Emotional impact of a leader is almost never discussed in the workplace, even less on literature on leadership. Yet we all know the rewarding experience of working for an authentic, optimistic, inspirational leader, and the drowning feeling of working with an insensitive, ruthless, and discourteous person.

In a major research that identified the key elements impacting an organization’s bottomline performance, the surprise entry was a leader’s mood and attendant actions as the driver of workplace behaviours. While a temperamental coercive boss creates a toxic organization with a dysfunctional environment and indifferent underachievers who ignore opportunities, an inspirational and inclusive organizational head cultivates positive employees and spawns high achievers ready to surmount challenges and scale new heights. New findings reveal that a leader’s emotional style and spirit spread inexorably throughout the business by a neurological process called mood contagion. This is analogous to the saying ‘Smile and the world smiles with you’. At the same time, one must understand, emotional leadership is less about maintaining upbeat spirit even on bad days or through stressful situations, more about understanding one’s impact on the workforce and adjusting one’s style suitably. And this calls forth the essential process of self-analysis, even before exercising one’s leadership responsibilities.

Yet, the business world is replete with examples of coercive CEOs who seem to have reaped phenomenal results. In many of these cases, though the CEOs were the more renowned or visible faces of the organization, it was actually led by highly capable division heads. Some might have had other strengths counterbalancing their caustic behavior. Bill Gates for instance was one such leader who, they say, got away with a harsh style. But if we agree to specific leadership styles for specific situations, Gates’ achievement-driven leadership that openly challenged employees to surpass past performance was not inappropriate for a high- performing blue-chip organization that cherry-picked employees. Such leadership ethos worked and continues to do so for organizations, as it did for Microsoft, boasting of people with high competence, high motivation levels, and high rewards.

What is alarming is that a large number of leaders do not really know ‘if they have resonance with their organizations’. A symptom of the ‘CEO disease’, as it is referred to, is its sufferer’s near-total ignorance of the implications of his actions and demeanour. Neither are people prepared to discuss the same with such leaders, nor do they realize it themselves. As aptly put by a renowned CEO, “I so often feel I’m not getting the truth. I can never put my finger on it, because no one is actually lying to me. But I can sense that people are hiding nformation or camouflaging key facts. They aren’t lying, but neither are they telling me everything I need to know. I’m always second-guessing.”

Self-discovery and personal reinvention could be central to improving the emotional intelligence capabilities linked to effective leadership. An emotionally intelligent leader can monitor his mood through self-awareness, improve upon them through self-management, gauge their impact through empathy, and act in ways that boost others’ moods through relationship management. The following five-part process rewires the brain toward more emotionally intelligent behaviours:

• Imaginingone’s ideal self – with low levels of self-awareness, not many can reallypoint at one’s struggles at both at work and home. Leaders too can learn to imagine what the missing emotional elements of life were, and what life would be if all were going right
• Understanding and coming to terms with one’s real self as others experience it – thisstage involves discovering one’s leadership style, virtues and vices, as others  With few employees daring to tell the boss what he’s really like, the latter must seek the truth which in any case will be somewhat diluted when it reaches him
• Creating a tactical plan to bridge the gap – while learning of weaknesses can bedispiriting even for a leader, understanding and revisiting strengths can help in the transformation process. Just as a leader would plan his organization’s strategy, so would he craft a plan with manageable steps for overcoming ingrained negative habits
• Embracing change and working on it – this is often the most difficult part when aleader learns to control emotions and act with honesty in disarming conflicts and deep-seated negative tendencies along with their manifestations
• Identifying change enforcers to keep the process alive – this is the final stage in the Paradoxically perhaps, this self-directed reinvention process actually requires one to draw and build on the feedback, assessment, and affirmation of others. A close and trusted group of colleagues, friends, and family could serve as highly effective change enforcers

While it would be injudicious to suggest that mood is all that matters and that managing moods of oneself or that of the team is a component of leadership responsibility, yet moods, decisions, and actions together must resonate with the organization and its way of life. No denying, a leader’s life is hard with unique and diverse challenges, but a wide array of psychological to organizational research reveals that emotional leadership ignites and sustains the spark of organizational performance and work ethos.

Smiles from the powers that be can actually galvanize employees to go the extra mile!