Emotional health: or how to increase performance through emotional flexibility

Even the Dalai Lama says it: “Today, 2020, the world seems to be facing an emotional crisis. Stress, anxiety and depression are at higher levels than ever before. ”

And when we know that the most contagious thing on earth is neither Ebola nor COVID-19, but emotions – and that most of us have already been infected, and especially in the workplace – there are reasons to raise the alarm at the scale of this emotional pandemic that affects us all.

But let’s start from the beginning, what is emotional health?

There is no officially accepted definition of emotional health. The term is often used, rightly or wrongly, as a synonym for mental health or emotional wellbeing.

Emotional health refers to a set of skills and beliefs that underpin our emotions, thoughts, and behaviour. Family Links: The England-based Centre for Emotional Health proposed in 2017 a definition and framework for emotional health in the workplace. This framework is made up of 7 competencies or assets. These can be grouped according to whether they relate to internal or external functioning, and whether they represent implicit beliefs, conscious knowledge and awareness, or behavioural competencies relating to social and emotional management. Each element is as important as the others, and what matters the most is their interconnection.

1. Self awareness
2. Social awareness
3. Self-beliefs
4. Self agency
5. Beliefs about others
6. Self regulation
7. Relationship skills

And how is that different from emotional intelligence?

Unlike emotional intelligence, which is viewed as a set of characteristics unique to everyone, emotional health is determined by the interaction between the individual AND his/her social environment. An individual’s environmental context will not only shape and develop their social and emotional skills but may also activate or deactivate their existing assets as required.

Nonetheless, it is true that there are some real similarities between emotional intelligence and emotional health. In 1995, the American psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman democratized the famous concept of emotional intelligence, and developed the famous emotional quotient (EQ), in his bestseller “Emotional Intelligence“. He described in his book the 5 areas identified in the design of emotional intelligence which are:

• Self-regulation,
• Social awareness/empathy
• Social skills,
• Self-awareness,
• Self-motivation.

We see that these 5 elements are well included in the drawing above. Let me reinforce what is important when we talk about emotional health/wellbeing:

1. To include all the skills and beliefs that shape our emotions, thoughts, and behavior
2. To interconnect our skills and beliefs together as well as with our external and social environment
3. To make sure that all emotions are considered, especially those hard ones we may be feeling
4. To avoid emotional contagion.

We have already covered the first two points, so let’s move on to taking into account difficult emotions, as well as this emotional capacity to cope with fears and anxiety in a new unstable and often anxiety-provoking world.

From emotional agility to emotional flexibility

Over the past 2 decades, skills related to emotional agility have enriched leadership development programs, which already included elements of good physical and mental health. The work of Dr. Susan David, renowned psychologist, and author of the book “Emotional Agility” has greatly contributed to this.
Emotional agility is that ability that we all have, some more than others, to navigate the many challenges that life throws at us, without judgment, with acceptance, and an open mind. This process is not about ignoring difficult emotions or thoughts but living them and facing them with courage and compassion for ourself. If you’re interested in this topic, you can read our blog Emotional Agility: or How to Develop Our 6th Sense.

In 2019, the concept of emotional flexibility was added by Dr. Jacqui Brassey, Assistant Professor at IE University (Spain) and member of the Center of Learning Innovation. We now see the need for an additional element of fitness for individuals and teams in organizations: what Dr. Brassey calls emotional fitness. This concept refers to training our emotional capacity to cope with fears and anxiety in a new, increasingly unstable world. This training is even more important as we can see the emergence in business of a huge stigma around the subject of insecurity, fear, lack of self-confidence and anxiety. And of course, it got even stronger with the arrival of COVID-19.

There are several methods or models to encourage teams and employees to develop their emotional flexibility and to regulate their emotions. Here’s one, taken from the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). This cognitive behavioural therapy, developed in the late 90s by Steven Hayes, was originally used in a clinical setting to treat mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, burnout. Dr. Brassey and others in the field have recently applied this therapy in the professional world and the results are overwhelmingly positive, with tangible improvements in emotional fitness within teams.

The ACT model consists of 6 elements:

• Purpose and values
• Mindfulness
• Acceptance
• Defusing
• Self-in context
• Committed Action

It is possible to measure these 6 elements, using an online questionnaire developed by Dr. Brassey and her team. I did the test myself to give you an idea, and you can see my results in the picture on the right, the green lines showing my score. As we can see, the areas for improvement are Values as well as Committed Action. And my strengths are Acceptance, closely followed by Present moment awareness. Thanks to these results, and with the help of a corporate health consultant, employees can then decide which practical tools they want to use to help them focus on the elements they want to improve. Without going into details, and depending on the results, they could focus on a tool such as an ikigai to clarify and reinforce their Values, as well as create a board of personal advisers or mentors to help them move forward with Committed Action. To improve each element, there are several practical and easy to use tools to implement.

This method can be used for a specific team, or as part of a Health Oriented Leadership Program, simply contact me for more info on the subject as I do deliver such programs.

Why improve the emotional flexibility of your teams and managers?

Improving the emotional agility of employees within organizations brings the following positive results:

Advantages for employers	Advantages for employees
Better employee performance	Higher self-esteem and confidence
Better communication	Better resilience and mental well-being
Stronger team cohesion	Better social skills
Greater employee loyalty due to a greater sense of belonging	Prevention of mental health issues including anxiety

In a world where one in four employees suffers from mental health problems, where the sense of belonging and team cohesion are losing steam, where loneliness and physical distance have become the norm, and where fear and anxiety are at alarming levels, giving employees the best tools to increase their emotional agility makes perfect sense. And, although this is not the most avowed goal, the increase in performance cannot be achieved in the long term without regulating the emotions of the teams.

How to regulate the emotions of the teams for a better performance?

What will have the most impact on the performance of your teams is to roll out initiatives or programs that touch on all the above aspects of emotional health.

Here are 4 strategies you can leverage to improve the emotional wellbeing of your employees and managers:

• Develop a perception of psychological safety

What is called psychological safety is the condition that allows everyone to feel included, safe to learn, safe to contribute, and safe to challenge the status quo and this without the fear of being judged, marginalized or punished one way or another. This definition, straight out of Dr. Timothy Clark’s book – The Four Stages of Psychological Safety: The Path to Inclusion and Innovation released in 2019, echoes the notion of trust. If an employee does not trust his/her manager, he/she will not feel free to speak up and might suffer from psychological unsafety.

We must therefore start with management, equip all levels of management so that they can offer this psychological safety and allow employees to break out of the silence in which they have sometimes walled themselves in to protect themselves. It all starts by encouraging managers to practice tolerance and inclusion, to be open to dialogue and feedback, to accept contradiction, to show their own vulnerability by sharing their mistakes, to be available and make time for their team, and to improve their listening skills to show more empathy and less judgment.

It takes time to create a work environment where everyone feels included, listened to and not judged, where employees feel welcomed asking for help, where challenging questionable practices is valued and not stigmatizing, and where being different is respected. But it’s worth the effort when we know the impact of such a safe work environment on the wellbeing and therefore the productivity and performance of employees.

• Foster a work environment based on compassion

Compassion is associated with “a feeling of concern for the suffering of others and a desire to improve that individual’s wellbeing.” It can happen without sharing the emotion of those observed.

If there is one emotion that we all need to develop, practice, and disseminate, it is compassion, for ourselves and for others. We heard a lot about this emotion during and post COVID lockdown and most therapists interviewed emphasized on its importance. Yet it hardly exists on the “official” lists of emotions. When I was preparing the content for a webinar for a client at the start of lockdown, I spent quite a bit of time looking for the ‘compassion emodji’, with no luck as it does not exist. One might be created soon.

Compassion strengthens positive emotions, creates positive working relationships, and increases cooperation and collaboration, according to research done at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. There are even compassionate training programs such as the one offered by the Center for Compassion, Altruism, and Educational Research (CCARE) at Stanford University in the United States. These programs have shown that cultivating compassion increases happiness and wellbeing and reduces stress.

And what’s even more interesting is that compassion and productivity are not mutually exclusive. Individuals, team, and organizational success depends on a compassionate work environment.

So, let’s develop an environment that encourages and promotes compassion for others. Indeed when everyone truly cares about each other, it’s easier to feel safer, more creative, and more engaged.

• Value and encourage employees

According to an article in the Harvard Business Review, instead of rewarding employees “doing a good job” with a carrot and stick approach, employees would be much more motivated by “feeling good about their job.” Ensuring that employees feel valued within an organization is therefore essential because it improves their wellbeing and team performance while reducing turnover, absenteeism and presenteeism.

To do this, a simple tool to use is giving and receiving positive feedback, where everyone is encouraged to share their appreciation and feelings.

Communicating a very clear business strategy as well as the team strategy is also important as we need meaning in what we do. The more employees have a clear understanding of the goals (theirs, those of the team and the business), how they can contribute to them and how their team supports them, the more valued and emotionally stable they will feel.

• Regulate emotional contagion

Emotional contagion describes the phenomenon of a person automatically and unconsciously adopting the emotional state of another person or a group of people. Unlike compassion we just talked about, this emotional sharing does not require knowing the reason of the other’s emotion. An example of emotional contagion: the baby, who, long before he develops a sense of himself or of others, begins to cry when he hears another baby cry.

In the workplace, emotional contagion can be both beneficial and harmful to productivity and performance. As French professor of social psychology and researcher Christophe Haag says in his 2019 book called ‘Emotional contagion’, emotional contagion undoubtedly has its advantages. The fact that it is innate, automatic and above all that it has persisted through the ages indicates that it is an extremely useful phenomenon for the survival of our species. If your anger or enthusiasm was not contagious, you would be less likely to be helped. And this contagion is also useful for the unity of the group, it increases the emotional communion and the feeling of belonging, the members of the same group feel the same emotion, at the same time. Football fans who attend every game of their favourite team will surely understand this phenomenon.

But too much contagion is harmful, both for ourselves and for others, and even more so in the workplace. If we take the example of a company undergoing restructuring, there is nothing worse than the contagion of fear and insecurity to deteriorate the working environment.

There are leadership training courses to teach managers as well as team members how to regulate their permeability to the emotions of others. The role of a manager is key to defuse surges in so-called negative emotions such as fear, anger, distress. I remember a Top Manager who did not filter his emotions, both positive and negative. We knew how the day was going to go the moment he walked into the office, we were going to be ‘tainted’ either by his anger if his favourite football team lost the night before, or by his enthusiasm if a client had signed a big contract.

As previously mentioned, in a world where one in four employees suffers from mental health problems, where the sense of belonging and the cohesion of teams are losing steam, where loneliness and physical distance have become the norm, and where fear and anxiety are at alarming levels, offering employees the best tools to increase their emotional flexibility makes perfect sense.

Emotional agility is one of the most important skills to cultivate in the workplace, and organizations that continue to ignore this aspect in their corporate health program will most likely see their performance suffer in the long run.