Is self-management of your emotions important to project leadership?

I believe without a question self-management emotion is important for project leadership. Merisno (p. 26) states “We have all experienced people and situations that have pushed our buttons and tried our patience. Self-control is what helps us to maintain our cool and not lose it.” If the only reason self-management of emotions is important is not to lose a person’s cool that would be sufficient for me to have this trait.

I am sure we have all been in situations where someone has “pushed our buttons (Merisno, p. 26). Sometimes we can avoid these situations such as not going to a store that has poor customer support, and other times they cannot be avoided such as having a manager loves to push buttons. Self-management of our emotion's acts as a framework for our emotional state to follow. By following this controlling framework, we are able to control our emotions, and not have our emotions control us.

When a project manager which loses control over their emotions such as getting angry by yelling or snapping at people, can only lower their credibility as a leader thereby potentially disrupting or derailing a project. At the very least they will disrupt the project for a few minutes. The more a project manager loses control over their emotions the more times they disrupt the project, and I believe these disruption's compound themselves. Project team’s members will begin to dwell on these out bursts (both negative and positive), and they will spend more time recovering from subsequent disruptions. Compounded disruptions can lead to team members feeling they are being treated with a carrot and sticks management approach, or causes them to become disassociated with the project.

Project managers which have self-management of their emotions balance their emotions in the areas of SASHET families of emotions (Merisno, p. 34) which are: Happy, Excited, Tender, Sad, Angry, and Scared. If a project manager can control their emotions, they can focus on guiding the emotional state of the project team, stakeholders, sponsor, and customer.

In Stephen Covey’s book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, he writes about the emotional bank account. Basically, the emotional bank account is when you put in enough positive emotions into a person, or group you are able to take out some of those positives emotions when you happen to operate outside of your normally positive manner. This is important to understand because no one is perfect in this area.

A project manager that is not able to keep control over their emotions will create a negative environment for the project to operate in. Overly negative and positive emotions can lead to misunderstanding, miscommunication, or lack of support for the project by outsiders. A negative emotional state by the project manager will obviously disrupt, and can even derail a project.