The Secret Stabilizing Force on Your Team
Less recognized but mighty
A sense of stability can create a container under which we can do our best work. Stability comes in all shapes and sizes — money in the bank, a good strategic plan, rock-solid execution, and always delivering on time. One form that’s less recognized is the ability to create emotional stability in a team. It’s a strong foundation other forms of stability can build on.
When done well it can look effortless, like the person isn’t really doing anything. We might even see it as an innate quality of the person rather than a practiced skill. Creating an emotionally stable environment requires effort, a ton in fact. It means setting aside your own concerns. Managing uncomfortable feelings that arise. Being patient. Having empathy for others. Seeing other perspectives. Holding other perspectives that our own as valid. It requires impulse control to regulate your emotions in service of others. There are so many skills in there. So much effort.
Creating emotional stability is a task for everyone in leadership though it tends to localize in a few people. Primed to be of service, these folks tend to be team-focused rather than self-focused. They’re the ones we vent to about our day. The ones who validate our feelings. The ones who listen again…and again. The ones we share our fears and vulnerabilities with. The ones we ask for advice on tricky human problems.
They help us process the emotional minefield that is dealing with others at work. They help us make sense of our human experience. They help feel less alone. They help us feel like we belong. They help keep our culture human-centered.*
There are people like this in every company. They stabilize our work environment and make us want to come to work. We feel like a human when we interact with them. They bring tremendous stability to our teams. People doing this work exist at every layer of the org, even the highest leadership levels. In fact, this describes one of my leadership archetypes — what I call the Glue archetype. Bringing a sense of belonging is hugely valuable to the company. Of all the six archetypes in my model, they are often less seen as leaders than other types. In large part, it’s because the work to bring emotional stability to the team is invisible.
We need to make this work more visible. As a team, we need to recognize the value of emotional stability and those who excel at it. If you work with someone like this, recognize that it as effort that has a cost and set of skills. Don’t feel bad about this. Do try to give back when they need the support too (and they will).
To those emotionally stabilizing work environments day after day, I see you. Thank you for your emotional work. It has enormous value. Just a wee reminder: have rock-solid boundaries, sources of support, and realistic expectations of what others can give. Not everyone is willing or able to give back this kind of emotional support. It’s imperative to recognize this so you can decide who and how much to give to others.
*The most prominent word in that paragraph is help. Repetition is often seen as a sign of poor writing unless, of course, you’re Gertrude Stein who famously wrote "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." Though she had this to say on the topic, "I am inclined to believe that there is no such thing as repetition," she said. "The inevitable seeming repetition in human expression is not repetition, but insistence." In my case, I left numerous uses of the word to make a point, for “insistence.”
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