“Handling Toxic Emotions:”
New Challenges for Leaders and Their Organisation
Human interaction is never flawless. Even the best relationships produce tension and at
times, unpleasant emotions. Since organizations are comprised of people, all organizations
generate emotional pain as part of the process of doing business: producing new products
on tight deadlines, setting benchmarks for performance, creating budgets, crafting
company policies etc.
When emotional pain goes unmanaged or is poorly handled, it can negatively affect
employees’’ trust, engagement, morale and ultimately this will impact the organisational
performance (profitability, productivity and so on). In essence the organisation has been
infected with Toxic Emotion.
Sources of Toxicity Organisation
The seven deadly “In’s”, these are
1) Intention
2) Incompetence
3) Infidelity
4) Insensitivity
5) Intrusion
6) Institutional Forces
7) Inevitability
A quick summary of each point
Intention
– These are Actions are aim to humiliate others, degrading and abusive behaviours
Incompetence – Managers with Weak or Inadequate People Skills
– Managers moved up the rank based on their technical skill such as Finance, IT and marketing. Where you
have manager who has no idea how to manage people, they just give you task to do, never try to explain
the context of the task in which the task is framed, either gives feedback or guidance. Staff feel out of
control wondering whether he/she is doing it right or not. These situation create unnecessary stress and
angst.
– Add some points (try to avoid difficult personal situations)
– Managers micromanage their staff “control freak” – inability to draw the boundary between mentoring and
micro management. Unnecessarily strict process regime, the old saying that there are different ways to
skin a cat. These manager insist of doing it one way.
Infidelity – the Act of Betrayal
– Employees feel betrayed where promise of promotions or salary raises were not met.
– Where the boss took ideas of subordinate and presented as their own.
Just a quick show of hand the number of you has committed an act of infidelity say in the
last 6 months. (who are working full time of course)
Elaborate results.
Insensitivity – people who are emotionally unintelligent (possesses low EQ).
– Managers possesses the inability to read people emotion
– Managers who believes that you should “check your emotion” at the door.
Some manager believes that the work place is a jungle, expressing emotion can be seen as
soft.
Intrusion – Situation where an unhealthy balance is created between followers’ work and
