Leading with Emotional Unpredictability

My first real job out of college was for a housing magazine. I had started at another entity owned by the same company and within three months somehow got promoted to Circulation Director of their magazine. I remember having absolutely no idea what a Circulation Director even was when they offered it to me.

All of my previous jobs prior to that had been part time retail, so I had never really experienced what it was like to work for a corporate type of entity in a high rise with deadlines and executives. It was pretty exciting. It was my first entry into the corporate real estate world. We had a really fun group of people working there, and I still have friends from there to this day.

Isolate each interaction

What I didn’t know before I accepted the job was that the Publisher of the magazine was a tyrant. A female one at that. I had been warned about her mood swings, but what I remember most was that everyone was always trying to gauge her current mood. If they had lost a sale or an advertiser pulled out was the dreaded news that had to delivered at some point. I vividly remember someone saying they had just seen her fly down the hall on her broom. Ouch.

But on the other hand, she could be really, really fun and funny. She knew how to party and made sure we all did too. But that’s not what comes to mind when I think of her. I remember her biting people’s heads off in staff meetings. Her reactions would swing wildly based upon what had happened to her in the last few minutes. She would carry forward every interaction into the next one. We didn’t have the term emotional intelligence back then, but I knew she was lacking something.

Know when to compartmentalize

I thought for a brief moment that maybe women had to be that way to get the respect they deserved. But as I moved on into working for real estate firms and relocation companies, I realized that it doesn’t ever have to be that way. Mercurial personalities have no place in leadership.

When we choose not to engage with a leader or a colleague or to have an important conversation until we know they are in a good place, we invariably allow them to control our behavior. We can’t walk on eggshells while trying to determine if their current emotions will influence how they react to the next interaction. It is an unhealthy way to work and can stymy creativity and diminish morale.

Leaders have to know when to compartmentalize disappointment or anger. A strong leader wipes the slate of emotion with each new interaction. The goal is to have an even demeanor with an open mind, so no one fears the reaction, no matter how dire the news. If you work for someone like this, it’s time to move on. As they say, shit happens. They need to get over it and leave the emotional unpredictability at home.

“Emotionally intelligent leaders know when to display emotion and when to delay emotion.” ~Steve Gutzler, speaker, author and executive coach