What data are you leaving on the table?

Are you a rational decision maker? Do you look at the figures and facts and analyze the data from diverse perspectives before making a decision? If you’re like many corporate leaders, of course you do.

In focusing heavily on the facts and figures, are you overlooking another impactful source of data?

I’m talking about emotions. Things everyone feels, but may tend to ignore.

Emotions contain data. It’s up to you to analyze it.

Emotions are signals, carrying messages to be mined. We’ve been emotional beings much longer than we’ve been thinking beings, so there are a lot of emotional signals racing through our body.

These messages have good intentions. They are trying to help us survive.

But our environment today is vastly different from the environment we experienced thousands of years ago. The fear we felt at the sight of lightening striking close by hardly equates to a slightly barbed comment pointed in our direction.

It’s up to us to process the data in our emotions and determine how best to use it.

That takes six seconds – time to allow the emotions to register and move to the rational brain, where we can mine the data for information.

What’s the Data in Your Emotions?

Think of a recent situation where you experienced a variant of one of the two more frequent emotions we tend not to handle effectively:

• Anger –from mild frustration to raging fury
• Fear – from vague anxiety to complete petrification

Perhaps:

1. You were in a meeting and someone spoke over you, or
2. A team member didn’t deliver a project in line with your expectations, or
3. The CHRO suddenly called you for an urgent meeting

?Let’s consider the possible data in those scenarios:

1. Someone speaking over you isn’t life-threatening, but it may be ego-threatening. Perhaps they were excited by the topic, or they thought you had finished sharing your perspective, or they found you weren’t making your point clearly.

2. What caused your team member to under-deliver on the project? Perhaps you didn’t provide enough detail around the project, or set your expectations clearly, or support them in a timely manner when they asked for help.

3. The CHRO calling you for a meeting provoke anxiety, but what’s the data? They need to speak to you. Why? If you quickly reconfirm your people practices are all compliant, then perhaps the meeting regards a new initiative. Little evidence appears to exist to suggest you need to be worried.

When you sense an emotional trigger, take the pause and play detective with the data.

Then determine your course of action.

1. When interrupted, you might want to smile or raise your palm to signal you haven’t finished – and politely/jokingly/calmy remind the person you are completing your thought. If you recognize you do struggle to articulate your points concisely and clearly, you might want to work on building that skill.
2. For the unsatisfactory project, you might reflect on your reasons for selecting that person for the project. Were you seeking to develop them? If that was the case, in future, you might decide to devote more time to setting context, or seek their perspectives and feedback upfront - and refine the project accordingly. You might decide to set up regular check-in timings and encourage the project owner to reach out any time – and call you out if you cancel meetings or can’t give focused time to discuss project progress.
3. If you felt a little anxious getting an unexpected meeting request from the CHRO, perhaps you decide to calm yourself, prep yourself to be curious, and - whatever the situation - promise to yourself to reflect before speaking.

How you choose to use the data is your call. It depends on your analysis of the situation, past experience, your individual strengths and values – in short, your evaluation of the optimal course of action in the specific situation.

Whatever you do, don’t leave this data on the table. It may be rich in meaning and consequence.

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Andrea Stone is a leadership and team coach, supporting leaders and teams to increase self-awareness, self-management and self-leadership – and in the process, grow. She is a Preferred Partner with Six Seconds, leaders in Emotional Intelligence.?