Like millions of other people, my college basketball consumption has peaked in the past few weeks. Even for non-sports types, it’s tough not to get excited about all the upsets and buzzer beaters that come along with March Madness. When I started getting, “What a game!” texts from my mom, I knew we’d crossed a cultural threshold. Despite the fact that regular season basketball viewership is down considerably, more people than ever are tuning in to the tournament. I’m no Dick Vitale, but it’s not hard to tell why people get so into college ball this time of year: the drama! It’s inspiring to watch these guys pour their hearts into every play. The emotion is palpable, alluring, and contagious.
For better…
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Wichita State players after stunning Gonzaga
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Jim Larranga after Miami beat Illinois
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And for worse…
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The Michigan State towel fight
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Is Marshall Henderson Crazy?
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Watching athletes leverage feelings to build momentum and carry their teams to victory, or inversely spiral out of control, got me thinking about the role of emotions in the workplace. On one hand, emotional intelligence is now revered as a critical leadership skill. On the other, outwardly emotional displays – tears, whoops, aggressive fist pumps, etc. – are often considered uncouth at the office. There are a couple of reasons I can see for this:
- There are still remnants of business’s machismo past in the average company. For some, emotionality and femininity are equal. People of both genders confuse femininity with weakness, or worse hysteria, and cap their willingness to let feelings fly.
- While we like to observe and absorb the “afterglow” of others emotions, dealing with our own is still difficult. Feelings muddle the simplicity of pure logic and make decisions, professional relationships, and group dynamics harder.
The important question is, are we subverting potential personal and team-based performance improvement opportunities by overly regulating our emotions? According to Wharton management professor Sigal Barsade, the answer is “yes”.
Manipulating our own emotional experiences isn’t easy, but it is doable. One approach called “surface acting” involves faking particular emotional responses to meet colleagues’ or customers’ expectations. Consider the waiter who slaps a smile on his face and forces himself to adopt a caring tone to soothe a customer whose meal is served cold. The other way of dealing with emotional labor is called “deep acting” in which we experience and share authentic empathy with those we interact with. In this case, the same waiter would sympathize with the customer and show the earnestness of that concern in the way he communicates with her.
My hunch is that most workplaces will never have the same level of emotionality as athletic competitions. In many cases, work activities are too mundane and compartmentalized to give people a reason to get excited. But there are ways to crank up the emotional resonance of your work experience.
- At the personal level, start by getting better in tune with your own emotions. Be real with yourself and with others about how you’re feeling, but focus on compassion. We’re all stressed. We’ve all got things going on at home. Being authentic is both the path of least resistance and a driver of better outcomes.
- From a leadership perspective, you can significantly increase your team’s emotional connection with work by “gameifying” it. Empower people to set “unrealistic” goals that need to be accomplished in very short periods of time, and give them license to do whatever it takes to win. Here’s more on how that works.
Lastly, Go Blue!
What’s your experience with emotions in the workplace?
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