While many factors impact mission or financial results, the widespread impact of leaders—particularly their mood and emotional intelligence—may surprise us. According to years of research cited by this HBR article, "the importance of the leader’s mood and its attendant behaviors are most surprising. […These] drive the moods and behaviors of everyone else. The final link in the chain is performance: profit or loss [or mission result]."
I think all of us have either been in a rotten mood at some point in our life or have been around someone else's rotten mood. If you are anything like me, when I walk into a room and someone is in a terrible mood I can feel it, especially if I know this person and more so if it's my boss where I feel stress to please. People are wired to be social animals with mirror neurons literally dedicated to the job of tapping into other people's emotional experience. And given the typical bell curve we often see in nature, I would suspect our abilities to pick up on this "water" around us may be quite varied. But even if we are unaware of these influences on the psyche, our unconscious mind may still be impacted and theory holds that many of our decisions may come from this far off place.
So the idea here translates to a leader's mood becoming a contagion that permeates across an organization. For instance, a CEO's neuroticism and often toxic behavior stresses out his or her VPs. Then the VPs impact their departments, and so on. What's interesting though is that toxic or fear-based leadership can make employees more productive in the short term. However, according to the previously cited HBR article that productivity bump does not last in the long term. In the long term, the emotionally intelligent men or women finish first when their mood crafts an inspirational culture gaining acolytes to overcome any challenge.
Take this out of context from a company and into a bigger institution and role like the presidency of the United States and I'll leave you to connect the dots of the potential impact.
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