Emotional Motives: Come Clean to Clean Up Your Leadership Presence

How you show up as a leader is strongly influenced by emotional motives, the emotional “end states” you are trying to achieve each day. Keeping your emotional motives hidden leads to messy interactions and a compromised leadership presence. When you come clean about your emotional motives, you are more likely to achieve your goals, gain support from others, and improve trustworthiness.

What Are Emotional Motives?

What am I talking about? How would you answer this question?

At the end of the day, as a result of all my efforts, I want to feel ____________.

Emotional motives might include feeling included, accomplished, successful, seen, purposeful, safe, secure, confident, or any number of emotions.

Emotional motives are strong drivers of behavior, whether or not we tell people about them. If we aren’t aware of our emotional motives, or if we conceal them, it creates messy interactions that lower trust and compromise leadership impact.

How To Know If Someone Is Concealing An Emotional Motive

In a meeting, one person continues to advocate for a solution even after the group has moved on. It doesn’t make sense to the others why he is so adamant. This is because he is concealing an emotional motive that would be accomplished with this solution. Maybe he wants to feel involved and included and didn’t feel that way about how his team made an earlier decision. By clinging to his solution, he can maintain a sense of involvement.

One of your teammates seems to be OK with the direction things are going, but behind the scenes, they maneuver to achieve a different result. They go to one person at a time, trying to persuade them to see things a certain way. Maybe they pit one person against another to create negative drama and stymie the initiative. Their emotional motive might be that they feel angry about something and want to feel content, but without coming clean about it, they choose instead to pursue roundabout methods. Over time, this behavior is experienced as manipulative and untrustworthy.

A leader micromanages her direct reports, even though they are competent and clearly understand the goals. What she isn’t telling them is her emotional motive to soothe anxiety about how the outcome of a new initiative will reflect on her as a leader. She wants to feel competent and appreciated, but instead of coming clean with her colleagues or subordinates, she takes away their agency to obtain a feeling of control for herself.

In all these situations, communication becomes messy, time is wasted, and trust is compromised. So why do people conceal their emotional motives?

Why Is It So Hard To Come Clean About Our Emotional Motives?

• Lack of awareness. Many leaders I coach aren’t aware of their feelings. They are so focused on tactics, strategies and results that they don’t take the time to look inward to what’s going on inside. Yet, they expend immense amounts of energy every day trying to feel settled, competent, included, or seen and appreciated. If they are aware of anything, it’s usually frustration, rage, or general anxiety. But these are just coverups for deeper, more authentic feelings that aren’t getting acknowledged.
• Fear of rejection. Recently, I was coaching an executive who chronically micromanaged and was getting significant negative feedback from peers and subordinates. He identified that his emotional motive was to feel competent and appreciated. I asked him if he’d ever considered sharing this with his peers. His first response was, “That would be suicide. They would think I was weak, needy, and not in control.” I reflected back to him, “Isn’t it ironic that your peers are seeing this exact thing, observing you acting like a bully who is weak, needy, and not in control.” This leads to the next reason that people don’t come clean about their emotional motives.
• Devaluing their own experiences. Most leaders are so focused on others that they don’t recognize when their feelings, needs, and motivations are being put on the back burner. Over time, they unconsciously devalue and disconnect from their internal emotional world. This creates dissonance between what they need and how they are acting. Remember, we will always attempt to get our emotional motives met, even if we do it in messy, roundabout ways.
• Stigma of asking for help. Leaders tend to resist asking for help, mostly because they put so much pressure on themselves to be competent and independent. There are plenty of reasons why this happens, but the end result is siloed decision-making, lowered teamwork, and lowered trust. Our research shows that leaders, especially executive leaders, have a very distorted view of how their subordinates would respond if they asked for help. Leaders mostly believe that subordinates would think less of them if they asked for help. Their direct reports overwhelmingly say they’d think more of a leader who asks for help.

The Benefits of Coming Clean About Your Emotional Motives

• You honor yourself. Your emotional motives aren’t wrong, they aren’t weak, and they aren’t selfish. They are what drive you. When you become aware and share your emotional end-states, you declare to yourself and others that you matter too. No more, no less.
• Others can help you. Compassion is about struggling with others toward a better future. Com-Passion means “suffer with.” How can someone struggle with you if they don’t know what you are struggling with? If you’ve ever supported another person to solve a problem, get through a tough time, or confront a challenging issue, you know how good it feels to be part of that equation. Give others the same opportunity to help you. Asking for help makes you human and relatable, and allows the team to work together for everyone’s success.
• Win-win solutions. When you share your emotional end state, others can contribute to helping you get there. In my book, Compassionate Accountability, I shared a story of a CFO who concealed her anxiety about a financial situation, and her maneuvering behavior was causing unnecessary drama with her executive assistant. The assistant finally confronted the behavior, and the CFO came clean about her anxiety regarding an upcoming report she was making to the board of directors. She asked her assistant to help her feel confident and competent going into the meeting. Together, they prepared a solid report, with supporting numbers, and proper research to back it up. I asked the assistant if her boss’s behavior impacted her view of her boss. Her response was typical of many people we work with; “I want to feel like I am contributing and making a difference. When my boss is honest about what she needs, it enables me to be the most helpful. It’s a win-win.”
• Role modeling authenticity. Concealing your emotional motives is not honest. It’s a form of deception that compromises authenticity. Whether or not you reveal what you are feeling behind the scenes, your behavior will show it. If people perceive your behaviors to be driven by ulterior motives, they will find it hard to trust you. When you come clean in a genuine way and ask for help, you set the tone for the entire team or organization to do the same.
• Compassionate Accountability^®. Compassionate Accountability is about treating yourself and others as valuable, capable, and responsible in every interaction. Sacrificing either compassion or accountability doesn’t work.

Easier Said Than Done: Where Do I Start?

If you’ve spent your life concealing your emotional motives or have learned that feelings are something to be avoided, it can seem daunting to come clean. It’s a learned skill that starts with self-awareness. We can help. Our scientifically validated assessments provide targeted insights to help you take the next steps to improve how you show up as a leader or leadership team.

One Number Tells The Story

Our Compassionate Accountability Assessment is a powerful self-awareness tool and includes the Drama Resilience Index, a single number indicating how you and your team show up as a leader.

Contact us today to get started!