Using Emotions for a Leadership Advantage

United States, 2020.

Emotions can be a real nuisance, both in our personal lives and our work. You’re planning to have a nice evening hanging out with some friends, but you keep thinking about the rude driver who cut you off in traffic on the way, and you get so angry that you can’t enjoy yourself. Or you’re making an important presentation, and a minor criticism a co-worker made about your slide deck puts you on tilt. What if she’s right, and everyone sees that you’re a fraud? Your reasoning mind knows that you are well prepared, have all the facts, and are sure to make a good impression, but your amygdala, the part of your brain concerned with emotions, keeps flooding you with doubt and insecurity.

Given the problems that emotions can cause, there is a strong temptation to want to turn them off, especially at work, where we want reason to take the lead. Tamping down emotions in this way is, of course, unrealistic, and attempts to do so can result in even worse problems when the suppressed emotions find another way to express themselves. But I would argue that at work, and especially for leaders, emotions are not just a nuisance to be minimized. Rather, they are an important tool that, properly managed, can provide knowledge and insight

We have emotions, and sometimes act on them, for a reason. The world is a complex place, and we can’t notice and analyze everything going on around us with our conscious minds. One function of emotions is to pick up on important, if sometimes subtle, information and bring it to our immediate attention. If we feel scared, there may well be something threatening out there we should avoid. If we feel disgust, we may be in the presence of something unhealthy. If we’re angry, something may be wrong that needs a response.

However, emotions are rarely subtle, and can often be “wrong” in the sense that the strength of the emotion is out of balance with the trigger. The human mind, with its complex interplay between conscious and unconscious, and emotion and reasoning, evolved in a quite different environment than any of us currently live in, so it’s not surprising that emotional responses sometimes seem out of whack. But what’s amazing is how often emotions pick up on something real that we otherwise might have missed.

“Making use of the power of your emotions doesn’t mean acting on the emotions”

Making use of the power of your emotions doesn’t mean acting on the emotions, or even expressing them to others (though knowing when to express your emotions is an important leadership skill I will discuss in a future post.). Rather, I am suggesting that you should practice being aware of your emotions, letting them wash through you without acting on them, and analyzing why you might be feeling that emotion. Figuring out the trigger may give you important information you would otherwise be leaving on the table.

For example, I had one client who was working on a due diligence project for a private equity firm that was considering investing in a company. She became very angry during the first meeting with the team from the company. She didn’t show the anger, but sat with it and tried to delve into where the anger was coming from. She realized that it was connected with her strong aversion to dishonesty. Even though she hadn’t consciously noticed any lies, her emotional mind had picked up clues suggesting that something wasn’t right. Based on this insight, she made sure to check everything they were being told even more than usual. As a result she discovered that the company’s management was misrepresenting the company’s situation, and was able to save her firm from investing in an unsound company.

So when you have emotions at work, don’t let them control you, but also don’t just try to tamp them down and ignore them. Feel them and explore them with curiosity, letting them tell you their hidden information. You might just end up with an important insight that can affect the bottom line.