions extend deep into their own talent pool as well. Their survival hangs in the balance in this election season — not just their funding and their staff’s future, but a complete social upheaval with the highest stakes. 

And because these organizations attract like-minded employees, folks are feeling, personally, the enormous weight and opportunity of our current political climate. Leaders of organizations working in political and mission-driven spaces, and leaders within the campaign world itself, need to focus on two things now and in the months to come: 1) leading their teams through the emotional ups and downs of this campaign cycle, and 2) intentionally building resilience so their work and their people can go on no matter the election outcome.

Honestly, it’s not just the election. The world feels upside down. As of the date of writing this article in July 2024, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, there are ongoing wars in Ukraine and Sudan, an attack and erosion of LGBTQ+ rights, the elimination of access to healthcare for women across the country, an existential threat to immigrants and refugees, a warming world. The list goes on. 

All that’s happening in the external world impacts your team and its mission. People work with you because they care about the issue or issues you address and the vision to which you aspire. When the world feels like it’s on the precipice of an upswing, they might be feeling energized and hopeful. And when we hit the next “unprecedented” crisis, they might experience fear, panic, rage, numbness, exhaustion. They show up to work with all those emotions in tow. As a leader, you may want to pretend that you can go about the day-to-day as usual, but the reality is that your people are deeply feeling what’s happening outside of work. You have to be mission-focused and drive toward your outcomes, but you can’t get away from the fact that it’s election season — and that our current election is happening in a tornado of global crises. 

3 Things Social Impact Leaders Should Do Leading Up to November

So how do you reckon with all those feelings and perspectives among your team? We’re encouraging the leaders with whom we collaborate to take three actions now (and to ask an associated series of questions):

1. Make space for your team to name and process feelings, out loud and together, and then clarify how their work fits into the bigger picture. What’s in your team’s control? What is beyond your team’s control? What action can your team take to ground itself and to push your organization’s work forward?

2. Build routines that ensure you’ll come back to the conversation at regular intervals both individually and as a group. If you’re in constant communication with your team you can weather the storm in a steady way instead of managing from crisis to crisis. It’s not a one-and-done. How will you bring the whole team back together, and how will you touch base with your team over time? What are the routines your folks can rely on? How can you encourage connection and emotional resonance? 

3. Build and share strategic scenario plans to give your team a sense of stability so they know where they’re heading, no matter the outcome. What needs to happen now so that you’re prepared for whatever happens in November? Are your people clear on how you’ll respond in each of the win scenarios and in a contested scenario? How are you preparing your team to function under even the highest external stress scenarios? 

Your team may look to you for answers. They may hope you can fix the world’s problems. They may long for you to resolve their unease. But that’s not a leader’s job. Your role here is to emphasize relationships and connection. Your job is to invest them in their own self care and in one another, and to create intentional space for folks to check in, express themselves, and identify ways in which they’re unlocking from the constant stress. It’s also to set the vision, to inspire, and to clarify how the team can make impact even in uncertain times and in the face of external forces outside your direct influence. 

This isn’t to say you have to conceal your own fears and anxieties behind a brave face. It’s important to show empathy and vulnerability as a leader — by expressing that you feel these emotions too, and admitting that you cannot build solutions on your own. Make space for everyone to share and be heard, yourself included, and then talk about how you all can support each other and do your best work together. 

There’s no leadership special sauce required in this moment. Simply an acknowledgement of the gravity and the emotion we’ll all be feeling in these next few months, along with regular check-ins with your team, is what your folks need from you. That’s emotional intelligence in action. 

The sweet spot is somewhere between the extremes of demanding that your team operate as usual and letting fear take over — where folks can feel the feels and be passionate about the issues that matter to them while keeping them focused on the greater mission.

It’s a tightrope, for sure. If you need a guiding hand, let’s talk. And we invite you back to this space in the coming weeks as we share more thoughts on how leaders can navigate and plan, whatever the future holds. 

Don’t Leave Your Emotions at the Office Door

The leaders we work with aspire to maximize their impact, be successful, and guide their teams effectively. But many have internalized the idea that showing emotions or talking about feelings — at all — is weak or unstable or unproductive. 

Studies have shown the opposite to be true: Vulnerability (defined by Brené Brown as emotional exposure and risk-taking) is a trait of strong, respected leaders. We find that leaders who are aware of their emotions — and who can articulate those emotions and manage their stress responses — can more effectively build connections, demonstrate empathy, and manage conflict.  

In our work as coaches and with teams, we see the impacts when leaders don’t confidently allow emotions to surface, welcome them in and explicitly work with and manage them. One (or both) of two things happen for us all in these circumstances: we retreat from others and avoid conflict, or we become volatile in our responses, reacting in the moment in ways we may come to regret, feel guilty about, and don’t know how to recover from. 

Why Emotional Intelligence Matters

What if we showed up to work, and in particular to the most stressful moments we experience, with the capacity to identify our feelings and a deep bench of strategies to help ourselves manage through stress? How might we lead differently, be perceived differently, achieve success differently?

You’re probably familiar with EI (or EQ, as it’s sometimes called). Psychologist Daniel Goleman, who coined the term, found that emotional intelligence is twice as important as other competencies in determining outstanding leadership. 

We learned about the relationship between EQ and leadership from our mentor, Fran Johnston, whose work (alongside Annie McKee and Richard Boyatzis) makes the case that  EQ is vital for effective leadership because self-regulation is necessary to navigate high-pressure moments, and social awareness is necessary to build resonant relationships. Developing EQ means building the capacity to manage relationships, foster empathy, and promote understanding of system- and team-level dynamics. Leaders with high EQ inspire, motivate, and manage conflict, resulting in more cohesive and productive teams. They’re better equipped to navigate challenges, communicate effectively, and make decisions that consider the emotional wellbeing of the folks around them. Teams led by emotionally intelligent leaders tend to have higher levels of engagement, productivity, and job satisfaction. 

When we coach individual leaders or guide teams, our work begins with some grounding in the Emotional Intelligence model: 

• Self-awareness is about being able to identify, name, and acknowledge our emotions. It’s knowing your strengths, weaknesses, values, and impact. Self-awareness is at the foundation of all the competencies.

• Self-management is about managing change and adapting with positivity. It’s controlling our disruptive impulses and moods. Self-regulation is critical in managing relationships and fostering belonging. 

• Social awareness is about building connection and rapport. Social awareness is the ability to have empathy, to see and understand what other people are feeling and how your actions impact them. It’s the capacity to move beyond your own ego and intent into a space of responsibility-taking and adaptation.

• Relationship management is about skillfully using your social awareness to build strong relationships, to influence and inspire, and to manage conflict. It’s using your self-awareness and social awareness to have a positive impact on your people and create a positive team climate. 

On top of Goleman’s four principals, we layer an emphasis on identity, equity, and practices of inclusion that foster feelings of belonging. We recognize that we are all operating within systems of power designed to oppress folks who hold marginalized identities. Working with the Emotional Intelligence model can only happen in a space that is simultaneously intentionally engaged in awareness-building and an insistence on equitable, inclusive practices. If we want folks to bring their authentic selves to the workplace and thrive, that workplace needs to be able to see the individual and meet their unique needs for safety and support. 

It’s More Than Just Awareness

EQ is one of those concepts that gets thrown around without a ton of understanding or substance behind it. Folks think, “Yeah, I’m good at talking and thinking about my feelings, so I’ve got that dimension of leadership covered.” In fact, EQ spreads beyond feelings into:

• How well do you know yourself? For real? 

• How effectively do you manage yourself when you’re stressed?

• Are you able to act with empathy?

• Are you able to communicate effectively by building shared meaning individually and with groups in your system?

• Are you able to anticipate, manage, and resolve conflict?

• Are you able to admit when you’re wrong?

• Are you able to own the impact you have when others feel hurt?

• Are you able to facilitate development in others?

• Are you able to give and receive feedback?

• Can you perceive and react to team and system-level dynamics, holding awareness around both your own power and authority and that of others?

• Are you able to build shared consciousness and invest others in your vision?

• Can you inspire others?

• Are you able to create an atmosphere of trust and enable candor? One in which team members believe they can share ideas and questions and make mistakes without embarrassment, rejection, or punishment? 

People think they know how to identify, express, and respond to their emotions. But they often don’t. Not because they’re not capable, but because the nature of work and group dynamics raise all kinds of barriers. 

And whatever capacity we do have for managing with EQ goes right out the window when we face stress at work. Under tension, we tend to respond at the extremes — we become either numb to what’s going on or hyper-vigilant; we freeze or fight; we lose trust in ourselves or in everyone around us.  

How to Tap Into Your Emotional Intelligence

Building emotional awareness and management takes patience, time, and intentionality. Some people are naturally gifted with a high degree of emotional intelligence, and others need to work on developing awareness, or management, or both. But these are habits of mind and action that anyone can develop — like playing the guitar or meditating — with practice.  

It starts with the recognition that EQ is something you want, and likely need, to work on. This is deceptively simple, but when we coach leaders we’re reminded of how challenging it is to  recognize that you’re less in sync, or receptive, to managing your emotions than you’d like to be. Because leaders so rarely get meaningful feedback, their capacity to lead with self awareness and management, and with social and relational awareness, can be deeply unknown.   

We help coach our clients into a state of awareness. We ask them to slow down, to quiet their busy minds enough to actually experience what’s happening; to pay attention to the physical signs. We help folks name the emotion they encounter in a given situation and talk about how it makes them feel. Often, people don’t understand the differences between emotions and feelings, or how to name them. Emotions rise from sensations in the body, while feelings are the stories our minds tell us about the experience — for example, the emotion of anticipation might trigger feelings of happiness and longing or anxiousness and dread. 

That process of self-awareness and self-regulation might look like this:

Awareness: I am feeling something (I am feeling exasperated with a team member or I am feeling burned out). 

Identification: I am experiencing an emotion (I am angry or I am discontent). 

Then we separate the person from the emotion: I am experiencing anger, but I am not the anger. 

From there, we’re clear to chart a path toward resolution or action. What is that emotion telling you? How have you responded in the past, and what happened? What do you want the outcome to be? What do you want to do about this situation? At the end of this process, the action becomes almost self-evident.  

EQ is foundational to how we think about coaching at an individual or team level. It’s not extra, nice-to-have, bonus work. It’s key to unlocking a leader's fullest potential. And it takes dedicated time and practice to master. The investment of time and energy ends up saving leaders time and energy when things go awry. It models a culture where emotional safety and health are centered for the full team to see, which makes everyone on board happier and more productive.

Ready to get to work? We’re here with the tools and strategies — and the guidance and safe space — to help you be your best. 

Why You Need Coaching

Coaching is everywhere; you can hire a coach to help you through nearly every life stage and quandary. You can pipe Peloton coaches into earbuds to get you prepped to run a marathon, hire a career coach as you embark on a job search, or work with a health and wellness coach to interrogate your lifestyle and work toward better overall health. Our brand of coaching is focused on developing the emotional intelligence, talent, and capacity of leaders in the social impact space. We are executive leadership coaches, and if you lead a team, chances are you should probably hire us to support your development toward deeply resonant, heart-centered leadership that centers human connection as a key lever to moving critical change work forward.  

The Imperative for Effective Leaders: Know Yourself

For starters, if you’re leading a team right now, you’re likely engaged in today’s brand of non-stop daily grind. Leading teams is hard work, maybe harder than it has ever been before. Movement leaders, in particular, are faced with multi-dimensional challenges every day, both internally and externally. These challenges include managing competing priorities, the 24 hour news cycle, the COVID-19 pandemic, the continual harm of systemic racism, our shifting workplace dynamics, generational misalignment, managing the demands of building healthy internal cultures with the organization’s stated mission, unclear accountability structures, inability to communicate openly and share clear feedback for growth, and the list goes on. 

You likely don’t spend a ton of time stepping outside of yourself to think about who you are and how you show up to lead. It might feel impossible to even consider engaging in that level of self-reflection. But the truth is that exploring your leadership through coaching so often helps you extinguish the fires, both in your mind and across your team, with more ease and efficiency. Coaching exercises your self-awareness muscles. It provides space to explore who you are, to define what matters to you, and to interrogate how and why you act and react. Through coaching, you can step outside of all that is urgent and important to find the space to connect to your own purpose, mission, and driving values. You need a coach because sharpening the clarity with which you see yourself can pave the way for you to lead from a deeply grounded place. 

Your Team is a Work in Progress 

Is your style of leadership helping to accelerate your team’s work, or is it blocking their progress? Are you an enabler or an enforcer? Do you create opportunities to gather that critical  feedback on your leadership? (If not, we’ve got you covered.) 

Your team likely struggles when you are down, and it likely flies high when you are at your best. That’s because most of our work happens in the interpersonal spaces we create. Our collective histories and futures are told through our relationships, and nowhere is this more apparent than in teams working to rewrite our systems’ scripts. Managing the constant demands and continuous change coming our way requires a model for leadership that is grounded in self awareness, emotional intelligence, and deep connectivity. 

Through coaching, you’ll explore the five elements of Emotional Intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social awareness. You’ll explore the roles you play in the relationships that drive your work. You’ll identify the connections that feel strong, and build skills to address ruptures when they happen. Coaching paves the way to better communication grounded in continuous feedback that’s not scary. Coaching helps you understand what your team needs from you, and provides space to explore those needs as you internalize them. You need a coach because building your capacity to embody emotional intelligence, and specifically to use the information you collect about your team’s emotional wellness, can pave the way for you to lead a team that feels anchored and stable. 

Systems That Know How to Learn and Grow

In order for our society to achieve the social changes we seek, and the systemic redesign required, we need deeply resonant leaders. Your team is a living, breathing, ever-changing organism; your team is its own micro-system functioning inside what is likely a web of interdependent systems. Each of the individuals who make up your team’s system has their own growth trajectory and needs different things to thrive. But your team’s system, no matter where it falls on the scales of health and effectiveness, needs leaders who can tend to its members and multiple systems that function in its orbit. 

Our collective systems need us all to prioritize relationships and empathy, to clarify accountabilities, to set high expectations, to motivate and inspire, and to model introspection and the delivery and receipt of feedback. Our systems need to understand how values are operationalized and embedded into the culture. All of these are leadership skills developed over time, one leader at a time, with impacts so far beyond merely one team at one organization. 

Read our clients’ reflections on their 1:1 coaching experiences with us. Reach out to learn more, and to find out how to jump into coaching with us.