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How to Become a Nurturing Leader

Charles Duhigg  |   | 
 
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One of the best things you can do as a leader is to help people understand their own behavioral patterns. We tend to think of work as a place that is highly rational. It is a place where we come to do business and then we go home and most of our emotional life theoretically exists in our home with our families. But, I don’t think that’s true, I think most of our emotional life actually exists at the office. We spend 8-12 hours a day at our office.  Work is something we think about all the time, work in some sense is our life. So what that means is as a leader is that your ability isn’t just leading around work it’s about leading around life and what people really want is they want someone to help them understand who they are. They want to have a sense of self-discovery. So if a leader comes to explain to people this is how your habits function, this is what we’ve learned from neurology about these impulses: this is why you’re eating too much, or you’re eating unhealthily at lunch and this is why you’re getting in a fight with Jim, even though you and Jim should be allies on this issue. A leader who helps us understand who we are, why we act in ways that we act without thinking about it – that’s a leader who is really nurturing our emotional life, our entire life and that’s the rationality of business. And that’s really how a leader changes people from just employees to an army of people who believe in a company or believe in a cause and want to work together to make it something ambiguous. 

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