It’s a quarterly leadership offsite in July, and your team is halfway through the year. The tension in the room is palpable because of a lack of emotional awareness. You’re reviewing your Company Rocks and Leadership Scorecard, and it’s clear: the team isn’t completing their Rocks, and key metrics are off track to hit your one-year plan.
Frustration and fear are bubbling under the surface—sales is concerned about missing revenue targets, operations feels overburdened, and the owner is worried about whether the Integrator and the leadership team can turn things around.
At The Beacon Partners, we’ve seen this scenario many times. By helping leadership teams improve their emotional intelligence and emotional literacy, we’ve transformed how they communicate and IDS (Identify, Discuss, Solve) their issues. With the right tools, teams can overcome emotional barriers, foster alignment, and get back on track to achieving their goals.
In this article, you’ll learn:
- What emotions are and why they matter in leadership.
- The basics of emotional intelligence and emotional literacy.
- How to use tools like the Mood Meter to manage emotions effectively.
- Practical tools to help your leadership team begin practicing emotional awareness.
Understanding Emotions: Why Emotional Awareness Matters for Leadership
Emotions can quickly take over in high-pressure situations, leading to reactive decisions and strained communication. Before leaders can manage emotions effectively, they must understand what emotions are and how they function.
Emotions are complex physiological responses involving changes in both the brain and body. When something happens—whether it’s a team conflict or an unexpected challenge—your brain evaluates the situation and triggers an emotional response. This response prepares your body for action by increasing your heart rate, altering your breathing, and affecting your thought patterns.
This is why emotions play such an influential role in decision-making and communication. Ignoring them or misunderstanding their influence can lead to unresolved tensions, eroded trust, and poor leadership outcomes. That’s why the next step is to develop the skills to recognize and manage emotions effectively.
Defining Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Literacy
Once you understand emotions, the next step is learning how to manage them—both in yourself and your interactions with others. This is where emotional intelligence and emotional literacy come into play.
- Emotional Intelligence (EI): The ability to recognize, understand, and manage your emotions while empathizing with others. EI involves self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and relationship management.
- Emotional Literacy: The skill of identifying and expressing emotions accurately. Leaders who improve emotional literacy can communicate more effectively, resolve conflicts faster, and foster a more transparent culture.
Why does this matter for leadership teams? High emotional intelligence strengthens collaboration and trust, while emotional literacy helps teams communicate more clearly and productively. Together, these skills create a foundation for healthier team dynamics and better decision-making.
Emotions as Data: A New Perspective for Leaders
Once leaders develop emotional intelligence, they can view emotions as valuable data—signals that provide insight into what’s happening internally or externally. Leadership teams running on EOS are already accustomed to reviewing their Scorecards to monitor key metrics and spot issues. Similarly, emotions act as personal data points, alerting leaders when something needs attention.
Just as you use a Scorecard to track the health of your business, tuning into your emotions helps you stay aligned, make thoughtful decisions, and foster productive communication. By paying attention to this emotional data, you can identify problems early, regulate your responses, and maintain trust within your team.
Using the Mood Meter to Improve Emotional Awareness and Literacy
To use emotions as data effectively, leaders need a reliable tool to identify and understand their emotions. One of the most effective tools for this is the Mood Meter, developed by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. The Mood Meter helps leaders locate their emotions on a spectrum of energy and pleasantness while expanding their emotional vocabulary. Rather than defaulting to broad categories like angry, happy, or sad, leaders gain access to a richer, more nuanced emotional language, which improves emotional literacy—the ability to recognize, name, and articulate emotions accurately.
The Mood Meter operates along two dimensions: Energy Level and Pleasantness. Leaders can assess their emotions by answering two simple questions:
- Is the emotion pleasant or unpleasant?
- Is it high energy or low energy?
Quadrants and Summary Emotions:
- High Energy, High Pleasantness (Yellow): Excited
Reflects high engagement and enthusiasm. Leaders in this state feel motivated and ready to take on challenges. - High Energy, Low Pleasantness (Red): Frustrated
Signals tension or conflict. Leaders in this state may feel stressed or anxious, often due to unmet expectations. - Low Energy, Low Pleasantness (Blue): Disheartened
Linked to fatigue or discouragement. Leaders in this state may benefit from rest or reflection. - Low Energy, High Pleasantness (Green): Satisfied
Reflects calm and contentment. Leaders in this state feel grounded and ready for thoughtful problem-solving.
Using the Mood Meter regularly helps leaders build emotional literacy by broadening their emotional vocabulary and enabling more precise communication. Over time, it fosters better emotional awareness and equips leaders to handle emotionally charged situations with greater clarity and empathy.
Connecting Observations and Emotions
In the last article, we emphasized the importance of differentiating evaluations from observations. Evaluations are subjective judgments, while observations are objective, fact-based statements. This distinction matters because evaluations often lead to defensiveness, while observations promote clear, non-confrontational communication.
Now, let’s take it a step further by linking observations to emotions. Imagine a scenario during a Level 10 meeting where a team member says, “Sales is always making unrealistic promises.” This is an evaluation, likely driven by frustration. Reframing it as an observation might sound like: “In the last two weeks, three sales orders have been delivered two days late.” This shifts the focus to facts, removing blame and judgment.
Once the observation is made, the next step is to identify the emotion triggered by the event. In this case, the emotion might be frustration due to delays affecting operational efficiency. Recognizing and naming the emotion reduces reactivity, enabling teams to address the underlying issue more productively. Leaders can use the Mood Meter to help them put their finger on precisely what they are feeling, making it easier to name and process the emotion.
Practical Guide: How to Begin Practicing Emotional Awareness
Here’s how you can start incorporating emotional awareness into your leadership practice:
- Start same page meetings with emotional check-ins using the Mood Meter:
Ask each team member to share one pleasant emotion and one unpleasant emotion they’ve experienced since the last same page meeting. Use the Mood Meter to help them categorize their emotions based on energy level and pleasantness. This practice fosters emotional literacy and builds a culture of openness. - Reframe evaluations into observations during the IDS portion of Level 10 meetings and use the Mood Meter to label emotions:
During the IDS (Identify, Discuss, Solve) portion of your Level 10 meeting, encourage the team to replace subjective evaluations with fact-based observations. Once the observation is made, use the Mood Meter to help identify and label the emotion triggered by the original observation. This approach helps reduce defensiveness, keeps the discussion productive, and enhances emotional clarity.
- Consider mindfulness exercises to improve emotional awareness:
Use mindfulness techniques—such as deep breathing or body scans—to help your leadership team notice where emotions are manifesting in the body. This practice enhances self-awareness and helps leaders regulate emotions before reacting.
Final Thoughts: Strengthening Leadership by Revealing and Connecting
After reframing an evaluation into a fact-based observation, the next step is to identify the emotion it triggered using tools like the Mood Meter. This process supports two critical goals for leadership teams: fostering ideological conflict—open, honest debate that drives better decisions—and ensuring we are revealing ourselves authentically.
By sharing what’s happening inside us, we build deeper trust and stay connected to our internal experience and team, creating a foundation for stronger collaboration.
Unpleasant emotions often arise from a story we tell ourselves about what’s going to happen in the future. These narratives are frequently rooted in fear or uncertainty, which can influence how we react and engage with others.
In the next article, we’ll explore how to identify and own these internal narratives. We’ll discuss how revealing these stories to the team fosters trust, encourages open dialogue, and ultimately leads to better problem-solving, collaboration, and team health.
