The best leaders don't bring everybody home with them

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There is a workload in leadership that does not appear on any organisational chart.

Emotional load.

Someone is struggling, another person is angry, two members of the team have stopped talking, a valued employee is thinking about leaving, people are anxious about change, somebody wants certainty when there simply isn't any available.

And all of that arrives at the leader's door.

Good leaders try to protect their team from the high emotional baggage they see affecting them. Either coming from above or from within. Good leaders care, but the danger comes when caring gradually becomes carrying. And it makes sense that the leaders that care the most, struggle the most.

I see leaders all the time who finish the day physically away from work, but still emotionally surrounded by the people they have spent the day supporting.

They replay conversations, they worry about somebody's wellbeing, they wonder whether they handled the conflict correctly, they anticipate tomorrow's difficult conversation.

Eventually the team becomes a twenty-four-hour emotional occupation.

This is why Relational Intelligence is one of the five Level Up edges.

It is our ability to understand what happens between people. I always say “look at the dance, not the dancers”, just for a minute.

Safety. Trust. Belonging. Mattering. Conflict. Power. Emotional atmosphere (or what I call the soundtrack of your team).

And importantly, it is the ability to stay connected to people without absorbing everything they are experiencing.

There is good research behind why this matters.

A major meta-analysis by Frazier and colleagues found psychological safety predicts engagement, information sharing and performance, with leader behaviour identified as one of the important antecedents.

That tells us something important about the influence a leader has on the capacity of everybody around them.

Relationally intelligent leaders learn to spot what is happening beneath the words.

They make difficult conversations safer, they allow healthy disagreement, and they recognise when someone needs support and when somebody needs accountability.

They create the conditions in which people can say, "I'm struggling", "I disagree", or "I think we're getting this wrong", without fearing what happens next.

They allow emotional frustration and distress to be aired, where everyone gets heard, then work with the team to define what can be done and what is out of their control, then develop a plan to tackle it together. This is known as ‘containment’ in psych terms.

And they have to develop boundaries around the emotional load they carry themselves. This is of primary importance.

We have spent years talking about leaders getting more out of their people. Perhaps the more useful question now is:

What does the leader create around their people that allows everyone to perform closer to their best?

That is Relational Intelligence. And it is every bit as important to readiness as technical capability.

If the relational health of your leadership team is becoming a performance issue, let's have a conversation about Level Up.