Note: this blog is from 2021. No AI was used in its making and all opinions, mistakes, misspellings are my own.
Some folks might argue that your employee’s emotional health is beyond the scope of a manager, that this borders into therapy. I would argue that part of being a manager in the 21st Century dabbles frequently into therapy territory. This is even more important as we go through a pandemic and not only are folks more on edge, they also are more transparent about what they are going through emotionally.
A practice that can help managers or coworkers navigate this sometimes complex endeavor is to baseline their colleague’s emotional health. In the engineering world, baselining usually refers to known good configuration or a minimum necessary performance standard. It’s not all that hard to do with ecosystems or platforms if you can measure and/or save correctly. This is a huge part of the development world where there is always a “safe” place to return after making critical changes — a rollback of code. Also when performance dips below a baselined threshold, someone is usually brought in to figure out why.
The principle of baselining emotional health for people is not all that different than with technical ecosystems though it can be challenging because people are analog whereas systems are digital. You want to try to find a “known good configuration” for emotional health for your coworkers, and pay attention to any diversions. That known good configuration will differ from person to person.
Why? The main reason is that you care about your fellow coworkers which should go without discussion. If you don’t care, no need to read further — in fact you probably haven’t gotten this far. People are not robots or systems — emotional health directly impacts performance. Deviations from the baseline can help you construe:
- stress level
- retention risks
- engagement
- burnout potential
- looming performance issues
- willingness to receive and give feedback
- receptiveness to critical asks
- How? It’s pretty simple. Just ask a question at the beginning of all one-on-ones or meetups and then employ your EQ (emotional intelligence) to decipher the clues. Make that question consistent throughout the entire employee or relationship lifecycle. And always start your interactions with that question, don’t dive right away into business.
After you ask your question, you listen. And are engaged. And ask questions based on their statements. But what they say is not necessarily as important as how they say it. Clue in on tone — voice tone is so important, that is where you will gather most of your information. Also body movements, facial movements, and the eyes, as the poet knows, reveal all. Eyes reveal stress. Eyes reveal anger, frustration, happiness, and engagement.
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My baselining question is easy and fairly well known from those that have worked with me — I start all individual meetups with “How are you doing?” Having a repeatable ritual at the beginning of meetings also provides a sense of comfort and allows people to open up more — they know what is coming. And with all things involving human behavior, interpreting the results can be a challenge. Practice makes perfect, the more you ask the question the better you will get.
What situations or relationships can you practice this?
- Your employees under you — this is the most critical group as you have a degree of responsibility for their emotional health. Pay acute attention, there will often be clues about the current emotional state of the entire team dropped here. If you feel there is elevated stress or any emotion, go down that route and ask more questions gently. Try to get to the heart of the matter, hopefully in some way you can help move some of the roadblocks out of the way.
- In the first phone/video interview — the baselining starts right away. In traditional phone screens, you can’t see them so you can’t pick up on body language but you can hear them, so can baseline tone in stressful situations. With video meetings, you miss a wealth of context clues since you can’t see full body language, but you can still pick up on tone and facial clues. This is a most critical baseline for later on in the relationship because you are seeing them in a stressful situation.
- Managing Up — Your ability to influence upper-level management in many cases depends on their receptiveness to your suggestions. I would love to say most asks (budget or people) are based purely on numbers but many times decisions are made based on mood and not metrics. If you have a request, use your baseline question to determine their mood. If they are in a receptive mood, proceed with the ask. If you detect stress or emotional barriers, save the ask for another day.
- Peer relationships — A little like managing up, but the exchange of information between peers starts with trust. Talking about things other than work can create a nice foundation for collaboration. Asking your baseline question gets peers talking and you never know what information can be gleaned. People love to talk about themselves.
- Other relationships — try it on your significant other, friends, or any other human relationship. You might be amazed at what doors it opens.
I will admit that I stole some of these practices from a therapist. Maybe the next edition will go over other key business lessons learned from a therapist.
