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Why Understanding Emotions Is Important
Emotions convey meaning. It’s as simple as that. If we wish to understand ourselves and one another fully, we must have a sophisticated emotional knowledge base. Understanding emotions provides us with information about what makes people tick. If we understand the causes of emotions, then we have learned something very important about a situation: we can gain insight into the causes of a problem. If we understand the ebb and flow of emotions, then we know something about the future: we can predict, perhaps with some accuracy, how the person will feel next, if certain events unfold in certain ways. Our emotional vocabulary gives us a means of communicating this information to other people and provides us with an emotional language and reality.[7]
Figuring Out What Makes Someone Tick
There are huge differences in people as to why they feel a certain way. Consider the emotion of joy. Joy comes from gaining something valued, but what an individual person finds of value varies. At the same time, emotions obey rules, and if you understand these rules, you can understand people a whole lot better. Let’s say this morning your boss rushed into the office a few minutes later than normal. It’s unusual for her to be late, and she seems a bit distracted. A colleague nudges you and whispers, “The boss is not in a good mood today, I can tell you that.” You conclude just the opposite, because you understand that your baseball-loving boss is late because she took an out-of-town client to a baseball game last night. You’d figure that there is a good chance that she’d be feeling happy this morning, having engaged in an activity that she enjoys. You also know that it was a well-played, close game and that her team won. Your conclusion? The boss is tired but feeling quite content and happy.
Understanding Complexity
We all experience “mixed emotions” at times. What, exactly, do we mean by emotions being mixed? Mixed emotions are two or more emotions that are usually seen as contradictory, at least to some degree, with one another or in opposition to one another, such as happiness and sadness. One of our clients, a foreign equities trader, was known for her brash, aggressive style. “Typical trader mentality” was how most of her colleagues viewed her, and to some extent they were correct. She was quite successful in this male-dominated environment. On the trading floor, she could scream as loud as her male counterparts, and she was a gung-ho, take-no-prisoners Wall Street warrior. But Eva, like many such people, was more complex than that and did not quite fit the stereotype. Our first meeting with her was in a conference room off the trading floor. Eva expressed ambivalence regarding her role, was contemplative and thoughtful, and seemed both energized and excited by the nature of her work. But she was unhappy about the personal sacrifices she was making. She often seemed both happy and sad, energized and low-key. Eva is certainly not unique in this respect, and our ability to understand emotional complexity provides added insight into ourselves and others.
Predicting the Future with Emotional What-If Analyses
We’ve mentioned emotional what-if analysis several times. Now let’s look at it more closely. What-if planning is critically important, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re in marketing, strategic planning, research, production, finance, operations, or technology. New products are usually developed only after you run your focus groups, understand the market, analyze the competition, and forecast market trends. Some people are better at this kind of what-if planning and forecasting than others, although even the best of them still can be off by a significant margin. We can also do what-if planning and forecasting with people and emotions. We’ve talked about how emotions follow certain rules. These rules give us the data we need to do fairly accurate emotional forecasting. Consider a performance evaluation meeting. It is the end of the year, and you plan to give two of your employees negative feedback about their performance, a low rating, and no raise. Here’s your emotionally intelligent manager question: How will each of the employees feel? It’s a tough question to answer, so let’s make it easier: How likely is it that the people will feel happy, excited, and joyous? How likely is it that they will feel sad, angry, or surprised? Let’s give you some more data to work with. The first employee has been avoiding you for some time, and you suspect that she realizes that her performance has been sub-par. The second employee is harder to read, but he seems to believe that he’s had a good year, certainly not a poor one. The feedback you will give is almost identical in terms of performance. Emotional what-if analysis provides the tool you need to be able to make certain emotional predictions. Your analyses tell you that the first employee is less likely to feel surprised than is the second employee. Your knowledge of how emotions change over time also allows you to predict successfully that the first employee may become sad later on and that the second employee’s surprise could turn to anger at some point. This knowledge can help you better prepare for the feedback sessions, as well as your later actions.
Emotions aren’t completely predictable, of course, but at times they are more predictable than the value of a company’s stock. There may come a time when we train people to be mood analysts rather than equity analysts. The first three steps of the Emotional Blueprint prepare you to take action. In the next chapter, we show you what to do with the data you have acquired from emotions. [7]A good introduction to emotion vocabulary can be found in Ortony, A., Clore, G. L., and Collins, A. The Cognitive Structure of Emotions. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
