Does your organisation need to get more emotional?
2019 has been an emotional year! I have found myself exploring emotions at every organisational level. Whether it be individual or team coaching, delivering leadership development workshops, reviewing risk management or undertaking the role of Freedom to Speak Up Guardian, emotions have been the common factor.
The thing about emotions, about feelings is that we all have them, all the time, wherever we are, and we don’t leave them at home when we come to work.
Let’s not perpetuate the myth that we do, and I will even go as far as to assert that we should embrace feelings and emotions in the workplace. A question perhaps for all of us to ask is whether the organisations we are part of seeks to suppress our emotions or instead acknowledges the importance that emotions have on our performance, whether the organisation acknowledges how we need to feel at work does in fact matter and that it takes steps to enable and reinforce the feelings its people wish to have, that they need to have to thrive and be successful, in order for the organisation to achieve success.
If we are serious about our people’s wellbeing, then we need to get serious about our emotional culture
My confidence in making that assertion stems from having spent nearly 20 years developing, leading and coaching teams and leaders and more recently, facilitating Emotional Culture Deck Workshops. This has led to me beginning a certification programme to become a Pro Elephant Rider – no it’s not what you think, although that would be awesome!
I stumbled across the Emotional Culture Deck, a fantastic resource from Riders & Elephants, a New Zealand based leadership company founded by Jeremy Dean. Having attended a London master class in how to use the tool and facilitate the accompanying workshop I have become a huge advocate for this approach, delivering over a dozen workshops during the year as well as using it during individual and team coaching sessions. I am now beginning an accreditation programme to become a fully certified Pro Elephant Rider in order to help more people develop better emotional cultures in their workplace.
Reviewing contemporary research as part of this programme has further opened my eyes to the importance of emotional culture in enabling organisational goals to be achieved and it has prompted a reflection in me.
My career has been about dealing with, responding to, managing, influencing and trying to understand the emotions of those around me as well as those of my own. I just didn’t entirely appreciate that was what I was doing. I thought I was managing and leading the day to day business – and of course I was but when I look back what I was mostly doing was influencing, managing and responding to the, behaviours and attitudes (including my own) that result from the manifestation of emotions in the workplace.
I also reflect on how, certainly in my experience, conversations within organisations are beginning to change. I am frequently working with teams to identify, explore and quantify their emotional culture. Helping them and their leaders to develop enhanced understanding of how central emotions are in building a culture of high performance and the practical ways within which we can create that culture in order to achieve the organisations goals.
It has been hugely interesting to review the research around this. It underpins the importance of emotional culture as distinct from a cognitive culture, both of which are hugely important to an organisation’s success.
Barsade and O’Neill in the HBR Jan 2016 article make the following distinctions:
“Cognitive culture: the shared intellectual values, norms, artefacts, and assumptions that serve as a guide for the group to thrive. It sets the tone for how people think and behave at work – for instance, how customer focused, innovative, team-orientated, or competitive they are or should be”
There is no doubt that cognitive culture is important, vital even to an organisations ability to achieve success however it is not enough, and this is where emotional culture is so important.
“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 article emphasises that every organisation has an emotional culture, even if it’s one of suppression and that as leaders we cannot ignore emotional culture.
From a personal perspective how, I feel at work matters, it impacts on my performance. I want to feel certain things at work and in order to feel those things I need to experience behaviours, attitudes and norms that reinforce those feelings from those around me, from colleagues, from leaders and I need the organisational systems, people processes, reward and recognition approaches to enable both an emotional as well as a cognitive culture to flourish. My job requires me to be creative, to innovate, to influence, challenge, to speak up. To do that I need to feel certain things. I sat down one evening and used the Emotional Culture Deck to explore my own emotions.
The outcomes were that I need to feel courageous, supported, inspired, involved, confident. I am also pretty keen on not feeling disheartened, insecure, defensive, guarded, controlled.
I certainly won’t perform at my best if I regularly feel the way I don’t want to and if I continually feel these things you can be fairly certain I will be moving on to another employer.
So, how I feel matters to me, it is reasonable to assert that it matters to other people, and at every level of an organisation. The CEO wants and needs to feel certain things to be at their best, as does the middle manager, as does the newly inducted employee. However, it is the senior leaders modelling of emotions that is vital for they are being observed all the time, by everyone and they set the tone, the rules. The rest of the organisation is observing, assessing, judging whether the emotional culture that is evident and experienced is aligned with both the organisations and their own values. A lack of alignment here can lead to significant under performance and turnover.
The challenge here is that this is often going on beneath the surface!
So, it can be challenging to delve beneath the surface, and we need to avoid being reckless in how we go about it. However, I would advocate delving!
The surfacing of your emotional culture and the subsequent measuring and tracking of it will as CISCO Finance found:
“allow you to determine what your emotional culture is, what it needs to be and to gauge how well your culture change initiatives are working” Barsade & O’Neill, HBR Jan 2016
In exploring emotional culture with a range of organisations over the last few years I have found it to be some of the most interesting, revealing, surprising, purposeful and liberating work I have ever been involved in. I have learnt a great deal and as my journey through certification continues, I wanted to share some of that learning:
1. People want to talk about emotions. However, they need to feel safe and secure in order to do that. It is a lot to ask of an individual, of a team to talk about how they feel, how they want to feel and to explore the gap between the two. They need to feel and experience a high level of psychological safety in order to have that conversation. It requires people to take a courageous decision – to be vulnerable and they will be continually, internally assessing the risks to them personally of doing so.
The groups that achieve the most are those that have clear intent, clarity in what they are trying to achieve, show care and compassion for each other and are committed to seeing it through even when it’s difficult.
2. People need the emotional language. I used to ask the question ‘how do you feel?’ and leave it hanging there, patiently waiting for a response, sometimes having to watch the panic rise in the person as they search for the words to describe how they feel.
I don’t ask that question, in that way anymore.
It’s not always an easy question to answer and it requires an emotional language to do so. The wonderful thing about using the Emotional Culture Deck is that it provides that language and the structure to consider and articulate our feelings effectively, leading to significantly improved conversations.
3. Co-creating a team charter can really help. One of the outputs from the emotional culture deck workshop is to work with the group to co-create a team charter. This is hugely important to ensure that the team agree the behaviours, rituals, actions and habits that they will undertake to reinforce the feelings they need to have to be successful. The group will use this to hold themselves to account and to maintain positive progress in building their emotional culture.
4. Leaders need support to create a better emotional culture. We ask, quite rightly, a great deal from our leaders and for those that are courageous enough to embark on this journey we need to provide them with support.
The best tool in changing your emotional culture is the behaviour of its leaders.
The most successful teams I have worked with commit to team coaching, action learning sets and individual leadership coaching to ensure that they are supported (and challenged) in bringing the team charter to life in the everyday in order to create a better emotional culture, even when it is hard to do so.
5. It’s not about trying to be perfect. It is however about being more conscious of our feelings, emotions and the behaviours they drive. These impact on the people around us and in turn lead to emotions and behaviours in them.
Recognising the humanity in all of us is important.
We are all busy being human, we are busy feeling all sorts of things, in all sorts of ways, all of the time so if we value people on a fundamental human level we should seek to understand what drives their behaviour, seeing the world through their window to better understand them and in turn ourselves.
Summary
2019 has been a significant one in terms of my own leadership.
The workshops I have facilitated have prompted a reflection in me around my own feelings, habits, responses, mindset and leadership style. Some of that reflection has brought discomfort as I become more conscious about my own emotional drivers. It has led to me being more willing to be vulnerable with my colleagues and with those in my personal life and whilst taking that step has not always been easy it has largely led to significantly improved relationships and a sense of greater authenticity within me. I like to think that has led to me performing more effectively whilst being increasingly empathetic and compassionate with those around me, although that is really for other people to judge!
My journey to become a Pro Elephant Rider continues with 3 emotional culture deck workshops scheduled in over the next couple of weeks. I will be reflecting on how the planning and facilitation went, what I have learnt and to consider all the various ways within which the deck can be used. ‘Hacking the deck’ is a requirement for certification so I am looking forward to exploring new ways in which to use the cards enabling more positive and intentional conversations about emotional culture to take place.
It’s all been a bit of an eye opener!
Do you want to learn more about The Emotional Culture Deck?
There are a few ways you can you learn more about the deck:
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.
You can also contact me directly for more information: steve@thecompassionateleadership.company