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What Are Your Strategies For Leveraging Emotions In the Workplace?

Do you have strategies for getting the most out of emotions in your workplace–strategies for yourself, for the work force, for the leaders in your organization, for your customers?

While doing research for a workshop on doctors’ communication skills I came across an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (“JAMA”) about using acting techniques to improve customer relationships. The JAMA article cites an intriguing look at the strategic use of emotions in the airline industry in a book called The Managed Heart, Commercialization of Human Feeling, written in 1983 by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Inspired in part by what I found in this book, I’ve selected eight ideas about the pivotal role of emotions in business that I want to share.

Point 1. Part of what customers pay businesses for, and part of what businesses pay their employees for, is a display of caring alongside the product or service being delivered. In particular, customers expect to experience a feeling that their well-being is valued by the company. As a bonus customers appreciate feeling personally liked by the company’s employees. If you are a business and want to give this sort of emotional satisfaction to your customers, the best way, and perhaps the only practical way, is to recruit, train, and lead employees so that they genuinely care about and even like your customers.

Point 2. Every emotion we experience is really a complex signal (like a command) to both our minds and bodies that triggers pre-wired responses according to our circumstances. Emotions prepare us for decisions and actions–and in hindsight this preparation is sometimes appropriate, sometimes inappropriate.

For example, a threat elicits the emotion fear, which prepares both our mind and our body for fight or flight by raising our blood pressure and alertness and reducing our reaction time while cutting off creative thinking, or for that matter, all thinking except about avoiding the threat. If the threat is physical, this is appropriate. If the threat is your boss saying she didn’t like your report, the response is inappropriate — or at least not helpful.

Point 3. We can learn and unlearn automatic emotional responses to certain situations. Back to the fear reaction, if we discover over time and repeat experiences that what we first thought to be dangerous is not a likely danger–turbulence while flying in an airplane comes to mind–most of us can unlearn our fear response. This happens when we compare each new occurrence to past occurrences which did not result in harm. In other words, if we don’t want a particular emotional response, we can retrain ourselves by associating a different emotion with the situation that triggers the emotion we don’t want. We can also learn, or teach others, new emotional responses. For example, if someone has had repeated experiences of feeling relaxed and pampered in a particular coffee house their memory will involuntarily summon up and signal the same feelings of relaxation and satisfaction whenever they are exposed to that coffee house.

Point 4. Emotions also automatically shape our physical appearance in a way that communicates what is on our minds. For example, the physical appearance of someone who feels threatened or otherwise highly stressed can be alarming to others, triggering in them a mirrored appearance of threat and stress.

Point 5. Emotions wind up being factors in many if not all business decisions. But contrary to our culture’s common wisdom, by themselves emotions aren’t necessarily rational or irrational.

For example, if you are about to be run over by a truck, fear is both rational and helpful as adrenalin is automatically dumped into your blood supply, boosting your escape power, while an instant vision of physical injury assists you with what we might consider a perfectly rational decision to jump out of the way. But what would happen without emotion? In the absence of fear you would be less well prepared to take appropriately rapid action. What if you tried to make a completely rational decision? You might first weigh the costs and benefits of changing your position versus getting hit by the truck. After this analysis, if you decided to move, then you would begin considering the most efficient route to take to get out of the truck’s path, taking into account practical factors like how far it would take you off of your intended course. In this instance a strong emotional reaction led to a better, more rational course of action than an in-depth analysis could have provided.

Emotions have a similar importance in business decisions. For example, when making a hiring decision your feelings of trust and rapport (or the absence of these feelings) aren’t absolutely quantifiable, statistically valid, or strictly logical. Nevertheless, they are highly relevant factors to weigh as part of your hiring decision despite their “irrationality” because the social fit of the person you hire will be important to your team’s long term success.

Point 6. As Hochschild examines at some length in her book, both sincerity and authenticity are looked for in relationships. Sincerity is about telling the truth to others, authenticity is about telling the truth to one’s self. The absence of either can cause turbulent relationships.

One of the most important functions of a leader, a sales person, or a coach is helping someone else uncover the authentic convictions or “truths” that lie within themselves. In other words, effective business people must be able to help someone make decisions that are appealing on an emotional or “gut” level as well as on a numerical or rational level. Decisions are certainly easier to explain when a valid comparison can be made between options on the basis of numbers alone. And of course, there is no doubt that preparation, including rigorous planning processes and the development of specialized expertise, makes an important contribution to many complex business decisions. But what happens when numbers aren’t available, or don’t answer the question being asked? In the real world there are so many intangibles and unknowns that pure numerical comparisons are of little value, or even misleading, for many business decisions.

For this reason your ability to facilitate people’s gut-level decision processes is a critical business skill which may be as important or more important than your ability to make quantitative arguments.

Point 7. Just as the author predicted in her book over 20 years ago, I believe that a whole generation has been raised by parents whose success at work has depended in significant part on their emotional self-management skills in managerial, teamwork, and customer relationship capacities. As a consequence, almost everyone now in the work force was raised in an environment where they were expected to explain their feelings and the feelings of others as a reason for making decisions and as a rationale for requesting action from others. We are persuaded by, and expect others to use, feelings-based arguments. Thus it’s critical for successful leaders and customer relationship representatives to understand the feeling rules or emotional expectations of the people they work with, then communicate effectively about the relevant emotions. For those of you interested in such things, this correlates to the concept of “self-awareness” in Emotional Intelligence and other contemporary leadership models.

Point 8. When she wrote The Managed Heart in 1983, Hochschild was a sociology professor at U.C. Berkeley. Along with her impressive first hand research, which focused primarily on flight attendants, and her valuable analysis of applicable psychological theories, she expresses concern about Management using emotional strategies in ways that are mentally and spiritually detrimental to Labor. Her book has a bit of an activist tone, opening with a quote from Karl Marx, and applying what might be considered a feminist perspective at times.

I respect the author’s viewpoint and echo her desire for responsible, ethical relationships in the workplace. But I also find that nearly everyone these days — whether male or female, self-employed, earning an hourly wage, or taking home an executive salary — is convinced that their personal success in business will depend in large part on their ability to apply the right emotions when working with customers and co-workers. I would also argue that improving our ability to promote the feelings we choose in business can lead to more efficiency by decreasing disagreements and poor decisions stemming from emotions, and thus more civility, improving everyone’s quality of life.

“Coaching for consequences” connects decision makers’ results to their choices

An increasingly popular leadership and sales style is the coaching (or facilitative) style. Among the advantages of this style are that it encourages people to explore their own motives, make choices and take action. A key component of this style involves pointing out the likely consequences of actions, or what I call “coaching for consequences.” I have two stories for you to illustrate this concept. (Each paraphrases an actual situation I’ve encountered.)

First example: after talking with me over a period of weeks about ways to wake up the internal motivation in his employees, one of my clients, “G”, recently had the following exchange with one of the managers working for him, “M”.

G: You know M, I’ve noticed that fairly regularly you get to work about 10 to 15 minutes after we open. Am I pretty close?

M: Yes, I’ve been late a lot lately. I really don’t know why; I wish I could do something about it.

G: I’ve also noticed that you seem stressed when you start late, and the stress can last for a long time. What have you noticed?

M: I really hate being late. It always takes me hours to get back to where I want to be and feel like I’m caught up.

G: As your manager, I need to tell you that I’m concerned about the example you are setting for the people working under you. I’m also concerned that your stress might be affecting them and bringing down their performance. What do you think about this?

M: I agree with you. My being late is definitely not good for them.

G: Here’s what I’m wondering. What would happen if you did whatever you had to do to get in a little early every day instead getting in late? How would this make you feel in terms of your stress level, and how would this affect your people?

M: You know, I’d probably feel a lot better and my work would go better and I’d be a more effective manager, too.

G: What are you going to do?

M: I’m going to figure out how to get in early from now on. Thanks — I think I know what to do now.

Guess what happened? The short answer is: it worked. This guy started coming in early and was able to keep it up because he quickly became accustomed to the consequences he experienced, including relief from stress.

Second example: this week I met with a potential client who told me he wants to stop procrastinating in answering his email. We talked about the amount of money and the stress he thought it was costing him. Then I said: “A few minutes ago, you thanked me for answering on Saturday night the e-mail you sent Friday afternoon. When you sent it I was out of the office and couldn’t reply right away. I replied as soon as possible because I thought you might appreciate it. So: how did it feel when you received it?” My client admitted that it had felt really good to get that response, and he recognized an opportunity. He resolved to start giving that emotional satisfaction to his customers. When squarely presented with consequences — feeling bad and losing money by procrastinating, taking pride in delivering satisfaction to people who matter — choosing appropriate action seemed much easier.

The role of the consequences coach in both of these examples was to help point out both the positive and negative consequences that flow from a particular course of action.

Please notice that in neither example did the coach (including the boss, contrary to popular stereotype) add the consequence of getting mad at and/or intimidating the person who was having trouble getting their job done! In fact, psychologist H. Stephen Glenn has pointed out that getting angry at someone for making the “wrong” decision shifts focus away from making a good choice based on consequences and makes the decision about the other person’s aggressiveness. Think for a moment about dealing with somebody who is really angry. Their anger may change or even dominate the decision made in the short run, but little learning is done or ongoing behavior change accomplished by the decision maker. In fact, when the anger or the angry person is no longer part of the picture our decision maker will probably have just as much difficulty making a good choice as before.

In a broader perspective, although decision by intimidation can bring about a short term decision we want someone to make, it doesn’t contribute to the development of either high delegation leader-team relationships or high trust seller-buyer relationships.

Designing Consequences. Glenn identifies “natural consequences” as those things which inevitably result from the actions we take. “What goes up must come down” comes to mind, or maybe “we’re going nowhere with no gas in our tank.” Glenn also encourages leaders to create “logical consequences” which motivate decision makers without punishing them (where getting mad and yelling would be considered a form of punishment). In line with Glenn’s thinking, consequences that are created to facilitate good decision making should be 1) PROPORTIONATE – not excessive or trivial considering the circumstances, 2) OBJECTIVE – not motivated by anger or retribution, and 3) CONNECTED – causally linked to the action being discussed.

For example, a logical consequence for someone who fails to keep reimbursement records might be to expect them to pay undocumented expenses out of their own pocket. This consequence is proportionate in a pound for pound sense; objective because anger or a desire to punish don’t enter into it; and connected because it arises only when records aren’t kept for the expenses in question.

Articulating what’s on everyone’s mind improves everybody’s choices

To be articulate is to be clear. And by clear I mean that you understand what you are saying, the person you are communicating with understands what you are saying, and the understanding you have and the understanding they have match pretty closely. (By way of contrast, one of the reasons why computers need their own languages to operate is because most of what human beings say in ordinary language isn’t particularly clear — it can’t be taken literally.)

Articulating what we are thinking, observing, feeling, and requesting from someone can be more difficult, frustrating, and irritating than we would like.

Effective leaders, sellers, and negotiators go one step further: they are not only skilled at articulating their own thoughts, they are skilled at articulating what others are trying to say, whether or not what they are saying is particularly clear to begin with. Being able to accurately and helpfully articulate what someone else is putting forward not only helps you understand them and gives them the feeling that you understand them (with the respect that entails), it actually helps them understand themselves.

Very often — or so those skilled at articulation say — people change their minds after hearing themselves say out loud what they are trying to say. It helps them become clear about their own observations, perceptions, feelings and wants. Which is why it behooves someone who strives to be a good leader, seller, or negotiator to focus both on clarity in what they say and on clarifying what others say to them.

For further reading: Vancouver B.C. consultant and professor Gervase Bushe’s book entitled “Clear Leadership” may be a challenge for the average business reader because of its detailed references to psychological theory, but its explanation of the whys and hows of articulate communication is unmatched.

Ask for permission, listen, and hold off on disagreement to facilitate decisions

Here’s a simple rule of thumb for effective communication: in any important conversation (and every business conversation) ask yourself: who is this about? Another way to put it is: who has to make a choice here? When you want to lead, sell something, or reach agreement with someone, someone besides yourself has choices to make. It’s going to be “about them” at least half of the time. You can’t control their decision — if you did it would be coercion, not leadership, sales, or negotiation — but you can facilitate by asking for permission, listening more than you talk, and showing respect even when you hear what you don’t want to hear. The following example of poor communication style, and the advice I gave the communicator, applies equally to leaders, sellers, and negotiators.

This afternoon an unsolicited caller offered me something I don’t want at this moment, a web site development, hosting, and marketing package.

I waited patiently through his intro — after all, it’s my business to listen without feeling threatened by or taking personally what people say and how they say it. When he finally paused, which he had to do because he wanted to confirm my postal address, I said: “you know, there is a lot of information that is important to you for me to hear. And I appreciate that. But what you haven’t done yet is ask whether I want to have this conversation with you.”

After a short silence he thanked me in a lower tone for paying him the respect of telling him this. And after I confirmed that I really didn’t need his services without denying the value of his services to others, he asked me to help him improve his delivery style. We wound up talking for around ten minutes. I’m glad it was on his bill because I’m guessing the call was coming from India.

The number one thing I recommend to you, I told him, is to listen to the people you are trying to communicate with. Give them opportunities to tell you what they want, they’ll be happier, feel respected, and trust you more.

The number two thing, I said, is not to be afraid of people saying “no.” Expect it will happen on occasion, for a variety of reasons, most of them beyond your control, and accept it gracefully when it does. If you are afraid of what they may say, they will hear in your voice that something is wrong. It will also negatively affect your judgment when choosing how to speak to them. The key here is to listen with an open mind to what makes their answer “no,” then you can move forward together if there is still common ground between you.

The number three thing, I said, is to ask for permission to go on soon after you initiate the conversation. (This is number three only because it combines the first and second things.)

He told me that this advice was worth more than a “yes” to his offer. And at the end of our conversation he asked if he could call back again some time — to talk more about his communication style. I agreed. And just in case you were thinking of thanking me for supporting his intentions to become a better listener before calling you: you’re welcome. Furthermore I encourage you to occasionally accept responsibility for giving telephone callers constructive feedback about their calling style.

Homework for the week: ask yourself what would happen if you applied the same assumptions you make about the people you’re doing well communicating with to the people you’re not doing so well with? For example, what if you spoke to the people you work with and your customers in the same way, with the same amount of emphasis on respect and candor? Liking or not liking someone really has very little to do with it — you choose your approach towards each person. (If you do this, write to tell me your results — it will help you remember what you discovered and I’ll enjoy the feedback.)