Can't Afford

“I can’t afford to feel low”, said the COO of a big company following a stormy event at the company. Some of the employees rebelled against the COO and went on a major strike, accusing and abusing him for the recent project failure and demanding his resignation. The conflict was eventually settled and strike was called off with a peaceful mediation by the BOM without removing COO from the company. However, the resentment inside some of those employees still remained. It was then after a few days, when I asked how he was doing, he said he can’t afford to feel low and said amusingly that he will sulk after a month, not now.

He has been working with the company for more than 10 years. He is one of the most positive, jovial and compassionate leaders I have come across. He trusts his employees and has faith in their commitment towards the company. He inspires and supports his team members to go beyond their task requirements and rewards them for creativity. He is visionary and risk taking. He has an open door office, where anyone can walk in and speak freely to him. He works as mentor to his company employees rather than an autocratic leader. Therefore, seeing some of those people turning against him in such big way was very disheartening.

I recall once my supervisor while training us counseling said, “it is okay to cry with your client in the session”. In a therapy session, normally the therapist is expected to be the stronger person in terms of handling distress and be more ‘emotionally balanced’. When my supervisor said so, it was a tinker in my mind. ‘It is okay to cry along with your client’ meant that it is okay to express those intense feelings. That “okay’ in fact assured that by being emotionally expressive, I am not going to lose my status of therapist. I can be as much competent and effective in helping my client. It would just mean that I am sensitive, empathic and more importantly a ‘human’, which will in fact enhance the effectiveness of the process.

Transformational leadership is similar to therapy in some sense. The leader inspires, motivates, supports, and encourages his followers for personal as well as organizational growth, just like a therapist who would facilitate such growth process of his/her clients in therapy. One certainly needs to be sensitive, humanistic and expressive to effectively transform the follower or the client to a higher level of moral and motivation.

But what if the client gets angry with you? Or a bunch of your subordinates turn hostile? At a responsible position, towards the company, employees and yourself, one really can’t afford to feel anything below normal. Tough mindedness would be the need of the hour. But how? In such situation, one would experience plethora of emotions: anger, depression, betrayal, hurt, shock, nervousness, fear, loneliness, and what not? How would such compassionate person be callous? How should he/she stop feeling? Can he/she? Would it help?  How to move from one end of an emotional continuum to another end?