Every great leader erases that line

It sounds stupid when someone says something like “Don’t mix up your professional and personal life”, or “Don’t take it personally; the comment is about your profession, not about you” or “Don’t let your personal matters affect your profession.”

We accept such statements just because they are popular and they are often told by people whom we consider highly knowledgeable.

You, are a person on the whole – collection of your knowledge, your emotions, your logic, your experiences, your thought process, your beliefs, your ideas and so on. All your thoughts and actions (or reactions) are based on them – whether at home, at workplace, or any other public places.

We have one brain. Although it is divided into two halves (surely, not one half for personal and another for professional use), what we perceive through our senses, what we store as memory, what we infer out of available information, how we receive some experiences – everything happens irrespective of place. And we use all that for our responses or reactions in future.

I may sound too simple, but here’s an example for easy understanding. We touch a hot surface at home. It burns our hand and our brain’s reflex mechanism immediately withdraws the hand from that surface. Does it happen differently at workplace if we touch a hot surface?

We may think, that’s about physical experience and reaction. But, it happens in the same way even in emotional and intellectual aspects; maybe the degree and ways differ, but the root perception and reactions remain the same.

You may react ‘on spot’ in one way when your mother scolds you at home and you may react in some other way when your higher-up insults you at your workplace. That’s because the liberty to retaliate and shout back at home is more compared to doing the same at workplace. But the root emotions, either anger or sadness, are generated in both the places. We just choose to express them in different ways and at different degrees.

Now, all this said, what’s the use of knowing that there is no bifurcation between personal way and professional way?

Well, it helps you to be the better version of you – everywhere. We must first understand that ‘emotions’ are not meant to personal life alone and ‘orderliness’ is not meant just for workplace. It’s important to add ‘emotions’ at work and ‘orderliness’ in personal life; just knowing the right amount to use and right place to stop applying them.

No great leader is ever made without investing emotions in his or her team. The leader may be highly knowledgeable, superbly skilled, truly talented, but if there is no emotional connect, the team spirit never rises. No matter what way the team members are motivated through incentives and positions, it does not last long. It all works on the basic understanding that the leader is handling people, not machines. So, it doesn’t take fuel or power, it takes emotions.

Applying emotions does not reduce your work, but it surely eases the pressure and keeps the boredom, monotony, mechanicalistic viewpoint towards work.

Just answer yourself. Imagine that a newly joined team member, who looks exactly like your brother and treats you the same way, comes little late to work. Can you be as harsh as you are with other team members? Assume that your manager, who speaks exactly like your uncle who brought you up with great care from your childhood days, questions or scolds you in a team meeting. Do you develop that anger, grudge or get sad about it for a long time?

Well, all that happens when we look at those people only professionally connected. A small shift in the way you look at your team members – either higher ups, peers or subordinates – can create wonders in people management. All the great leaders I have seen have this emotional bonding and all the bad leaders I have seen clearly drew a line between emotions and work!

A strict boss could be compared with an angry uncle in your family. A childlike girl in your team could be your niece at home. A middle-aged housekeeping employee at workplace could be your aunt in faraway relatives.

The moment they appear like that and from the time our view points act like that, we tend to look at their positives, we ignore their minor mistakes, we forgive them quickly when they speak something harshly out of their pressure, we don’t get offended and don’t carry the same mood for a long time even if they are not alright with us, we teach them, we learn from them, we care for them. Their small appreciation matters and our small concern touches them. That’s how you create a happy aura around you at your workplace – as a leader and as a team member.

When we are happy, we are more productive. To become more productive, we must be happy. Finding the starting point of this circle is a great challenge.

There is no line between personal and professional ways. But we must understand, there is always a line to be drawn on what extent and how emotions and orderliness can be mixed in personal and professional areas.

We need to understand that there is a sensitivity and ethics on both sides. Just because someone looks like a brother at workplace, we ought not do him a special favour at work. Just because a team member looks like your niece, we cannot cross the limits of decency. Just because we should treat people as our own, we must not think we own them and start interfering in every personal matter and become 'Uchita Salahananda Swami'!

The popularity earned keeping our ethics aside can never become respect. A fatherly leader who teaches skills needed to grow is respected more compared to an unethical boss who promotes someone just because that someone belongs to the same caste or looks like someone in the family.

Nothing great has even been achieved on this planet without love and without spreading happiness. I’m sure our home and our workplace - both are on this planet.