One of the most important projects in my ongoing education is training my emotions and recognizing how vital they are in doing good work. We don’t check our emotions at the door when we come to work. And we take the emotional aftertaste of work back into our homes.
Our bodies and minds don’t separate technical tasks from emotional tasks. We experience every task as a labor of head, heart, and hands. The late Robert Solomon, a master teacher and professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, frequently reminded his students, “We are always in a mood. Moods are our way of being tuned to the world.” Our colleagues in social psychology remind us that moods are viral; we tend to catch them from one another. During the years, I’ve watched many student teams work on assignments. The emotional imprint of dominant teammates spreads. When leaders are upbeat and positive, that mood often propagates through the group, igniting ideas and helping people collaborate.
Good collaboration is never just about good information. It’s also about sustained energy. Just as positive moods are viral, so are negative moods. Even subtle moods are communicable. Clinical psychologists have, since the nineteenth century, commented on how difficult it is for the clinician to maintain attention and animation during therapy sessions with severely depressed patients. On the other hand, all of us have experienced the infectious laughter of a tv sitcom in which the laugh track and the comic situation build to a crescendo, pulling us in their intended direction.
This emotional convergence is what some psychologists have termed “entrainment,” a kind of empathetic dance in which people’s physiological states (heart rate, skin temperature, eye movement) actually come closer together (Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, 1995, 114–117). This research on “emotional contagion” is of vital relevance to every leader.
I’ve learned that I pay too much attention to what philosophers call the “vehement emotions” and too little to the low-key emotions, both positive and negative. Along with many of my students and managers, I handle emotions in extremis (such as emergencies or a highly charged argument) better than in more mundane situations. In daily interactions the emotions that challenge me are boredom induced by fatigue or a nagging sense of impatience—which I cannot always account for. The emotional traps that most of us walk into are usually rooted in these subtle sentiments that we think are less dangerous, and so we invest less in how we manage them.
On the positive side, I’ve learned that small efforts to warm up the emotional temperature of a meeting or a conversation can be very helpful in making the work more pleasant and productive. In academia we can make the mistake of ignoring emotion and attending too much to cognition. Good moods create a space in which better work can be done, and these positive moods can be triggered by modest effort. People can be put in a more positive frame of mind by being complimented, listening to music, or looking at a funny cartoon.
I’m learning that leaders, teammates, parents, and citizens can do a lot to provide that music. Getting every phone conversation, email, and family meal off to a good start with positive feelings—felt and expressed—is at the heart of leadership.
Sincerely,
Michael Thompson Associate Dean
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Marriott Alumni Magazine | Summer 2008
