Wouldn’t it be RUDE not to recognise that our emotions influence our talent?

As we roll into the final hours of 2022 and look back over the year there’s a lot to reflect on. Some good times, some bad: life’s ups and downs. It’s also at this time of year that we come up with our new year's resolutions. What if yours for 2023 were to become more at ease with your emotions? ?

For some people, even more so perhaps for those driven by logic and analytical thinking rather than those of us who are more intuitive perceptive sensing or feeling by nature, it is difficult to accept that emotions play a vital role in our professional life and development. Here’s the thing though: we are all human. All humans have emotions. It’s normal, and whether we like it or not emotions are going to play a powerful role in how we operate on a day-to-day basis, how well we will perform, and how others will perceive our potential and ability to evolve and develop. ?In short, emotions influence how we manage our own talent, and how we are managed as talents in our careers and professional development. The workplace, and all that it brings, can sometimes feel a bit like an emotional rollercoaster.

Emotions can be hugely positive and beneficial to us, just as they can also be destructive and harmful. Listening to our emotions and feelings helps us to develop the emotional awareness to understand what they're telling us. We all need skills to harness and use our emotions to our advantage. It's never too late to learn how to handle our emotions. Emotional self-regulation can be life changing. As a manager-coach, recognising not just your own emotions but those of your team allows you to adapt the way you?accompany them in the most appropriate way to their needs, enabling them to perform to their best. Being able to discuss emotions and the impact of an employee’s work or conduct is crucial in being able to express the “how” during a constructive developmental feedback?

Let’s talk about emotions... ?

According to psychologist Dr Robert Plutchik PhD human emotions have deep evolutionary roots that may explain their complexity. ?Plutchik simplified this complex range of human feeling into his emotion wheel. It depicts 8 core emotions that are at the heart of our experiences, reactions, and sensations. ?

Taking each petal of the wheel in order, let's look at how emotion plays a part in how we interact. ?

JOY:?includes happiness, ecstasy, elation, pleasure, triumph, satisfaction, contentment, pride, and serenity. We can clearly derive this from our work, however it is just as likely to be an emotion derived from people we work with. An engaged and happy talent will perform and succeed, so it is in everyone’s interest to ensure people have joy in their work and working relationships.?

TRUST:?includes safety, hopefulness, positivity, security, feeling supported, comfortable, and relaxed. Clearly this is an emotion that should be fostered in our working environment, and one which the manager-coach has a responsibility to instil with and amongst the team. I’ve written previously on trust, and our fundamental needs of safety.?

FEAR:?ranges from terror, caution, to feelings of apprehension, concern, worry, anxiety, stress, and nervousness. We can at times experience negative emotions of anxiety and nervous stress at work or as a result of our work. The World Health Organisation occupational health guide states that good management is stress management. The most stressful type of work is that which values excessive demands and pressures that are not matched to workers’ knowledge and abilities. If and when we stray too far outside our comfort zone, we can all experience a little fear or worry in work.?

SURPRISE:?includes amazement, distraction, wonder, awe, amusement, shock, speechlessness, and disbelief. I guess that how this emotion surfaces and the impact it can have will depend on your line of work..!?Whilst surprise is generally expressed positively, distraction or unwelcome unplanned events can actually be very negative in some high risk or procedural work environments or safety focussed industry. Surprise can be very disorientating and cause for serious or damaging consequences in some work contexts.

SADNESS:?includes grief, pensiveness, regret, hurt, rejection, melancholy, discouragement, and feeling depressed. Clearly emotions on this scale are going to have a negative effect, and let’s hope that they aren’t provoked by something in the workplace. Let’s be honest though, we all have lives outside of work, and sometimes we will feel down for reasons external to the workplace such as divorce, the breakdown of the family unit, death or serious illness. There is little point kidding ourselves that we’ll leave these emotions at the door of our workplace, clearly they’ll be with us during our work day. ?When it comes to many forms of sadness, grief or depression it literally would be rude to expect someone to experience absolutely no impact on their work output, their performance, their engagement when processing such powerful emotions.

DISGUST:?includes hatred, disinterest, disapproval, revulsion, dismissiveness, repulsion. On the less intense end of this emotion is boredom, an emotion we can feel if we are not sufficiently engaged in meaningful work that meats our intrinsic motivational drivers. On a more severe basis we can also feel emotions of this type if we are asked to undertake tasks that we perceive to be counter to our personal values or beliefs.?

ANGER:?includes feelings of rage, irritation, frustration, insulted, bitterness, jealousy, offended. I'm sure we can all certainly think of times we have felt anger or frustration in the workplace. Knowing how to handle this emotion in a professional context is important as whilst all of us experience it, none of us wants to be perceived as the lion-like beast angrily coercing people around them with a ferocious roar. This is not a sound base of power or professional influence, and not a good emotion to demonstrate for any sustained period of time.

ANTICIPATION:?includes interest, vigilance, excitement, awareness, impatience, expectant. I’d argue that we all need to have a certain degree of interest in our work, and that that it is this feeling that will drive many of us to look to the future, embrace our potential and progress in our careers.?

It would be RUDE not to ...?

Ok, so it's time to confess to a little play on words here. I don’t refer to RUDE in the literal sense of impolite. Instead, what I mean is that not only is is really important that we handle our emotions, but that it’s also actually quite straightforward... Let’s break it down into 4 simple steps with the acronym RUDE: ?

Recognise: ?

The first step is simply to realise that emotions are at play. They could be yours, they could be someone else’s, or both. Recognise this fact, identify and name which emotions we are dealing with.?

Understand : ?

Once you have recognised the emotional reaction, the next step is to try and understand it. Ask yourself why this emotion? Why now? What does this mean? What triggered it? What does it mean for you? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Let me be clear here, a positive emotion isn’t always a good thing, and a negative one isn’t always a bad thing. Let me illustrate what I mean. An employee displaying overt and visible pride and happiness for a work outcome might mask the reality that they are taking all the limelight for the work which was actually a collective team effort. If the emotion is expressed individually rather than together with the others involved it is not likely to have a positive influence, indeed quite to the contrary. On the other hand, an employee who is upset or frustrated or annoyed at work isn’t necessarily a bad thing either: the expression of these emotions shows they care, that they are engaged, that they wanted to contribute to a result and aren’t satisfied with how it has turned out. Being an engaged employee that wants the best outcome is no bad thing.?

Decide : ?

Take charge and consciously decide how you are going to process it. Ensuring that the behaviour and conduct that flows from the emotion is appropriate is a critical step. On some occasions the emotion may be very strong and behaving in a proportionate manner would not be appropriate, and so you’ll need to decide to handle the emotion by temporarily masking it and taming your behaviour accordingly. In the heat of the moment, we’ve probably all had to sometimes bite our tongue, or sit on our hands to avoid conduct that might later come to regret. Ensuring this cognitive step of decision-making might just take a split second, but it is a sensible sense check to ensure that our conduct and behaviour won’t be perceived out of kilter. It is all the more important if your working environment isn’t very emotionally expressive as any sign of emotion may be misinterpreted or misunderstood. Working on my poker face and taming my natural emotional expressiveness has been one of my development goals for over a decade, and is something I'm still working on. ???

Express?: ?

Finally regardless of the decision taken in the previous step you will need to let your emotions out. Emotional expression is very important to our mental wellbeing as it is not healthy to suppress or bottle up our emotions. So perhaps you’ve felt frustrated or angered at work. Perhaps you’ve decided to bite your tongue and internalise how you feel without vocalising it. Make sure that you find an outlet for that emotion, which?may be later, ideally in a safe place, perhaps with someone external to the situation, with someone you trust and who will understand you. Our better halves are often great recipients for our emotional expression when we get home in the evening after work.?Regardless how, when or with whom, talking about it may help put things in perspective, to see things in a different light.?Or it may just get it off your chest. Either way it’s an important step, and one not to be neglected. As Bob Hoskins used to say in the British Telecom adverts of my teenage years : it’s good to talk.

So there we have it.

Emotions.

We all have them, we can all benefit from developing our emotional intelligence and knowing how to handle them. ?

With that I’ll sign off this final newsletter for 2022 and wish my followers, Linkedin connections, colleagues and friends an excellent celebration of the New Year and all the very best for a successful and fulfilling 2023! Thanks as always for your support, kind comments reactions and reshares. ?

Alan Lambert, Fellow of the Institute of Leadership and Management, is an International HR leader currently working at the Corporate HR Strategy division of a global energy major and is a Linkedin Talent Voices Talent Advocate award winner.?