As humans, we cannot separate our behavioral tendencies from our emotions. Emotions are constant, real and abiding, and play a pivotal role in motivation. Believing that emotions can be ‘checked at the door’ or ‘left at home’ is debilitating, and dampens acuity that in turn impedes progress. Research demonstrates that attempts to minimize or ignore emotions only serves to amplify them and their potentially crippling effects.

Agility (the capacity to move deliberately and precisely in the face of disturbance) in the emotional context does not intend to avoid, fix or otherwise remediate natural human feelings of loss, isolation, criticism, fear, or doubt, but rather acknowledge and navigate those emotions productively. Emotional immobility results when these disturbances fester and inhibit individual agency, resulting in degraded performance. 

We refer to this optimized emotional intelligence capacity among individual contributors (team mates) as emotional agility, because it requires behavioral dexterity to balance across both cognitive and behavioral realms, strength to manage to positive behaviors, coordination of multiple and often competing priorities, and mental endurance.

All teams experience tension, but emotionally agile teams are far less likely to suffer from burnout, traumatic stress, disruptive conflict, and attrition.