The Emotionally Intelligent Manager [Electronic resources] : How to Develop and Use the Four Key Emotional Skills of Leadership نسخه متنی

Six Principles of Emotional Intelligence

Our approach to emotional intelligence begins with these six principles:

Emotion is information.

We can try to ignore emotion, but it doesn’t work.

We can try to hide emotions, but we are not as good at it as we think.

Decisions must incorporate emotion to be effective.

Emotions follow logical patterns.

Emotional universals exist, but so do specifics.

PRINCIPLE 1: EMOTION IS INFORMATION

Emotions Are Data

Emotions contain data about you and your world. Emotions are not random, chaotic events that interfere with thinking. An emotion occurs due to some factor that is important to you, and it helps motivate you and guide you to success. At the most basic level, emotions can be viewed as:

Occurring due to some sort of change in the world around you

Starting automatically

Quickly generating physiological changes

Changing what you were paying attention to and how you were thinking

Preparing you for action

Creating personal feelings

Quickly dissipating

Helping you cope, survive, and thrive in your world

Figure 1.1 shows graphically the function of an emotion. Emotions are a signal, and if you pay attention to what an emotion is signaling, chances are the emotion is going to help you out of a tough situation, prevent something bad from happening, or help bring about a positive outcome.[10]

Figure 1.1: Function of an Emotion.

Emotions Are Mainly Data About People

Principle 1 has an important subprinciple: emotions are primarily signals about people, social situations, and interactions. Emotions tell you a lot about you—how you feel, what’s happening to you, what’s going on around you. But emotions likely evolved in order to ensure our survival by helping us work together. Psychologist Paul Ekman believes that this is the key function of our feelings: “ Typically, the events that call forth emotion are interpersonal actions.”[11]

When we are angry, we send a signal to other people to leave us alone or to give back what they took from us—“or else.” Our smile of happiness shows that we are open and accepting and, most important, approachable. The interpersonal, or social, nature of emotion is what makes these data sources of such vital importance in the lives of all managers and leaders.

Emotions Are Not Always Data-Driven

If emotions are this wonderful source of data that we need to embrace, then what about those stories you have heard about how emotions derail people, how destructive they can be, and about the need to rein in our emotions? It’s a great question. As Figure 1.1 illustrates, emotions are real-time feedback signals that come on quickly and dissipate just as rapidly. But what gives emotions a bad name and gets us into trouble, is something related to emotions: moods. Scientists often distinguish between emotions and moods. Emotions have a definable cause. Moods are feelings that last a long time, often occur for unknown reasons, and can be part of our body chemistry. Sometimes the “aftershocks” of emotions are felt as lingering moods. It’s likely that calls to carefully regulate and control emotions, as well as the view that emotions are often irrelevant and give rise to undue stress, are really calls to examine our moods.[12]

The emotionally intelligent manager must be able to differentiate between the experience of an emotion and the influence of being in a certain mood. This requires great skill, knowledge, and practice, and it’s something that we will help you develop.

Emotions Help Us Survive

Emotions are critical to our survival as individuals and as a species. In fact, emotions are not unique to humans. The survival and development of a species depends on a number of behaviors, including attending to emergencies, exploring the environment, avoiding danger, maintaining bonds with other members of the group, protecting oneself, reproducing, fighting against attack, and giving and receiving care.[13] Emotions were hard-wired millions of years ago through evolution to protect us from threats to survival, as suggested by Exhibit 1.3.

Yet is it possible that, after millions of years of evolution and change, emotions have indeed become useless vestiges of an earlier and more dangerous existence? In current times, with the advances in technology and a general growth of civilization, do these “primitive” emotions interfere with survival and success in the modern world? This is a very logical and sensible argument. But it is very wrong. The world that we live in is exceedingly complex, and accessing our emotions is still important to behaving adaptively and surviving.

Let’s take fear, for example. Fear is a powerful emotion that certainly has an important role to play in the lives of even the most “ civilized” of nations and peoples. When we worry about something, we are potentially motivated to act in order to alleviate the fear.

Of course, fear can also paralyze us and prevent us from achieving-important goals: fear of rejection leads us to avoid relationships with people; fear of failure causes us to delay our plans. But emotionally intelligent managers integrate their emotions and their thinking in ways that are adaptive and productive. The intelligent use of fear involves using it to energize us to address things that are important: feeling nervous about a major presentation can motivate us to work harder; worry about an upcoming business meeting can provide the energy we need to go back and review our notes, catch some glaring inconsistencies and problems, and achieve a more successful outcome; anxiety can facilitate performance just as easily as it can debilitate it.[14]

Emotions motivate our behavior in ways that are adaptive and helpful to us. Emotions are not extraneous. They don’t just add interest to our lives; they are critical to our very survival. Almost every theory of emotions suggests that emotions convey important information about the environment that helps us thrive and survive. Different emotions have evolved to help us meet these and other needs.

Emotions are also linked to action. Consider a situation in which you’re angry with certain team members for failing to show up at the meeting you called. That’s only natural. These no-shows are an obstacle in your path. Rather than physically attacking them, however, you can contact them, express your displeasure constructively, and gain their assistance.

Positive emotions like happiness and joy are also a part of our work life—alas, a small part for many people. For example, when you make that huge sale, and there are high-fives all around the trading floor, the team experiences a feeling of joy, motivating them to repeat that experience all over again. Quite simply, emotions convey information and meaning and motivate action.

In Exhibit 1.4, we have revised Exhibit 1.3 to suggest ways in which emotions motivate behaviors that, although they may not have survival value, can be relevant in everyday workplace situations.

PRINCIPLE 2: WE CAN TRY TO IGNORE EMOTION, BUT IT DOESN’T WORK

Most of us would admit that emotions influence performance in some areas of our life and that this is normal and even desirable. We see the impact of emotion in sports, as we attempt to psych out our opponent or energize our team. “Attitude”—mood and emotion— is critical in all sports.

But what about a job in which logic is essential? Surely, emotions cannot, and should not, play any sort of role in highly rational and analytical decisions. In a classic study, psychologist Alice Isen discovered that even presumed bastions of rationality—physicians—alter their thinking and decision making, depending on their mood. In an experiment with radiologists, she found that their diagnoses were both faster and more accurate after they were given a small gift (presumably mildly elevating their moods).[15]

We told you earlier how emotional contagion influences the effectiveness of groups. It is remarkable that although emotions have a major impact on judgment, we are almost completely unaware of their effects. It doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not, or whether you are aware of it or not, emotions and thinking are intertwined.

You can try to fight against Principle 2, but it won’t work. Social-psychologist Roy Baumeister found that when people try to suppress the expression of emotions, they end up remembering less information.[16] It seems that emotional suppression takes energy and attention that otherwise could be expended in listening to and processing information.

This is not to suggest that we must continuously be awash in emotion. Instead, we can process the underlying information, as well as the emotional component, of the situation, through strategies that do not involve suppressing the expression of our feelings. One such strategy is emotional reappraisal, wherein we look at the issues but attempt to reframe them in a more constructive and adaptive way. We view the situation as a challenge to be addressed, or we try to gain some sort of lesson from the situation.

Don’t get us wrong. Emotionally intelligent managers don’t merely fix a smile on their face every morning and try to put a positive spin on everything the rest of the day. In fact, emotionally intelligent individuals try to avoid Pollyanna-like positive reactions to all things all the time. That is not an effective way to deal with problems—or to avoid dealing with them. An emotionally intelligent manager experiences the emotions and then uses the power of emotion as a springboard to a successful, productive outcome.

PRINCIPLE 3: WE CAN TRY TO HIDE EMOTIONS, BUT WE ARE NOT AS GOOD AT IT AS WE THINK

Managers and leaders often don’t share certain types of information with their people, or they try to cover up how they feel in order to protect themselves or others. We say that everything is fine when it is not; we claim that we’re not worried when we are.

Organizations are notorious for their attempts at controlling emotions, especially the display and the expression of emotion. In many service-oriented jobs, employees are explicitly taught to suppress their feelings and to put on a happy face. This is the concept of “emotional labor,” an idea that sociologist Arlie Hochschild first brought to wide attention.[17] There are a few ways that people try to display the emotions that their employer demands. One is through surface acting, when you feel one way but don’t show the true, underlying feeling. In deep acting, you actually try to change your current feeling to match the desired feeling. As you might expect, surface acting, as well as emotional labor, have been linked to performance burnout and job turnover, among other issues.[18]

Emotional suppression in organizations takes many other forms. In a process known as normalizing emotion,[19] we do not show strong emotions or emotions that the organization or group deems inappropriate. What may surprise you are the sorts of emotions that people are taught not to show at work. Think about your own observations of organizational life. What emotions do you see people show, and what emotions are rarely displayed?

If you said that anger is an emotion that gets covered up and suppressed at work, that may be true for your workplace, but it certainly is not the case in general. In one workplace study, anger was the most likely emotion to be expressed to the person who provoked it.[20] In fact, this study found that 53 percent of people expressed their feelings of anger. The emotion that was least frequently expressed at work was the feeling of joy; only 19 percent of people said they expressed this emotion while at work.

At first blush, these results seem counterintuitive. Anger is a powerful, negative emotion that people cover up and try to suppress, whereas joy is a positive emotion that seems more appropriate to display. But the emotional norms of organizations dictate that the expression of joy is not professional. After all, this is work, and we’re not supposed to be having that much fun at work. Anger, on the other hand, is the expression of power and authority, of showing others who’s the boss. We’re not saying that this is the way we should live our work-lives. We believe that the expression of joy is an important part of the emotionally intelligent manager’s tool kit, and we need to celebrate our successes more often and encourage each other to reproduce that success.

These attempts at disguising our emotions, although they are consciously made, may not work terribly well. Ekman’s research on facial expressions and lying indicates that it is possible to spot a liar by observing pauses in a person’s speech, speech errors, and fleeting emotional displays. Our desire to protect emotions or to engage in purely rational pursuits in the workplace can end up in decision-making failures and create an atmosphere of mistrust.[21]

You can try to be the management tough-guy loner type—a John Wayne of organizational effectiveness—and it will work some of the time. But not all of the time. Your feelings and emotions will be read by some of the people most of the time and all of the people some of the time.

PRINCIPLE 4: DECISIONS MUST INCORPORATE EMOTION TO BE EFFECTIVE

Our feelings have an impact on us and on others, whether we want them to or not. Quite simply, no decisions are made without emotion. As we noted earlier, according to neuroscientist Damasio, rational thinking cannot occur in the absence of emotion.[22]

The fundamental error often made by Western philosophers and researchers is to separate mind from body. In doing so, we have created a split-personality view of ourselves as rational creatures (with minds, or thoughts) who must fend off irrational impulses (originating in our bodies, or emotions). Such a view seems to be shared by many people, even today. We distrust emotion as unreliable, irrational, and unwanted impulses that bring us back down to a lower evolutionary level. Such a view is embedded in a “pop” psychology approach to emotional intelligence; consider this quote from a magazine article trumpeting, “What’s Your EQ?”:

Primitive emotional responses held the keys to survival: fear drives blood to the large muscles, making it easier to run; surprise triggers the eyebrows to rise, allowing the eyes to widen their view and gather more information about an unexpected event. Disgust wrinkles up the face and closes the nostrils to keep out foul smells.

Emotional life grows out of an area of the brain called the limbic-system, specifically the amygdala, whence come delight and disgust and fear and anger. Millions of years ago, the neocortex was added on, enabling humans to plan, learn and remember.[23]

Perhaps this passage illustrates the most critical point of divergence between many approaches to the topic of emotional intelligence and ours. In our approach, we recognize that emotions make us truly human and undergird rationality, and, as such, emotions must be welcomed, embraced, understood, and put to good use.

Although we’ll teach you the importance of strategies such as regulating and managing moods and emotions, we emphasize the fuller experience of emotion, not blocking it out or rationalizing your experience. It means that there are times as a manager, a team member, an individual contributor, when one might feel hurt, badly hurt. But if it doesn’t hurt badly at times, you’re probably not making emotionally intelligent—and effective—decisions.

Different Moods Influence Our Thinking in Different Ways

Psychologists Gordon Bower and Alice Isen, among others, have studied the interaction of mood and thinking for many years.[24] They have found that emotions influence our thinking in different ways.

Positive emotions tend to open us up to our environment for exploration and discovery. The broaden and build theory of Barbara Frederickson suggests that positive emotions do more than make us feel good.[25] Positive emotions:

Expand our thinking

Help generate new ideas

Encourage us to consider possibilities

Generally, pleasant or positive emotions motivate us to explore the environment, broaden our thinking, and enlarge our repertoire of behaviors. Positive emotion dares us to be different. It helps us see new connections and generate new and novel solutions to problems.

Positive emotions have other effects on us. For example, happiness motivates us to play or to interact with others; smiling and laughing signal others that we are friendly and approachable. In this way, positive emotions promote social bonds and stronger social networks.

Positive emotions also inoculate us against negative events and emotions. If people are asked to watch a film that induces strong negative emotions and are simply asked to smile after watching the movie, they tend to recover more quickly from the physiological impact of the stressful event.

In one study, Lee Anne Harker and Dacher Keltner studied the yearbook photos of more than one hundred women college graduates. They rated the faces on how happy they were and then tracked these individuals over thirty years. The women who expressed positive emotion in their photos were more likely to have stronger social bonds and more positive social relationships than the women who were not smiling.[26]

Negative thinking has received bad press of late. Yet negative emotions are also important, as they can enhance thinking in very useful and practical ways. Some of the effects of negative mood or emotion on thinking include:[27]

Providing a clearer focus

Allowing details to be examined more efficiently

Motivating a more efficient search for errors

Negative emotions call for us to change what we are doing or thinking. They narrow our field of attention and perception, and they motivate us to act in very specific ways.

Compared to positive emotions, negative emotions tend to be experienced more strongly, and there may be an evolutionary explanation for this phenomenon. There are greater survival costs for an injury or an attack than there are potential rewards for finding something interesting out in the wild. Therefore, negative emotions that signal the chance of danger must be more carefully attended to, and if they are experienced more strongly than positive emotions, then we are less likely to end up on some predator’s dinner table.

We all love positive emotions and recognize their positive effects on health and well-being, but there should be a fond place in our hearts for the so-called negative emotions such as fear, anger, and disgust. There’s a time for peace—happy emotions—and there’s a time to fight—to feel negative emotions. Management is not about avoiding conflict and making everyone happy all the time. Management is more about effectiveness, and effectiveness requires a range of emotions.

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS FOLLOW LOGICAL PATTERNS

Emotions come about for many reasons, but each emotion is part of a sequence from low to high intensity. If the event or thought that initiated a feeling continues or intensifies, then it is likely that the feeling also gets stronger. Emotions are not randomly occurring events. Each emotion has its own moves, sort of like in a game of chess. You just have to know which piece you have and the rules that govern that piece.

Robert Plutchik, a well-known emotions researcher, proposed a model of emotions that explicitly presents them along an intensity continuum, so that emotions intensify as they go from lower to higher on the diagram.[28] The eight primary emotions are arranged in a circle, with opposite emotions on opposite sides of the circle. His model also indicates how emotions can combine with one another to form more complex emotions. The terms in the open spaces are called primary dyads or a mix of two of the primary emotions. A graphic model of Plutchik’s work is shown in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2: An Emotional Map.

This map of emotions provides us with just one of many pieces that we need to understand and manage our emotions better.

Consider this example of the importance of understanding the rules of the emotion game.

Jenna is in sales, and Joe is a customer. It came as a real surprise to Jenna that Joe was angry. His anger seemed to come out of nowhere. In reality, there were many warning signs of Joe’s impending anger. It didn’t just materialize; it was the next logical step in the progression of Joe’s emotions.

Here’s what happened. Joe started with a mild feeling of annoyance when Jenna told him that the new system would be delayed a week or so. But Joe was not angry. “These things happen,” he reasoned at the time. When a week went by and there was no word from Jenna, Joe called her. She casually mentioned that they couldn’t do the install for another week because they were so busy. Now Joe’s minor annoyance transitioned into a feeling of frustration. But when still another week went by and Joe called Jenna’s office, only to find out she was on vacation, then Joe was pretty mad.

Your emotional knowledge can serve as a crystal ball of sorts. When applied with care, it can reduce surprises and predict the future.

PRINCIPLE 6: EMOTIONAL UNIVERSALS EXIST, BUT SO DO SPECIFICS

Emotional intelligence “works,” in part, because there are universal rules of emotions and their expression. Much is made of cultural differences in social behavior, and with good reason. Customs and manners do vary markedly from country to country, as well as within regions of larger or diverse nations. But the case of emotions is a special one. We know that cultural universals exist in emotions. A happy face is seen as a happy face by people all over the globe. A face of surprise is interpreted the same way by a Wall Street investment banker and a New Guinea tribesman. Even nonhumans display and recognize emotional expressions in fellow creatures. Those of you with dogs know this. Can’t you tell when your dog is happy or sad or angry?

Perhaps we all recognize a smiling face for what it is because there are universals in the underlying causes of different emotions. Thus we are happy when we achieve or gain something, and we are sad when we lose something. At its core, an emotion signals something important and therefore communicates a universal signal to all peoples.

But life is more complex than the universal picture we are painting, and there are, indeed, emotional specifics. Some of these specifics have to do with display rules, secondary emotions, and gender.

[10]See, for example, Clore, G. L., Wyer, R. S., Dienes, B., Gasper, K., Gohm, C., and Isbell, L. “Affective Feelings as Feedback: Some Cognitive Consequences.” In L. L. Martin and G. L. Clore (eds.), Theories of Mood and Cognition. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2001; Schwarz, N. “Feelings as Information: Informational and Motivational Functions of Affective States.” In R. M. Sorrentino and E. T. Higgins (eds.), Handbook of Motivation and Cognition: Foundations of Social Behavior, New York: Guilford, 1990.

[11]Ekman, P. “Facial Expression and Emotion.” American Psychologist, 1993, 48, 384–392.

[12]Literature on stress and coping skills offers detailed analyses of this role of mood. See Lazarus, R. S. Emotion and Adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991; Lazarus, R. S. Stress and Emotion: A New Synthesis. New York: Springer, 1999; Lazarus, R. S., and Folkman, S. Stress Appraisal and Coping. New York: Springer, 1984; Lazarus, R. S., and Lazarus, B. N. Passion and Reason: Making Sense of Our Emotions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

[13]Frijda, N. H. The Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Plutchik, R. Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.

[14]Alpert, R., and Haber, R. N. “Anxiety in Academic Achievement Situations.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1960, 61, 207–215.

[15]Estrada, C. A., Isen, A. M., and Young, M. J. “Positive Affect Facilitates Integration of Information and Decreases Anchoring in Reasoning Among Physicians.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 1997, 72, 117–135; Estrada, C. A., Isen, A. M., and Young, M. J. “Positive Affect Improves Creative Problem Solving and Influences Reported Source of Practice Satisfaction in Physicians.” Motivation and Emotion, 1994, 18, 285–299.

[16]Baumeister, R. F., Muraven, M., and Tice, D. M. “Ego Depletion: A Resource Model of Volition, Self-Regulation, and Controlled Processing.” Social Cognition, 2000, 18, 130–150.

[17]Hochschild, A. R. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

[18]Ashforth, B. E., and Humphrey, R. H. “Emotional Labor in Service Roles: The Influence of Identity.” Academy of Management Review, 1993, 18, 88–115; Ashforth, B. E., and Tomiuk, M. A. “Emotional Labour and Authenticity: Views from Service Agents.” In S. Fineman (ed.), Emotion in Organization. (2nd ed.) London: Sage, 2000.

[19]Ashforth, B. E., and Humphrey, R. H. “Emotion in the Workplace: A Reappraisal.” Human Relations, 1995 48, 97–125.

[20]Gibson, D.E. “Emotional scripts and changes in organizations.” In F. Massarik (ed.), Advances in Organization Development, vol. 3. Westport, CT: Ablex, 1995.

[21]Ekman, P. Telling Lies. New York: Norton, 1985; Ekman, P. Emotions Revealed. New York: Times Books, 2003.

[22]Damasio, A. R. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon, 1994.

[23]Gibbs, N. “What’s Your EQ?” Time, Oct. 1995, pp. 60–68.

[24]See, for example, Bower, G. H. “Mood and Memory.” American Psychologist, 1981, 36, 129–148; Isen, A. “Positive Affect, Cognitive Processes and Social Behavior.” In L. Berkowitz (ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. New York: Academic Press, 1987.

[25]Fredrickson, B. L. “The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology: The Broaden-And-Build Theory of Positive Emotions.” American Psychologist, 2001, 56, 218–226; Fredrickson, B. L. “The Value of Positive Emotions.” American Scientist, 2003, 91, 330–335.

[26]Harker, L. A., and Keltner, D. “Expressions of Positive Emotion in Women’s College Yearbook Pictures and Their Relationship to Personality and Life Outcomes Across Adulthood.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001, 80, 112–124.

[27]Forgas, J. P. “Affect and Information Processing Strategies: An Interactive Relationship.” In J. P. Forgas (ed.), Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Leeper, R. W. “A Motivational Theory of Emotion to Replace ‘Emotions as Disorganized Response.’” Psychological Bulletin, 1948, 55, 5–21; Schwarz, N., and Clore, G. L. “How Do I Feel About It? The Informative Function of Affective States.” In K. Fiedler and J. P. Forgas (eds.), Affect, Cognition, and Social Behavior. Toronto: Hogrefe, 1988.

[28]Plutchik, R. The Psychology and Biology of Emotion. New York: Harper-Collins, 1994.