Putting Our Emotional Biases to Work for the Greater Good

Each of us has an emotional bias. There is one emotion that predominates our behavior style. To be sure, we can all display each of the four fundamental emotions but, one shows up more than the others. I personally know people who seem to be in a constant state of fear. There are others who seem to be happy and upbeat all the time. Still some are just sad and I know people who are angry about everything.

Because of our experiences, and perhaps some as a result of genetics and biology, we have developed an emotional bias. We all know people who are prone to respond to what happens around them in a certain way. The exact same experience can produce quite different responses. How we view what happens in our world depends on our emotional bias. We all know people who can observe a situation and get angry when we just can’t see what the big deal is! We also know people who will look at the same situation and come through it all with a smile on their face while we’re thinking it may not have been worth getting angry about that but how can you be happy now? People who get angry so easy or seem to be happy when the situation is dire, have not learned to be very emotionally intelligent. There are also people who are sad too often and people who are afraid of their own shadows. Learning how to connect with people through their emotions can be very helpful not just to us, but to them as well.

The danger with learning to interact through the emotions felt by others is that we can be become manipulative. We must guard against the possibility of connecting for the wrong reason. Others will eventually catch on and you will lose the trust of people you need. Therefore, it’s important that everyone be on the same page with respect to what we are trying to accomplish. So, how do you do this? How do you interact with others through their emotions? The first step is to get everyone to agree on using just 4 emotions as the basis for this work; fear, happy, sad, and mad. Next is to simply accept that the emotion someone is experiencing at any given time is the emotion they are experiencing. Don’t reject the emotion as being inappropriate or wrong in the context of the experience. Do seek to understand why the person feels the way they feel. Now we can all work together to deal with the situation from the context of any strong emotions being felt by various people on the team. Another important step is to start talking about the emotions we experience and observe. For example, if I’m feeling angry, I need to share with others that I am angry and what happened that has resulted in my anger. Another example is when I sense that someone else is experiencing a strong emotion, I should tell that person that I’m sensing that they are very sad, or scared, or happy or angry, and I’m just wondering what happened to cause this emotional response from you. By engaging in these conversations, we will all grow in our emotional intelligence. This is a good area for growth for any team.

By recognizing that we all have biases, we begin to understand that the way we see things is colored by those biases. When we realize that we have a bias towards one of the four basic emotions, we begin to understand that when we see a situation as being maddening, frightening, exhilarating, or depressing, that is our interpretation but not necessarily the interpretation of others. Once we begin to see that other emotional perspectives not only exist but are also entirely valid from the experiential reference frame of those who have lived those diverse lives, we open ourselves up to a new way of understanding the people we relate to on any given day. Rather than wondering why a person gets so mad about things that don’t particularly anger us, we can begin to examine the possible ways that we might be able to use that anger to help us solve what another person sees as an angering problem. It also gives us a chance to confront that anger and help someone try to find other emotional responses to the same conditions and circumstances. We can do this for any powerful emotion that interferes with our attainment of important outcomes.

Our emotional bias may not ever cause difficulties for our organization. But sometimes they do. Knowing how to deal with these emotions is a key to organizational success. Taking the time to directly deal with emotions is important for every organization. Thinking we can eliminate emotion from our processes is not only unrealistic, it is for all intents and purposes, darned near impossible. So instead of asking to leave their emotions out of the workplace, why not learn how to use those emotions to help us achieve our goals. Every decision we make has some emotion associated with it. Being aware of the emotions associated with each decision helps us understand where people are as we move from decisions to implementation. Practicing emotion checking during more routine decision making and every day activities, prepares us for those more highly charged activities and decisions. Like so much of what makes the best organizations more successful than most mediocre organizations, preparation and practice helps people anticipate what might happen during a crisis. Rather than leave those difficult moments to chance, the Legacy Culture driven organization wants to have outcomes they’ve chosen.