Five ways to help leaders who struggle to connect with their teams

The COVID-19 crisis has presented leaders with unprecedented challenges in understanding and responding to the emotional stresses impacting their people. Emotional intelligence (EQ) was an important leadership quality before the crisis; it’s essential now. Leaders need to be able to mobilize, focus, and sustain the energy of teams that have dealt with enormous personal and professional pressures over the past 18 months.

But with many people still working remotely as return-to-the-office dates get pushed back, the challenge is growing. Communicating with team members via screens makes it hard for managers to get a true sense of how their workers are feeling. Employees that feel alienated or misunderstood by their bosses are more likely to leave. And many are doing so as the economy rebounds from the pandemic recession. Some four million people quit their jobs in the US in July, according to the latest job openings and labor turnover survey. More than ever, executive coaches need to help their clients do a better job of authentically connecting with and reassuring their teams and others.

In my experience, it’s challenging to help leaders who are low on EQ learn not to alienate their teams. So I asked some of the great coaches I know about how they approach working with leaders with this issue. There was 100% agreement that this is a hard, sometimes insoluble problem. That’s the bad news. The good news is that they offered some solid, actionable advice. Here’s five strategies for coaching leaders to connect with their people.

1. Focus first on raising awareness and motivating the leader to change

The need to do this reminded me of the old joke: How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? The answer is just one, but the lightbulb has to want to change. Does the leader understand that their inability to connect undermines their capacity to mobilize, focus and sustain the energy of their people? As one coach put it, “Does he or she know that he is failing? And if so, what is the impact?” If not, you need to work to strengthen that motivation. As another coach said, “work with the executive to clarify the impact they want to have and how that connects to their goals/objectives. Once it is (painfully) obvious they’re having a negative impact and how this adversely affects business operations, they’re more likely to be motivated –at a gut level – to do something different.”

2. Leverage assessment tools to reinforce the case for change

One coach crystallized the value of using the right tools, saying, “Validate the derailer/behavior with a psychometric assessment plus 360 feedback that concretely describes the behavior and the negative consequences it has. Make it undeniable.” There are many such tools available, but the key is to be sure the results shine a spotlight on the key behavioral issues and, critically, are viewed as credible by the leader. If you’re not certified in such instruments, then, as one expert suggested, tag team with a trained psychologist/assessor who can help administer and debrief the assessment and determine “coachability”.

3. Help to ‘program’ the right behaviors

Even when leaders don’t have the natural ability to connect, they can learn to do a good simulation of it. Having learned to do this, they may be able to embrace the behaviors more deeply. One coach described a success story in doing this:

“I worked with a CFO who was highly introverted and abrasive. He routinely alienated people because he never even thought to pay attention to who people were personally. He wasn’t ill-intentioned, he was just so internally focused that he didn’t ask others the basic things that many of us need to be asked to feel connected. He had to learn how to use specific tools whenever he met people, as well as triggers to help him remember to use the tools. The ones that helped him most were to (1) commit to start meetings with a personal check-in, to (2) intentionally ask people how they were doing in 1:1s and when meeting informally, and to (3) remember to smile because he could be intimidating.“