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Introduction
Have any of these statements been made to you? Let’s not get too excited. You are being way too emotional about this. We need to look at this rationally. We are taught that emotions should be felt and expressed in carefully controlled ways, and then only in certain environments and at certain times. This is especially true when at work. It is considered terribly unprofessional to express emotion while on the job.[1] We all believe that our biggest mistakes and regrets are due to being overly emotional—the times when our emotions get the better of us. After all, emotions are remnants from 300 million years ago, when they were necessary for the survival of our species.[2] We believe that this view of emotion is incorrect. After 300 million years—give or take a few million—human brains have gotten bigger and more complex but still have the wiring for emotion. The emotion centers of the brain are not relegated to a secondary place in our thinking and reasoning but instead are an integral part of what it means to think, reason, and be intelligent. This is the essence of the work conducted by University of Iowa neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.[3] The fundamental premise of The Emotionally Intelligent Manager is that emotion is not just important but absolutely necessary for us to make good decisions, take optimal action to solve problems, cope with change, and succeed. This does not mean that you jump with joy every time you make a sale or that you sob your heart out when you aren’t promoted. Instead, the premise of The Emotionally Intelligent Manager replaces the conventional view of emotion with an intelligent view—one that might sound like this:Let’s get excited. You are not being emotional enough about this. We need to look at this emotionally—and logically. The Emotionally Intelligent Manager is organized around an abilitybased approach to emotional competencies that was developed in the late 1980s by two psychologists, John ( Jack) Mayer and Peter Salovey, and called emotional intelligence. [4] This intelligent approach to emotions includes four different skills arranged in a hierarchical fashion. We explain the importance of each of the four emotional skills and provide you with concrete techniques to improve and use these skills in the workplace. These are the four emotional skills around which we build The Emotionally Intelligent Manager:
Read People: Identifying Emotions. Emotions contain data. They are signals to us about important events going on in our world, whether it’s our internal world, social world, or the natural environment. We must accurately identify emotions in others and be able to convey and express emotions accurately to others in order to communicate effectively.
Get in the Mood: Using Emotions. How we feel influences how we think and what we think about. Emotions direct our attention to important events; they ready us for a certain action, and they help guide our thought processes as we solve problems.
Predict the Emotional Future: Understanding Emotions. Emotions are not random events. They have underlying causes; they change according to a set of rules, and they can be understood. Knowledge of emotions is reflected by our emotion vocabulary and our ability to conduct emotional what-if analyses.
Do It with Feeling: Managing Emotions. Because emotions contain information and influence thinking, we need to incorporate emotions intelligently into our reasoning, problem solving, judging, and behaving. This requires us to stay open to emotions, whether they are welcome or not, and to choose strategies that include the wisdom of our feelings.
Each ability can be isolated from the others, but at the same time, each builds on the others. Although we can measure, learn, and develop each skill on its own, the interrelationships among the skills, as depicted in Figure I.1, allow us to employ them in an integrated way to solve important problems.
Figure I.1: Emotional Intelligence.
A Diagnostic Example
Here is a simple example to show how this process model of thinking and feeling works. You are conducting a product development team meeting with a number of items on the agenda. There is some discussion regarding the items, and once everyone has had a chance to provide input, you ask for consensus agreement before you move on to the next item. Most of the items are discussed efficiently, and you have a good deal of agreement by team members. You find that you are moving quickly through the list.
The next item has to do with the latest changes to the product specs requested by your internal customer—the marketing VP. Such changes are not unusual; they have been requested before in this project, and you consider these particular changes to be fairly minor. There is general agreement by the group for the need to alter the plan, and you are about to move to one of the last items on the agenda. But something holds you back, keeps you from moving on, and you pause to reflect briefly before closing down the discussion. It’s nothing that anyone has said that gave you pause, but it certainly was something. Almost without thinking, you mentally review the requested changes and feel less sure about them. Something does not seem quite right—does not feel right to you. You consider letting this fleeting feeling pass. But even though you have paused for just a few seconds, you see that the pause has had an effect on the group. They seem a bit more attentive and have drawn themselves forward in their chairs. The mood is a bit more serious. One of your senior engineers speaks up and wonders whether the changes, albeit minor, will have an impact on any of the underlying architecture. It’s an annoying question, as you have covered this ground a number of times. Again though, you reflect that the vague uneasiness you just felt may have something to do with this very issue. You ask for others’ input, and with the now-more-serious focus, a number of team members point out that the product changes are much less trivial than they first appeared to be. You encourage this focused attention and analysis to continue, and in doing so, the team realizes that the system was simply not being designed with such changes in mind. Rather than looking for buy-in, you are now seeking information with which to go back to the marketing VP to demonstrate that the requested changes are not feasible. What just happened? And why did it happen? Our model of emotional intelligence begins with the awareness, recognition, and identification of emotion. Something held you back from moving on. What was it? First, there was the look on the faces of a few of your more senior developers that indicated some subtle signs of uneasiness and caution. Second, you felt some inner discomfort, recognized it, and did not let it go. Third, you expressed your uneasiness and sense of trouble by looking down at the floor, slightly frowning, and rubbing your hand over your chin.
The second part of our model explains how these feelings influence thinking. The fleeting feelings of worry and concern focused your attention—and the team’s attention—on a problem. Your brain, or something inside of you, is saying, “Houston, we have a problem.” Your thought processes became more attuned to search for and find errors and inconsistencies. And you did find them. Our process model then moves to an understanding of emotions, what causes them, and how they change. You determine that the change in the mood of the group is due to some potential issue regarding the requested product specification change. You reason that the growing sense of uneasiness is not due to either the lateness of the hour (the meeting is on time) or to any other external issues. It seems pretty clear to you that everyone is focused—and for good reason. The fourth and final part of our model indicates that because emotions contain data, we must stay open to them and integrate them. The very last thing you need is another project set-back. And you certainly don’t relish having to tell the marketing VP that these latest changes won’t fly. Many of us in similar circumstances might try simply to ignore the uncomfortable feelings, discourage them, and direct the team’s attention to the next agenda item. But you let the feelings hold sway, allowed them to redirect attention, figured out what was going on, and then stayed open to the wisdom of these feelings to uncover a serious problem. You have just employed an emotionally intelligent approach to core functions of managing, such as planning, flexible thinking, and adaptability. A focus on emotion does not make you weak or vulnerable; instead, it allows you to be much more able to face up to, and successfully cope with, conflict and change. This approach to managing is not just a reactive, passive analytical tool; it has a strong prescriptive and positive function. It’s not enough to uncover problems. The job of the effective manager is to solve problems, and this is where our emotional intelligence approach pays dividends. Let’s look at two approaches you, as the team manager, might use to resolve the problem you just discovered: an emotionally unintelligent approach and an emotionally intelligent approach. [1]Kramer, M. W., and Hess, J. A. “Communication Rules for the Display of Emotions in Organizational Settings.” Management Communication Quarterly, 2002, 16, 66–80. [2]Darwin, C. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. (Definitive edition with introduction, afterword, and commentaries by Paul Ekman). New York: Oxford University, 1998. (Originally published 1872.) [3]Damasio, A. R. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon, 1994. [4]Salovey, P., and Mayer, J. D. “Emotional Intelligence.” Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 1990, 9, 185–211; Mayer, J. D., and Salovey, P. “What Is Emotional Intelligence?” In P. Salovey and D. Sluyter (eds.), Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence: Educational Implications. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
