What’s important to you about that - and your workplace relationships?

As people, we all have unique values and points of view. We often feel more intense emotions when something happens that in some way affects one of those values, or things we care about.

This can lead to heightened happiness, sadness, anger, or any other emotion - and this in turn can make us do things that are different to our usual behaviours. 

For example, you might feel a rush of excitement or pride and give someone a high 5, you could feel overwhelming sadness and then have a teary hug with a friend, or perhaps you felt a sudden need to shout or interrupt someone due to frustration or anger.

These behaviours might be out of the norm for you, and that can sometimes take others by surprise - which can lead to all sorts of reactive behaviour that is out of the norm for those around you! And it can happen in your workplace relationships. It’s like a ripple effect, one person with a heightened emotional level can lead to many other people feeling similar - but not always the same emotion and rarely with the same behavioural response.

When we start to notice and really pay attention to these times of increased emotion and the resulting behaviours - especially in workplaces - we can start to learn a lot about ourselves and others. This in turn helps us to support each other and work together much more effectively.

Through working with my coach, I realised that recognition is something I care hugely about - and it sparks lots of different emotions and behavioural responses from me.

Posts and messages of thanks and praise: you’ll often see me publish posts and articles where I thank others for their contributions. If we are more connected, you’ll possibly have received a text or voice note of thanks from me. This comes from an intense feeling of gratitude and a need to make that person know that I appreciate them.

Lashing out or retreating: When someone has done a great thing and they aren’t thanked or shown any kind of appreciation, I can often lash out verbally, or I can become very quiet and say nothing at all. This is a response to a heightened sense of frustration and feelings of injustice.

These two behaviours are both related to the core value of recognition that lives within me. Most of the time, it’s there and serves the way I operate on a daily basis, but it’s in these times of heightened emotion that that value makes me do things out of the ordinary.

But I’m not the only person in the world who cares about recognition. And this is where it gets interesting. Other people will have completely different ways of behaving, even though they may be feeling similar emotions around gratitude or injustice as I did. And the person who is on the receiving end of my appreciation or lashing out may view that completely differently to how I meant it.

Some people might view me as a person who ‘sucks up’ to others. Always thanking people, always being ‘humble’. They might say ‘it’s all a show’ or ‘she’s so fake’.

Those receiving my messages or being tagged in my posts might think that I want something from them, or that I’m trying to embarrass them.

These are the bits that are so often left unspoken. And that’s when we can run into trouble. If I keep thanking you and you keep thinking I’m being fake, we’re not going to have a great relationship. And when an interaction like this involves more than 2 people, like a team in a workplace, we can start to see unhelpful patterns emerging all over the place, with the same behaviours triggering the same emotional reactions in people - and no one really talking about what’s going on or why.

Imagine me, as a team leader of 5 people. Every time we achieve something great, I get us all together for a celebratory chat, where we thank and appreciate each other. Afterwards, the team all talk to each other about how fake I am and how I just don’t care about their hard work and effort. And the pattern repeats. I don’t get the deep relationships I need with my team, they don’t feel they are being supported properly, but no one brings out into the open that this is going on.

I see unhelpful patterns taking all sorts of forms in the teams I work with, but they are mostly all down to that lack of visibility and openness about how each other’s behaviours are actually affecting everyone else.

If I, as the leader of that team, was able to tell the group about my reasons for appreciation and hear what they thought about those celebration meetings and how it didn’t actually help them with the things they care about, we’d be able to work a way for everyone to be satisfied. Perhaps a thank you email or message is all they need, and satisfies my need for showing appreciation. And we can use the celebratory meeting for a different purpose, to deal with something that matters to one or more of them.

But if these things aren’t talked about, nothing changes, and the unhelpful patterns persist.

That’s where I can help.

I can help you to:

1. Get in touch with your own core values that spark those heightened emotional responses

2. Find ways to comfortably discuss those values, emotional responses and resulting behaviour with others

3. Understand how those behaviours impact others

4. Understand the values of the people around you, their emotional responses and resulting behaviour

5. Find ways to work together, with everyone’s values out in the open, knowing where they clash and where they complement.

6. Create a more harmonious, open and efficient team working culture.

   
   

Thanks for reading and if you would like to reach out, click the image below and it will take you to my contact page.

Valerie