The advice offered to Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man[8] (“but you gotta know the territory”) applies not just to sales but to all our interactions. That is, you need to have a basic understanding of a person or a sales territory in order to be effective.
Accurate emotional identification results in core emotional data that are required for decisions and actions. Without this base of data, how can we hope to make good decisions and take appropriate action?
Even slight inaccuracies can have a major downstream impact on our lives. It’s like what happens when we take a compass bearing and follow it to some distant point. If that point is not far away, a slightly inaccurate reading has little impact on us. But a compass reading that is off by just one or two degrees, over a journey of hundreds of miles, can lead us to a point very far distant from our intended destination.
Accurate emotional identification is important, even in seemingly routine managerial tasks such as budget planning. Consider a meeting in which you present your annual budget to your direct reports and seek their buy-in and agreement. Lots of things need to happen correctly for you to get the data you need. First, your direct reports have to feel that you want feedback. Whether that message gets communicated or not will depend on the way you express emotion. You may subtly invite comment, or you may send signals indicating that you really don’t want any feedback. Second, your ability to read between the lines and pick out the accurate emotional signal in all of the noise of the team’s moods requires a fair amount of skill. One of your managers says that the plan looks fine to him, but he sure does not seem fine to you, as he shifts nervously in his chair. Another direct report complains that not enough money was allocated for his people, but there doesn’t seem to be much passion behind the complaint. Likely enough, he’s just trying to pad his budget against possible cutbacks later in the fiscal year.
Recognizing negative emotions accurately is a key to our well-being and, in some cases, to our physical survival. Accurately reading positive emotions may not have immediate survival value (at least for humans; in animals it may be an important cue for a mating opportunity), but it does help us develop and grow. Opportunities to explore our environment, to experiment, and to invent arise from positive emotions. We approach situations and other people when we perceive positive emotions. Wouldn’t it be useful if we could detect the subtle signs of interest during a sales presentation or when we are interviewing for a job? Would that be a hint that you could use? Perhaps the encouragement you also seek?
Your ability to be aware of positive emotions and to recognize them accurately can provide you with extremely important information about your world. It’s easy to dismiss the hunches or the gut feelings we have, and perhaps some of us should if our emotional read is inaccurate. But if we are accurate, then attending to positive feelings means we are onto something good. It’s like the game kids play when they search for a hidden object, and the person who hid the object tells them whether they are getting colder (further away) or warmer (closer). Positive—warm—feelings can signal that we are on the right track.
Nonverbal information is often the basis for successful social interaction. This information consists of gestures, voice tone, and facial expressions. If we focus on a person’s words alone, we are at serious risk of misunderstanding the underlying message.
Although the concept of body language received bad press some years ago, when it was exploited as a tool to pick up potential romantic partners, a great deal of research has been conducted in the area of nonverbal communication.[9] Estimates vary, but as little as 10 percent of the information in an interchange between two people comes from their actual words, and the rest from tone of voice, gestures, and facial expression.[10]
Accurately identifying facial expressions and accurately expressing emotions is therefore a key to appropriate and successful interpersonal interactions. The person who is not skilled in identifying their own or another person’s emotions through subtle cues is likely to behave quite boorishly, whether intending to or not.
Once you’ve identified the emotions, it’s time to examine how these emotions influence thinking.
[8]Wilson, M. The Music Man. Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 1957.
[9]Henley, N. M. Body Politics: Power, Sex, and Nonverbal Communication. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977.
[10]Elfenbein, H. A., Marsh, A. A., and Ambady, N. “Emotional Intelligence and the Recognition of Emotion from Facial Expression.” In L. F. Barrett and P. Salovey (eds.), The Wisdom in Feeling: Psychological Processes in Emotional Intelligence. New York: Guilford Press, 2002.