Why you need to join the Emotional Culture flash mob

There is an exciting flash mob starting to happen in workplaces across the globe. 

The workplaces leading the mob have been lifting the lid on the current emotional climate in their organisation by asking their employees how they need to feel to be successful in their roles, versus how they actually feel, because here’s the thing – they often don’t match. 

The leaders of these workplaces realise this mismatch is a problem, it’s a problem because there is a worrying glitch over what enables their employees success, which means there is big glitch over what will enable their organisations success, no matter how fancy patterns their business strategy and transformation agenda is.

The flash mob around emotional culture is starting to build momentum, as more and more companies are exploring what it takes to cultivate an environment where their employees feel all the stuff that supports them to shine and perform as their best selves. 

“Some companies have begun to explicitly include emotions in their management principles. For instance, PepsiCo, Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods Market, The Container Store, and Zappos all list love or caring among their corporate values. Similarly, C&S Wholesale Grocers, Camden Property Trust, Cisco Finance, Ubiquity, and Vail Resorts” *

This exert above comes from research featured in the HBR article ‘Manage your Emotional Culture’* back in 2016, and since then the number of companies putting emphasis on their emotional culture has grown.  Jeremy Dean, founder of Riders and Elephants and creator of the ‘Emotional Culture Deck’ has been running masterclasses on how to use the deck as a tool to be intentional around workplace emotions across the world in USA, Canada, Italy, Australia, UK and New Zealand, with demand going up by the day and the deck being used far wider than that. 

Interest has been piqued because leaders and organisations are getting it. 

Over the past 6 months I’ve been doing increasingly more work with organisations around emotional culture using ‘The Emotional Culture Deck’ – assisting them in actively focusing on how they want their employees, as well as customers and business partners, (because it doesn’t stop at employees) to feel and not feel as a key enabler to organizational social harmony, psychological safety and overall measurable business success.  

The more work I’m doing around emotional culture, the more curious organisations and leaders are becoming around what this emotional culture malarkey is all about. 

Below is my take on the answers to some of the questions I’ve been asked. 

What is meant by the term emotional culture?

“Emotional Culture: The shared affective values, norms, artefacts, and assumptions that govern which emotions people have and express at work and which ones they are better off suppressing.” * 

The above is the HBR slant. My definition is it's the general tone of how people are feeling and the behaviours prompted by those emotions, based on the environment around them. For example; if an organisation places too many rules and restrictions on its employees then they are likely to feel controlled or powerless, versus give them lots of genuine positive recognition, reinforcement and clear honest communications and they are more likely to feel appreciated, supported and connected.

How is emotional culture different to overall culture?

Emotional culture isn’t different to overall culture, it’s part of it. However, what is often being referred to under the banner of ‘culture’ is actually ‘cognitive culture’.

“Cognitive culture: The shared intellectual values, norms, artefacts, and assumptions that serve as a guide for the group to thrive. Cognitive culture sets the tone for how employees think and behave at work—for instance, how customer-focused, innovative, team-oriented, or competitive they are or should be.” *

Cognitive culture refers to the collective thinking and subsequent behaviours of the organisational group and emotional culture refers the collective emotions and subsequent behaviours of the group. It's the sum of the two parts that makes up culture.

How do you define thoughts versus emotions?

Thoughts

A thought is a notion that comes into your mind which it then puts language to. The notion is based on your individual experience, external input and subsequent biases (which you will have on some level unless you have lived in a small dark box all your life). 

Thoughts are basically like a movie reel that is running through your minds, some movies relay past events that have happened or are a prediction of future events that haven’t occurred yet. Some movies are completely made up, fictitious, triggered by what someone has said or something that occurred in the past, some movies are on a constant rerun loop in your head – those constant reruns feed your beliefs.  

Lots of change is often one of those triggers that prompts speculation and the fictious movie reel of stories to go into overdrive. When organisations do a lot of work on the cognitive side of culture they are basically looking to reprogram the movie reel to run on a certain story to get the desired behaviours and action to follow.

Emotions

Emotions are subconscious reactions used to tell us what your brain is picking up on or noticing. 

These emotions are pathways in the brain that show up maybe as the feeling of love you notice when you think of your nearest and dearest, or pride and satisfaction that you completed that marathon after all the training, sweat and tears to get to the finish line, or that feeling of impatience the barista is taking ages to make your coffee because they are chatting about their date last night. 

In the workplace it could be a feeling of overwhelm that your workload is out of control and you have just been given another deliverable by your boss. Maybe there is an emotional sense of disconnection that the same boss never listens to you when you tell them you’re super busy and need support, or talks over you when you speak and possibly even checks their phone at the same time. It happens. 

Emotions can also come up based on the movie reel running in your head (aka thoughts) that brings up the time you crashed and burned when you had to speak at a school assembly, but still haunts you to this day when you are asked to present at the next leadership meeting.

Emotions, like thoughts, can come up totally unexpected at any time, making rare or regular appearances. Some emotions pump us up, some emotions pull us down, others sit somewhere in the middle where we feel passive, indifferent, neutral and a bit ‘meh’.

Another important thing to note about emotions is that they are almost always coupled to physical sensations in the body.  If you’re not convinced then I invite you to recall a time where you’ve had butterflies in your tummy with nerves, or felt like you couldn’t breathe with anxiety, or your heart felt like it was going to explode with love or happiness. Get what I mean?

The reason this is important to note is that this physical manifestation of emotions can affect our health and wellness.

A workplace wellness report produced by Southern Cross Health Society and BusinessNZ, published in 2019, stated stress has risen by 23% across businesses in the past 2 years. That stress shows up as a physical reality that is not pretty, in the doctors waiting room, in corporate burnout and much worse.

The pic above is a Body Atlas, produced from research conducted by Finnish scientists, showing a heat map of where in our bodies we can expect different emotions to manifest the most. Emotions are more than just a feeling - they are a physical sensation that can impact our health in a positive and negative way.

What comes first the thought or the emotion? 

Google this question and you will find a range of ideas and answers. It’s one of those ‘Chicken and the egg’ type questions that’s a bit subjective. There’s not really a simple answer because it isn’t a simple question, there is a whole cause and effect loop going on. 

Ruby Wax in her book ‘Frazzled’ refers to this loop as being 

“Like a cat chasing its tail: feelings to thinking, thinking to feelings, feelings to … it’s endless.” 

The relationship between our thoughts and emotions is very much a symbiotic one. Basically, they riff off each other and this is why focusing on both within the workplace is essential to building a healthy culture.

Why should we focus on emotional culture?

Cognitive Culture and Emotional Culture are 2 sides of the same coin that makes up culture. The thinking side and the feeling side and as mentioned above they riff off each other, one affects the other and so on. 

Cognitive culture is traditionally where organisations focus which yes is totally important, but it’s only one side of the coin. It’s easier to see and rationalise the ‘cognitive, thinking’ side of the culture coin, as it’s the side that’s easier to spot, you can hear it and see it through what people are directly saying and then doing. Whereas the ‘emotional, feeling’ side is the less obvious underbelly of the culture coin, albeit equally important. 

The signs of how people are actually feeling are much more subtle and it’s easy to miss the emotional cues and not pick up them. However, they are every bit as real and significant.

Another reason it's harder to pin the emotional tone down is because it’s not necessarily logical. As Dale Carnegie says 

“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.” 

Culture is ultimately about people and people aren’t robots.  As much as there is lots of talk and debate around the rise of Artificial Intelligence in the workplace we are still very much in a world of warm sentient bums on seats. People think therefore they feel, people feel therefore they think. Organisations that only focus on the thinking, cognitive side of culture are missing a BIG part of the puzzle.

“Emotional culture influences employee satisfaction, burnout, teamwork and even hard measures such as financial performance and absenteeism”.*

Emotional culture exists whether you intentionally focus on it or not, so ignoring it, signals to employees their feelings either don’t matter or don’t exist.

Just take a moment now and recall a time when someone you interact with on a regular basis disregarded your feelings or made you feel crappy in some way, maybe they didn’t deliver on a promise, or repeatedly failed to ask for your input and on the occasions they did then totally disregarded it without explanation. How did you feel? I’ll take a punt and guess it was somewhere on the crappy, frustrated or neglected scale rather than the motivated, pumped and inspired scale.

“When leaders ignore or fail to understand emotion, they’re glossing over a vital component of what makes their organisation tick, and their companies and people suffer.”*

Maybe (it’s a big maybe) by some stroke of luck you can ignore the emotional element of culture and everyone will end up in a ‘Fantasy Island’ situation, where you have organisational culture nirvana – however it’s more likely you will end up nearer a metaphorical ‘Lord of the flies’ or ‘Hunger games’ situation. Do you really want to risk it?  This is ultimately about establishing a healthy relationship and synchronicity between hearts and minds on an organisational level.

Is ‘Emotional Culture’ just another organisational fad?

In my opinion definitely not because the emotional side of culture is always there, and it always will be. This work is about intentionally focusing on how to create a positive shift rather than being passive and accepting the status quo. It's about creating connection across the workplace in a 'speak to the heart' rather than a 'speak to the hand' kind of way.

As much as there are many big challenges being faced by organisations (and the world) today, such as volatile markets, the frenetic speed and pace, polarising politics and climate change, we are also in a time of increasing awareness and opportunity, where it’s becoming more acceptable to be vulnerable, to show up 100% as ourselves, to speak our truth and this means the emotional tone is becoming more apparent. 

Establishing a positive emotional culture also promotes psychological safety in the workplace, which research shows as the one of the key success factors for a high performing team. This means a workplace where employees feel; ok to ask a question without being made to feel stupid, comfortable to challenge ideas without being made to feel like the squeaky wheel and liberated to turn up as themselves without fear of being judged.

Workplaces that embrace and recognise how their employees feel are in the process enabling them to express themselves and encouraging the true diversity and individuality that invites. Rather than aspire to be a Stepford workplace that is a brittle and static and unable to adapt and flex with crazy wild speed of change that is the reality we live in.  

So, this is my take on some of the questions I get posed around emotional culture that may shed more light on what it means and why it’s worth focusing on. In a future article I will delve more into how to go about it, because I’m hoping you are now sold on why you need to join the emotional culture flashmob. It’s not just a trendy dance – it’s the way forward.

Once the benefits of proactively cultivating a desirable emotional culture are seen – they can’t be unseen, the question to ask yourself is whether you are willing to put in the effort.

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Lotty Roberts is a forward thinker in New Zealand in the field of Change Management and Leadership, with over 20 years’ experience delivering and leading others through large scale change and transformation programmes. Lotty has now founded her own consultancy business - ‘Mind U’ where she is devoted to helping companies and individuals build the culture, mindset, capability and 'know how' to mindfully lead and navigate themselves through change using her hands on experience and knowledge as a leader, mindfulness coach and change management subject matter expert. 

Do you want to learn more about The Emotional Culture Deck? There are a few ways you can you learn more about the deck:

• Visit www.theemotionalculturedeck.com
• Download a free Lo-fi PDF version of the deck at the website, click here
• Download the #emotionalcultureworkshop for free here (yes for free but I can also facilitate this workshop for you and your teams if you wanted some help).

You can go through The Emotional Culture Masterclass (like I did), click here for more info

If you still have questions, feel free to contact me on [email protected]

#theemotionalculturedeck #proelephantrider #ridersandelephants #emotionalculture #emotionalculturedeck