#mood

As a leader, what’s the mood on your team?

We all want to be more impactful and more effective. We take a lot of courses, read books, talk to coaches and mentors about how we can improve professionally. However, sometimes all the recommended action and leadership tactics in the world aren’t helpful when we aren’t honestly addressing the mood.

Environments have a mood. Your family, your company, your country, your team — all of these places have an atmosphere that permeates our thinking, actions and reactions. Think of the mood of Paris compared to New York City. Or the mood of a room of students taking a test versus the mood of the cafeteria.

Unlike emotions that can change faster and are more a product of an individual in a moment, the mood is something that surrounds a group of people or an environment. For example, at a birthday party the mood is celebratory or joyful — even though individuals at the party may have their own emotions.

Moods set a tone for a team, too, determining how much positive outcome you can create. But like so many things, if you can’t recognize the mood and the impact it is having, you are unlikely to be able to take advantage of it.

This model helps clarify four major buckets of mood that you may encounter in companies or organizations.

Acceptance, Ambition, Resignation, Resentment

Let’s start with Ambition: this is the quadrant in which we want to see teams operating. Ambition is a combination of action and optimism. The team can see what’s possible and can combine that broad outlook with a sense of responsibility. Let’s make it happen! But be careful, sometimes it’s easy to paste a veneer of ambition over the actual mood of the team. We want to feel our team is ambitious because it’s too threatening to see what’s really there. Leaders lose their team’s trust when they push a false optimism.

Resentment on the other hand, is the space of changing or taking action, but not willingly. “I’ll do it, but I don’t want to”. This space relinquishes responsibility. “This is the reality, but I don’t accept it willingly” and possibly and puts blame on “the boss” or “the client” or any other external factors. When the team is acting from this space, it’s unlikely things are going to go well … “I could have told you it was going to flop. They made me create some dumb changes.” Familiar? It’s a common mood in the professional space.

Resignation holds the same relinquishment of responsibility but without any ability to take action. “What’s the point? My action won’t matter. It won’t change anything or make a difference around here.” Resignation is when accepted a reality or situation, but we are powerless to change it. This mood shuts the team down from even trying because “That’s the way it is around here. Same stuff, different day.”. Talent is wasted and standing by.

Finally, acceptance. In acceptance, we see our environment and we are at peace with it. Perhaps we need to take action for change in the future, but for now we’re in a mood of alignment with what is. This might feel great at first, right? Team is happy. Things are peaceful. Acceptance isn’t a mood that encourages radical innovation but it can signal a harmonious workplace.

So, your team marinating in a mood that is rarely defined or discussed but is having an impact on the team everyday.

And as a leader, you may not be seeing the mood firsthand if you aren’t working side by side with the group. Or maybe the team presents their “best face” when interacting with you. Ultimately, it’s up to you to uncover and track the mood of the team.

Some common ways to do that include:

1. Survey. Many companies run annual or bi-annual employee satisfaction surveys that can be a solid start in understanding mood. Dig into these results to fully understand what’s behind the findings.
2. Have a facilitator conduct 1:1 interviews that address a variety of team members and roles, Interviews can be confidential with an overview that addresses broad findings.
3. 1:1 conversations with you (leader/manager) if you have folks on the team that trust you to share straight feedback. (P.S. If you don’t have people who feel they can share honest feedback with you, that’s another situation to address.)
4. Hold “Town Halls” for smaller focus groups that allow people to talk about Hopes Fears and Dreams where you are a listener gathering data and feedback (Just listening. Not fixing.)

Mood is meta and probably isn’t a quantifiable metric, so listening with curiosity and without judgement is the best way to build trust and gauge moods of the team.

In Part Two, I’ll dive into more strategies for tracking and shifting moods of your team so you can lead people more productively and with more care.

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As a coach, Courtney Kaplan partners with leaders to support them in building strong teams with clear vision and communication.

Courtney founded the Design Operations team at Facebook and spent 6 years building the discipline into an impactful team key to creating design operations excellence. Before Facebook, Courtney was Principal of Program Planning and Principal of Client Development at Hot Studio working to build a team that could scope, manage and deliver complex digital engagements.

For more about moods, refer to the Institute for Generative Leadership, Newfield Network where many of these concepts are discussed at length.