As a leader, awareness of self and others is the most critical factor there is. This awareness translates into a knowledge and understanding of the different types of people personalities and the way they will typically interact with each other and within a team or group.
Just as there are different people personality types that you must acknowledge and adapt to, there are also differing dimensions of emotional behaviour that every leader must be aware of. Human emotion (aka feelings) is your response to your thinking and mental patterns. Your thoughts (mental patterns), in turn, predict your behaviour. A leader’s emotional behaviour style can compel followers to either connect or engage, or to turn away.
My good friend and mentor, Dr. Michael Frisina, in his book “Influential Leadership – Change Your behavior, Change Your Organization, Change Health Care” (page 73), talks about emotional awareness and recognizes that emotionally aware leaders can acknowledge their gut reactions and prevent possible emotional meltdown. Emotionally aware leaders also are aware that negative responses are counterproductive to peak performance. He goes on to say,
“… our behavior style can stir up emotions in others.
Behavioral style, or social/communication style, is the way we conduct ourselves in front of other people, particularly in the workplace. Are you friendly and warm? Are you reserved? Are you assertive? Are you in full control? Your behavioral style (which is different from personality) either attracts or repels other people, and vice versa. Sometimes we cannot articulate why we like or dislike someone’s behavior, because these types of preferences are unconscious. “
The more you understand your own and other people’s emotional behaviour, the more capable you are to use your skill of Positive Presence to create a positive emotional behaviour that will move you toward others to combine for a positive and energized synergy in the work environment around you.
We are all different, but we are all the same. We all have similar emotional and physical needs, but we all possess individual differences in basic temperament. ‘Personality’ means a relativity fixed set of feelings, behaviours, and responses – long-term features that comprise a person’s personality ‘make up’ or ‘profile’. And of course each different ‘profile’ will elicit different feelings, behaviours, and responses from other differing ‘profiles’. Personality profiling has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. One of the most popular in the business world today is the Myers & Briggs personality type indicator (MBTI), but there are others as well. And, there are also free tests on line that will give you a ball park idea of where you land. 
Research in the neurosciences has shown there is a continuous looping and re-looping of energy both positive and negative, between your two dominant human energy fields — the heart and the brain. It is this looping and re-looping of energy that makes each of us a unique individual. There is also evidence of a correlation between positive energy (positive thoughts and feelings) and your ability to ‘connect’ and work with others. Also, just as you are a looping and re-looping energy being, as you come together with others within an organization (or anywhere else for that matter), your individual energies combine and create a unique synergy of its own. 
As a licenced affiliate and certified coach of The Frisina Group’s ‘Center for Influential Leadership’ I am honoured to present the following excerpt from their April 2019 guest newsletter … it never gets old:
In conjunction with your own self-awareness, comes the need to bring your awareness to the environment around you. Today’s work environment wrought with lightening-fast change, complexity and never-ending demands, is a natural playing field for negative energy. To start, make a mental note of people and situations that trigger your negative feelings and thoughts. You may notice that the negative moods of a toxic person can be extremely pervasive and emotionally draining – the nervous energy, the anger at life and everyone in it, the sadness, complaints, clinginess, attention seeking, the gossips, the consistently negative viewpoint — these negative attitudes will suck the positive out of even the most up-beat and positive person! 
Our brain is an extremely powerful machine to which we hold the controls. Having ‘control’ requires a keen self-awareness into our emotional energy and our behaviour and thought habits. It takes anywhere from 14 days to 8 weeks to ‘re-wire’ our brain for a higher skill level. We ‘re-wire’ by continuous reading, writing and reciting of information for creating new thought and behaviour habits. This re-wiring occurs via the neuroplasticity of your brain. 
In today’s corporate world, people are craving effective leadership. Middle level managers and their team members are overburdened and uninspired by individuals holding titled positions of authority providing neither effective leadership nor effective management. The issue is not change resistance. Peter Senge said it well, “People do not resist change. They resist being changed.” Knowledge based workers desire true leadership that capitalizes on collaboration, communication, and connection to accomplish their work related to clear goals and objectives. 
People do not quit their jobs. They quit their leader – the boss. Ineffective leaders breed ineffective followers and performance and productivity suffer as a result. With a positive, emotional connection with your people you send a clear message that you are interested and invested in what your people experience on a daily basis. 
Learning to create a mindset that overrides the stress response is an invaluable skill in today’s workplace wrought with lightening-fast change, complexity and unrelenting demands. It is the neuroplasticity of your brain that enables you to change brain structure to extinguish stress reactions and amplify higher brain function. When we are able to move our mind into this higher brain function, it is then that we work smarter, we are more innovative, and we improve our emotional intelligence. Furthermore, when we are using our higher brain function, the following benefits arise:
In the last couple of decades, a new field of neuroscience has mapped the mental zone that can literally change the brain to quiet an overly active stress response system and simultaneously pave the way for higher brain networks to perform at optimum. The more you function from this ‘higher’ mental zone, the less you stress, and the more your brain lights up with the mix of intelligence that predicts a successful life.