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Why You Need to Use Emotions
The ability to use our emotions intelligently may underlie creative thinking. When people are able to get into and out of moods, they see things from different perspectives, and this perspective shift can often result in new ways of viewing the world. This mood-generating ability may also play a role in empathy — feeling what other people feel. In order to relate genuinely to others, whether they are employees, bosses, or customers, we need to be able to understand them and their feelings. If a team member is feeling anxious, and we are able to generate a feeling of anxiety, we can have empathy for the person. In turn, our sense of empathy allows us to form strong bonds with the individual. As certain moods facilitate certain types of thinking, we can be more efficient, generating, for example, a neutral mood before we proofread an article and a positive mood just before we go to a sales award ceremony.Because thinking and feeling are vitally linked, people who are good at using emotions to facilitate thinking can be better at motivating others. They may have an intuitive sense of what inspires people, motivates them, and excites them. This is the essence of management and leadership, and these skills have a strong emotional component to them, as recognized by this definition of leadership: “Leadership, which embraces the emotional side of directing organizations, pumps life and meaning into management structures, bringing them to full life.”[7] In addition, leaders lead through words as well as through powerful icons of meaning, or symbols. Symbolic management relies on the use of these powerful ideas to focus and direct organization and “symbolic management is effective because it draws on the qualities of the heart and of the head—and, at times, it entirely bypasses the latter for the former.”[8] Certainly, symbolic management and leaders’ facility in creating-meaning tap into their ability to express emotions. But that ability also has to do with the interwoven nature of feeling and thinking—the ability to match the emotion to the message in order to communicate on a deep and meaningful level. Consider some of the memories you may have of certain leadership moments. People from the United States can often recall not only the words but the stirring tone of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech. Tragically, many vividly recall exactly where they were when they heard that Reverend King had been shot. As England was plunged into one of its darkest moments, Prime Minister Winston Churchill roused not only the island nation but the world, when he spoke these words before the House of Commons:
We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender.[9]
Let’s take a look at some ways in which feelings and thinking interact. [7]Barach, J. A., and Eckhardt, D. R. Leadership and the Job of the Executive. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1996, p. 4. [8]Ashforth, B. E., and Humphreys, R. H. “Emotion in the Workplace: A Reappraisal.” Human Relations, 1995, 48, 97–125. (Quote is from p. 111.) [9]The speech is available online. See http://www.canadahistory. com/sections/documents/1940churchillfightspeech.
