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

Predicting the Emotional Future

Emotions have rules, and they follow certain patterns and progressions. The ability to figure out emotional what-if situations— to determine what is going to happen next to us and to others emotionally—is one of the skills of emotional intelligence.

Emotional Progressions

What-if planning and analysis is a core managerial skill. Yet the most analytical of plans will fail if it does not incorporate emotional what-if analyses. You must consider how people will hear and respond to your plan. Will the plan and the way it is communicated make sense to your team, to the board of directors, to the customer? These plans must take account of how people are feeling, as a baseline, and then predict possible reactions to various aspects of your plan. It’s not easy to do this, but because emotions do have rules, or patterns, it’s possible.

Some emotional patterns seem to make more sense than others.-Although we could create any number of scenarios to illustrate almost any emotional pattern or progression, some of these scenarios are just plain weird. For example, let’s look at this emotional progression:

You are wondering.

You are surprised.

You are feeling shocked.

This emotional progression is complex, but I bet that you can come up with a story that follows it. Try it now. Write down a story that, as reasonably as possible, illustrates how you could feel each of these emotions, in order. Then read this story:

I was sitting at my desk, wondering what the impact of our poor quarterly sales record would be on the company. I was surprised when my boss said that our sales group might be impacted by the poor financial results. But when I heard that my position was being terminated and that I was losing my job, I was shocked.

Was it easy to come up with your story? If you told your story to someone else, would that person think it made sense? Or possibly consider it to be a very bizarre series of emotional events?

What if we were to add to, and then jumble, this list of emotions? Would it be harder or easier to tell a story that made sense? Would the story be reasonable, or would it appear to be somewhat unusual? Try telling a story in which a person’s emotions progress as follows:

Surprise

Wonder

Happiness

Shock

Sadness

Write these emotions on a piece of paper, and take a few minutes to tell a story about them—a story that makes as much sense as possible. Is it an easy task? Remember that this is not a creative-writing exercise; you have to tell a story that would make sense to you and to most other people. Sure, anything is possible, but the less an emotional progression follows the emotional rules, the less sense our story makes. It is difficult to tell a story following this emotional progression because the progression makes little emotional sense.

Progression of Negative Emotions

If emotions have rules, then it should be possible to ask which of the following two emotional progressions makes more sense. Read each set of emotion terms in Exhibit 10.2 and decide which is in the more sensible, emotionally intelligent order.

Emotion experts would likely say that Getting Mad B is a better illustration of how emotions work than Getting Mad A. We begin by being in a somewhat negative mood, not angry or upset but just a bit irritable. If that irritation continues and worsens, we become annoyed. When the annoying event continues, we become frustrated, as our plans are blocked and thwarted. Now this makes us feel upset, and the feelings build until we are mad. Turning our feelings toward someone else, we are angry at this person, and when that other person refuses to stop, we become furious. As the other person taunts us and we lose control, we become enraged.

It’s important to be able to figure this out. If you know how emotions work and how they don’t work, you can learn how to predict the future—at least how someone might feel if a certain event occurred, how a client will react to your proposal, or how you will feel if you take a new role.

Progression of Positive Emotions

Let’s spend some time now on positive emotions. Consider the case of joy. What is the progression of emotions that leads to joy? Take the list of emotions in Exhibit 10.3, and try to put them in an order that makes sense emotionally. Your list should end with joy.

Although emotions have moves much like chess pieces, emotional moves are less precise than those in chess. There are a few ways to order the emotions leading to joy, but the order in Exhibit 10.4 begins with a positive neutral mood—calmness—and ends with an active, positive mood—joy, placing the scrambled emotion terms in an emotionally intelligent sequence.

Try some other emotional jumbles, as shown in Exhibit 10.5. We don’t want to sound like people are completely predictable. That’s certainly not been our experience. But emotions follow a certain path, and they progress from one state to another.

Emotions really make rational sense, and you can leverage your knowledge of emotional progressions to help you become a more emotionally intelligent manager. We began with a simple two-dimension approach to emotional vocabulary. To that, we have added several layers of knowledge and emotional sophistication.

Emotions have rules. You can learn these rules and use this knowledge to help you better figure people out. Understanding the way in which emotions change and transition, as well as the underlying causes of emotions, gives you the ability to gaze into the future and to predict it with some degree of certainty. You won’t be able to guess the lottery winners or someone’s height and weight at a carnival side show, but you can learn to predict how a person will react to certain events and situations. This emotional what-if ability can help the emotionally intelligent manager to better strategize and plan better.

What do you do with your emotional insights and predictions? This is where the fourth step of our model—Managing Emotions— comes in. In the next chapter, we will describe strategies to help you become a better emotional manager.