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

Becoming Aware of the Feelings and Emotions of Others

Now that you have logged your own emotions, played emotional charades, and generally have become better at being aware of your own feelings, we can begin to focus on other people. What are the people around you feeling? How do you figure this out?

Accurately identifying emotions starts with the basics: awareness. Many people we’ve worked with are just awful at recognizing other people’s emotions because they simply don’t look for them. It’s not that they are unable to figure out how someone is feeling; it’s that they don’t know to look for the valuable clues in the faces of people they meet.

The first step, then, in identifying emotions is simply to pay attention to the world around you. Just follow the method of Sherlock Holmes, the great fictional detective, who believed in the powers of observation and deductive reasoning. Holmes could find clues that others overlooked, in part because he was actively looking for them.

There are three main sorts of emotional clues that you can look for to help you identify others’ emotions accurately. What are they? Accurate emotional identification includes: (1) people’s facial expressions, (2) the pitch, rhythm, and tone of people’s voices, and (3) the feelings conveyed by the posture of someone’s body. Let’s consider each of these in turn.

Face Off: Others’ Facial Expressions

When people look at you directly as they talk or listen, it usually means they like you. They will tend to feel more interest in you and be more willing to cooperate with you. If people don’t like each other, or if they disagree with each other, they tend not to make as much eye contact. When meeting someone for the first time, if the other person both looks directly at you and is smiling, that likely means the person has positive feelings toward you.

Of course, directly gazing at someone can lead to an unwavering-stare. For most people, this is awfully disconcerting, and it should be. An unwavering gaze has been thought to be a sign of threatening and dominant behavior among certain primates. This probably applies to encounters with people as well.

Listening to Emotions: Voice Pitch and Tones

Klaus Scherer, one of the pioneering figures in emotions research, has examined ways in which a person’s tone of voice contains valuable emotional information.[4] Although such voice tones vary from person to person and certainly across cultures, consider the voice tones and their typical meaning, as listed in Exhibit 8.4, when trying to accurately determine a person’s emotions.

However, as with any such technique, it is important to modify your knowledge base and decision rules as you gather more data. For instance, individuals have their own vocal styles. That is why it is important to process the relative changes in vocalization so that you can calibrate your awareness to different individuals.

Looking Beyond the Face: Body Language

You also can develop your ability to read nonverbal emotional cues in someone’s body posture. Whether engaged in conversation or observing someone, you can pick up clues to the person’s feelings by examining their nonverbal behavior. The chart in Exhibit 8.5 illustrates aspects of nonverbal behavior and what the behavior may suggest emotionally.

Analyzing the face, voice, and body posture of your friends, family members, and associates at work may be just a little uncomfortable, especially at first. So we suggest practicing these skills by watching movies, an exercise suggested to us by Dr. Amy Van Buren. Pick up a movie at the local video store or library. It is best to get a movie you haven’t seen before. Scan through the movie and stop at any point where there are people talking. Watch the movie but turn the sound off completely. Watch the scene unfold for thirty seconds to one minute. If there are several characters, try to focus on one or two main characters.

At the end of the scene, stop the movie and write down how each of the two main characters in the scene feels using the Emotions Checklist shown in Exhibit 8.6. This can be a very difficult task, as all you have to go on are the visual cues and little context. After you have rated each of the two main characters’ emotions, rewind the video to the start of the scene you just analyzed and replay it. This time, however, turn the sound on. As you watch the scene unfold again, keep your Emotions Checklist in front of you and record the emotions expressed by each of the two main characters.

Turn the movie off and look at your emotion ratings. How similar-are they? Were there emotions that you were able to identify correctly just from the nonverbal cues? Were there others that you needed vocal cues as well in order to get them right? It is very instructive to review the emotions you identify well and those you have some trouble identifying. Ask yourself what clues you might have underemphasized or overemphasized. What did you miss? And of course, which clues were you really good at noticing?

Because the need to assess how people feel often occurs in public settings (and rarely while watching movies), it is a good idea to practice this skill in such a setting. Take care not to alarm unsuspecting people by staring at them, however. Use the people-watching form shown next or one similar to it that you make up on your own. Look for a “target” person, and observe him or her quietly and from a bit of a distance for a few minutes. Try to complete the people-watching form shown in Exhibit 8.7 as best as you can. If you are really brave, approach the person you were watching, extend a greeting, and ask how he or she is feeling. Compare the person’s verbal responses with those you recorded on the form, and compare the emotions you thought the target was experiencing with those described to you. Of course, if your targets are not interested in talking to you, we do not advise that you continue this exercise with them.

It’s fun and instructive to do this with another person. Both of you agree on a person to observe and evaluate, but don’t share your responses and ratings until after you’ve completed them. Then compare your ratings and discuss them.

We think it is especially important to learn to read facial expressions of emotion. Decoding the various clues in faces is not easy. A very well-regarded system of coding facial expressions, developed by Paul Ekman, examines dozens and dozens of discrete facial movements.[5] Computers are being trained to do this as well. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to enhance your ability to recognize emotional expressions in faces, nor must you analyze dozens of facial clues to determine how someone is feeling. If you focus on a few key principles of emotional expression, you can greatly increase your accuracy of decoding emotions.

Take a look at the table in Exhibit 8.8. It shows you the major facial clues for six primary emotions. Focusing on the mouth, eyes, and nose is an especially effective way to ascertain what another person is feeling.

It’s not the real thing, but we’ll share a schematic view of these features with you in Figures 8.1 and 8.2. It’s basic but a great start to picking up the visual cues of emotions.

Figure 8.1: How to Decode Emotions in Faces.

Figure 8.2: Basic Emotional Expressions.

Liar, Liar

Of course, one challenge is differentiating true from false feelings. How do we know if the person we are observing really is feeling an emotion or just acting like he or she is? Smiling, for example, is not always a valid indicator of happiness. Often a smile is voluntary, or forced, in order to mask underlying, negative feelings. A true smile involves both the muscles around the corners of lips— pulling them up—as well as those near the eyes, creating crinkles or crow’s feet near the corners of the eyes. A smiling mouth with no eye crinkles is not a real smile. A false smile also comes on too quickly, and the lips may appear to be more stretched sideways than curled upward.[6]

Sometimes these false smiles are clues to deceit or lies.[7] How can you catch an emotional liar? It depends on the nature of the lie or the situation. Strategies will differ, depending on whether the lie is a “white lie” and does not involve strong emotion or whether it is a high-stakes lie and thus generates stronger emotions. Let’s take a look at the low-stakes lie and liar. Consider this low-stakes lie communicated by a ten-year-old boy:

Father: Did you brush your teeth before getting into bed?

Son: Yes Dad, I did. Good night.

The boy was reliable and very motivated, so the father never doubted the statement—until a dental check-up revealed several cavities and the need for a minor root canal. (In fairness to the boy, the dentist said that the root canal was not due to poor dental hygiene, but it’s a good story.) Now, the nightly question became less routine and took on greater importance.

When strong emotions are not generated in a situation that involves lying, then you need to catch a liar using clues that do not involve overt emotional displays. In the tooth-brushing situation, one might especially focus on speech. Did the boy pause in his responses? Take a long time to say something? Make errors of speech? Say anything inconsistent?

Alternatively, consider a situation in which you have a new sales person. You find a major error on a large order and call him into your office. He claims that he entered the order correctly into the system but that one of the administrative people must have messed it up. He goes on to say that the admin person appeared to be bored and tired at the time he handed the order entry form to him last Friday afternoon. He apologizes for not checking the order and says that he will be more careful next time.

You know the admin person well and are surprised to hear about this lapse. But something is bugging you about the story, only you can’t quite put your finger on what it is. Certainly, if the sales person is at fault, it could be grounds for dismissal under the conditions of the probationary period of his contract. But he seemed so sure! How can you hope to figure out if he is telling the truth or unfairly pinning the blame on someone else?

In this case, the stakes are much higher than in the tooth-brushing incident. Lie detection strategies change when the lie is a big one. Big lies may be accompanied by more obvious emotional overtones. Now the way to catch a liar is to ignore the little clues of inconsistency in speech patterns and associated verbal clues. Instead, you need to focus on several aspects of the person, including nonverbal and verbal cues and, most important, subtle facial expressions.

When it’s a big lie, as in the sales example, we are more likely to experience strong emotions. If we are attuned to the person’s emotional displays, we stand a better chance of detecting the lie. The basic strategy is to look for negative emotional displays. Liars, when the stakes are high, are much more likely to feel strong negative emotions and to display them. People telling the truth usually do not feel strong negative emotions at all. Sometimes the liar attempts to cover up these negative feelings by smiling, but the smile will look false, as described earlier.

[4]Scherer, K. R. “Vocal Affect Expression: A Review and Model for Future Research.” Psychological Bulletin, 1986, 99, 143–165; Scherer, K. R., Banse, R., and Wallbott, H. G. “Emotion Inferences from Vocal Expression Correlate Across Languages and Cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2001, 32, 76–92; also see Bachorowski, J. A., and Owren, M. J. “Vocal Acoustics in Emotional Intelligence.” In L. F. Barrett and P. Salovey (eds.), The Wisdom in Feeling: Psychological Processes in Emotional Intelligence. New York: Guilford Press, 2002.

[5]Ekman, P. Emotions Revealed. New York: Times Books, 2003.

[6]Ekman, P. Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Marriage, and Politics. New York: Norton, 1985.

[7]Ekman, P. Telling Lies.