Commonsense Leadership

Chapter 12Teach Your Team to Play on the Emotional Edge

We need to play on the emotional edge all day, every day. Leaders don't tell people to relax. Relaxing is the quickest way to shut down your operating system. Instead, true leaders teach people how to recover their edge after facing adversity.

Coaches often talk about playing with emotion and the importance of the mental edge. What do these expressions mean? Can a performer be too emotional? Given a high level of talent, emotion probably does separate the winners from the survivors. Like coaches, leaders need to concentrate every day on developing winners. Emotion can raise talent to an even higher level, not only for individuals but also for teams—sports teams, corporate teams, and family teams.

Uncontrolled emotion, however, can be devastating to performance. Too many times we see the downside of emotion rather than the upside, which is why it's much more common to encourage people to calm down instead of harnessing their emotional energy.

My philosophy is that, for the most part, if you want to win, you never relax during performance. The exception to this is in sport, where taking a calculated mental lapse can help athletes regain their focus. Whether it involves sales, sports, business, or family, act with emotion and perform at as high an emotional level as you can control.

In crisis and conflict, uncontrolled emotions are a serious liability, while controlled emotions can provide a tremendous asset to finding solutions. ...