The McGRAW-HILL 36-Hour Course Organizational Development (McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Courses) by Stephen R. Balzac

Author:Stephen R. Balzac [Balzac, Stephen R.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Published: 2010-09-27T14:00:00+00:00

UNDERSTANDING KEY EMOTIONS IN LEADERSHIP

I hear all the time about how there is no room for emotions in the office. Yet, the companies where I’ve seen this implemented are only putting on a front. Under pressure they are as emotional as anyone else. I still remember, from early in my consulting career, the manager of a team screaming at me that he did not allow emotions to influence his behavior. For some odd reason, the irony of the moment was lost on him.

I am frequently asked how I can tell whether or not emotions will really matter to a team. Is there some reliable way of recognizing when you have a prospective employee who will not be influenced by such unpredictable, unprofessional, and messy things as emotions? In fact there is. Computers and robots are not emotional. In the event that you have robots interviewing for jobs at your company, you can be reasonably sure that they will not act based on emotion.

If you’re dealing with people, that means you’re dealing with emotions. You can’t deny it, avoid it, or prevent it. Therefore, it helps to understand which emotions really matter. There are four that form the basis of most organizational behavior: fear, affiliation, autonomy, and competence. The secret to being an effective leader is understanding and being able to manage these four emotions well.

Fear

Fear is an amazingly popular motivator, in large part because it is so easy to use. Just because it’s easy to use doesn’t mean it’s useful, though.

Fans of Mel Brooks’s 2,000-year-old man might recall that he described the primary means of motivation in “those days” as fear: when the lion popped up, you were motivated to run the other way. Fear is very effective at getting people to move away from something. Scare someone enough and he’ll move very rapidly away from the source of that fear even if that means slamming full tilt into a tree.

Despite its popularity, fear leaves something to be desired as a way of motivating employees. In one of my first jobs out of college, I got “the talk.” It was my first or second day on the job at a Silicon Valley start-up, and the VP of engineering stood over me and lectured me about how high his standards were, what was expected from employees at a start-up, what would happen if we didn’t measure up, and so forth. At the very end, he said, “And I’m a serious hunter. I have several guns at home. What do you do for fun?”

The effects of his talk were easy to see in the behavior of the team: blaming and finger-pointing were the norm, not cooperation and problem solving. This was less a team than a horde, bravely charging forward in vaguely the same direction, each member quite willing to hang another out to dry.

Fear, however, does not manifest just as a “motivational” tool. Fear has a way of influencing a great many decisions. Hiring can drag on for weeks or months because everyone involved in the decision is afraid of hiring the wrong person.

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