A lot of what goes on at work is hidden from you. It’s beneath the surface. You can see people doing stuff like writing emails, drinking coffee, you can’t see motivation, resentment, or anxiety. It is these feelings – the emotional atmosphere of a workplace – that will largely determine how effective that workplace is.
How can you find out what’s going on beneath the surface? You can ask people and they might tell you, but they probably won’t. You can watch them and you’ll observe activity that might help or it might just look like random busy-ness.
How can you start to understand what’s going on beneath the surface at work? How can you begin to explore the emotional landscape of your workplace? Why is it useful or important to understand this emotional landscape? Because it reveals a whole layer of data that will help you to improve things at work and maybe anticipate problems.
What are feelings?
There are many answers to this question, but one way of thinking about emotion is as a communication – messages – from our unconscious mind to our conscious self.
Your unconscious mind processes most of the data from your senses. It’s like a massive supercomputer. You get to see the output, not all the processes going on behind-the-scenes. Did you know that your mind processes 11 million bits of information per second, yet only about 40 bits per second reach your conscious mind? That’s the power of the unconscious. You are reading this on a computer screen. You can see the text on the screen, you don’t really understand how it got there, do you?
The unconscious mind communicates with your conscious self using thoughts and feelings. You can understand complicated stuff with your thoughts, but it is always emotion that compels behaviour. Imagine sitting in the library reading about philosophy or investment banking and someone stands up and starts waving a machete around and screaming. It won’t be your understanding of thoughts about what is happening that gets you through the door to safety, it will be your feelings of panic. In fact you will probably be moving towards the door before you consciously register the person with the machete.
Feelings rapidly communicate what is important in your immediate environment. It tells what we should be paying attention to.
Consider this passage from Erich Maria Remarque’s novel about the First World War, All Quiet on the Western Front:
“At the sound of the first droning of the shells, we rush back, in one part of our being, a thousand years. By the animal instinct that is awakened in us we are led and protected. It is not conscious; it is far quicker, much more sure, less fallible, than consciousness. One cannot explain it. A man is walking along without a thought or heed; – suddenly he throws himself down on the ground and a storm of fragments flies harmlessly over him; – yet he cannot remember either to have heard the shell coming or to have thought of flinging himself down. But had he not abandoned himself to the impulse he would now be a heap of mangled flesh. It is this other, this second sight in us, that has thrown us to the ground and saved us, without knowing how.” (Remarque, 1958)
The sound of the incoming shell reached the unconscious mind, and the unconscious mind made a decision and triggered action before the sound had even registered with the conscious mind.
From now on, start thinking about feelings as data about your environment. Your feelings are just another type of data hitting your consciousness from information already processed by your unconscious mind.
Outside of work, emotions play a central role in our lives.
We love our families, get cross with them. We go to a football match and cheer on our team with passion and enthusiasm, or again get cross with them. We listen to a piece of music or watch a film and feel emotionally moved.
In contrast, our emotional lives at work are often hidden or tightly constrained. If we feel angry or annoyed or frustrated – or maybe excited and enthusiastic – we learn to minimise, hide or even, over time, repress those feelings. When we’re at work we carry on as if everything is fine. We put on a mask that hides our emotion and sends the message that everything is okay and we don’t feel that strongly about anything in particular.
Of course there is nothing wrong with that. We can’t be emoting at work all the time. It’s only when we get home and offload on our spouse, partner or significant other that the strength of our work-related feelings begins to emerge. If we’ve had a rotten day at work, sometimes that tension and anger builds up and we come home and metaphorically kick the cat – or pick a fight with those we live with.
A different approach to emotions in the workplace was popularised in the 1990s by Daniel Goleman’s bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence. Goleman is a science journalist not a psychologist or academic and there is little empirical evidence for the existence of emotional intelligence as an independent psychological construct. I don’t find Goleman’s work particularly helpful because it regards feelings as commodities to be exploited. The flaw with this way of understanding feelings is that emotions are inside of us – they are us – and they are enormously difficult to control. You can suppress them, but like the ‘whack a mole,’ fairground game they just pop up somewhere else.
Emotions can help when you become more aware of them, experience them, try and stay with them to understand and learn from them. We open the door to being curious about their meaning. That’s important because when you experience strong emotion at work, it tells you as much about what is going on at work – in the work system – as it does about yourself.
Try asking yourself:
What happened to trigger that feeling?
Why do I feel so irritated when everybody is smiling?
Why do I feel so bored when we are so busy?
Try and understand the feeling you are experiencing at work not just as an individual experience, but as a reflection of what is happening in the overall system of the workplace.
If you can manage to do this you will have access to a new layer of rich data about what is going on beneath the surface at work. If you want to improve your effectiveness as a leader, pay attention to your feelings at work. Think of them as a priceless stream of data that’s telling you what might be going on beneath the surface and maybe what you should be giving your attention to.
Questions to reflect on:
The next time you are in the office, pause for a moment and spend some time just noticing how you are feeling. Then write down a few words on a piece of paper (this is important) to describe your emotions. Use real emotion words like angry, sad, or cheerful.
Then start to think about what you’ve written down and start to develop some hypotheses on what that might mean. How much of your experience is just you and how much is a reflection of the emotional atmosphere of the workplace? If your feelings are reflecting the emotional atmosphere, why might that be? Is there anything practical you could do to change things for the better?
Remarque, E. M. (1958). All Quiet on the Western Front. New York: Fawcett Crest.