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Working Supervisor's Support Kit A collection of tools and information that will help you do a better job as a boss.

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It was a Tuesday morning like most others. I had finished a writing session and was preparing for a session with a client about his book when it happened. First there was a message that screamed that something was wrong with my computer. Minutes later I realized I had allowed a virus to infect it.

Now, understand that I am not a novice computer user. I've had a personal computer in one form or another since the late 1970s. I know about taking precautions and I'm usually pretty aware of the threat of viruses and other malware. Even so, I let that nasty virus in. It's a human nature thing.

The virus' creator hooked me. My screen flashed with a message that there was problem on my computer. My heart rate sped up and I responded. Alas, that was what Mr. Virus Maker was counting on.

He hooked me with a credible-looking message that engaged my emotion, fear in this case, and closed off rational thought. If that hadn't happened, I would have recognized the fake message as fake and the format as a standard virus hook. But my emotions ramped up. I acted with only minimal thought. Mr. Virus Maker achieved his goal: my computer was infected.

In the end the computer was made well by the wonderful folks at Geek Squad. I lost about six productive hours that I could make that up. I spent my downtime thinking about how emotions are so much a part of our humanity and therefore, so much a part of leadership.

Leadership is a people pursuit, which means that emotions are important. Many of us learn that the hard way. Along the way we encounter people who are master chain-pullers, the most passive-aggressives of the breed, and dangerous situations. We make mistakes and, hopefully, learn from them. Until recently, most of that was trial and feedback.

In the last year, though, I've discovered some resources that will help you understand the emotional part of leadership. When you understand, your odds of improvement go up. Let me recommend two books that, taken together, cover a lot of ground on the emotional component of your work.

The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer covers the world of work with lots of actual workplace examples.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck will introduce you to what she calls a "growth mindset," explain why it's important for success and how you can both develop it yourself and help others develop it.

For continuing ideas and insight, I suggest you add Ed Batista's "Executive Coaching and Change Management" blog to your reader. To get you started, I'm pointing you to his post on "High-Performance Communication ."

Boss's Bottom Line

You deal with people every day. People have emotions that affect them at work, just like everywhere else. You will be a better boss if you make an effort to understand human emotions and do a better job of dealing with them.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.