Leadership and Emotions & Emotional Listening – Practising ‘ET’

Many readers of my blog were interested in my earlier post on the COMET model of communicating.  They asked, however, how they and others might do better at the E and the T parts of the model.  Here are a few tips for doing that.

You may be wondering what role emotions have in leadership, which you may perceive as something of an art or science and which requires discipline, decisiveness, sometimes “tough calls” and decisions which may be upsetting for other people. Emotions, in fact, are an indispensable tool to successful leadership for these very reasons.

Recognising and acknowledging your emotions

Recognising the existence of emotions and actually being up-front in acknowledging their existence means that the members of the organisation can truly express how they feel in an interaction, e.g. between a manager and a staff member. The staff member may tell the manager: “I am upset with that decision” (personal input), rather than, “I don’t like your decision” (professional input), or “I think your decision is wrong” (professional input). It means that a different dimension can be created in an organisation in terms of the way people relate. It means that people can bring into the organisation more than just a “professional” relationship; by making some personal input they bring more of themselves into the organisation.

Being yourself in expressing emotions

Many CEOs who are fearful or nervous about emotions will find this approach quite threatening. If you are reacting this way, it is important that you look seriously at why. Emotions are part of everyone. If we put them ‘under the table’ and say: “Well, this is a professional organisation and we are here to do business and that is all”, the emotions in everyone will then have a ‘lid’ put on them. It is only a matter of time before this lid comes off like a pressure cooker, and it could explode in your face. This happens in many organisations, and it could happen by way of:

• documents leaking,
• sabotage,
• people not performing well,
• high absenteeism rates, or
• Workcover costs spiralling.

These are just some examples of what happens when people cannot be themselves or truly express themselves.

I am not suggesting that you conduct yourself in the organisation in a highly-charged emotional state. What I mean is that you actually acknowledge the existence of emotions and that people will get upset about certain things, that people will be happy about certain things and that you yourself, especially if you are the senior manager or CEO, should feel able to express what emotion you are feeling at the time of discussion, especially surrounding a major decision. This means that if you can do it as a CEO, other staff will feel free to express themselves. This is a way of freeing up the organisation and making it truly a learning organisation (this will be the subject of another post shortly).

Emotions and judgement in decision-making

Emotions tend to cloud our judgement at times. The reason for this is that when we are emotionally charged, either angry or happy, our ability to reason is very affected. We need to be aware when this is happening so that we can avoid decisions when we are feeling this way.

If we do not recognise our emotions, we are likely to make decisions while we are in an emotional state. This is especially so for people who say they are ‘professional’ at all times. Unfortunately, my experience suggests that the very people who say they are always ‘professional’, are very often so emotionally charged that their judgement is impaired greatly.

Listening “emotionally”

As well as admitting to your own emotions and accepting those expressed or felt by others, it is also vitally important that you listen emotionally. You may already believe that you are a good listener, always available to your staff, practice an ‘open door’ policy etc., but ask yourself how carefully you listen to what is being said, or not said, to you. Particularly if you are not one to talk about feelings, it is almost a given that you will not pick up the emotions expressed, or repressed, by those with whom you deal. You need to sensitise yourself to acquiring this skill.

The skill can be acquired by asking questions of yourself about how you and others might feel (rather than think) when something is said or something is done. Using the word “feel” helps; using the word “think” doesn’t help. Using the word “think” gives a sense of where you or other people are at ‘intellectually’ or how an idea might be received, whereas using the word “feel” gives you an understanding of your or other people’s vulnerabilities and fragilities or otherwise, or your or their happiness or strength or ‘positiveness’. As you can see, if you only use one part of the spectrum, that is the thinking side, without dealing with the emotions, you are only getting half of the story. Dealing with the other side, the feeling side, means that you are getting the full story.

The important issue to remember in listening is that, if you only use the thinking approach to listen, you will only hear or listen to 50% of what is communicated.  If you use the listening and feeling approach you will then hear the full 100%. Listening, as we have said earlier, implies not just using your ears, but also using your eyes and your sense about how a person feels as they are talking to you. This is what we mean by ‘emotional listening’ – being able to hear the words, hear the content, hear the tone, see the body language and, further, get a feel, a sense, an understanding of how that person is feeling while they are talking to you.

It is important to remember that the words a person speaks to you may not convey the entire message, if indeed any message at all. The content of a message may be more fully conveyed by the associated non-verbal behaviour, as well as some verbal cues, albeit directly expressed. 

An example would be a staff member who came to see you as the CEO, and reported that the recent staff publication “was of an excellent standard”. That would be the content of their message. It would be interesting to listen to the tone of their voice as they were telling you.  It would be interesting to get a sense of their body language. It would then be interesting to get a sense of the total picture of how the person looked and felt to you in your office:

• Were they afraid?
• How did they look at you?
• Were they sitting?
• Were they standing?
• What was your sense about the person after they left your office?
• Did they actually tell you the truth or did they tell you what you wanted to hear? It’s up to you to decide on that.

Remember, listening sometimes involves asking directed questions to elicit further information.  But not to such an extent that you drown out or cut off what is being said to you or what is being attempted to be said; simply to ensure that the person to whom you are speaking is better equipped to give you the total picture, verbal and otherwise.  An example of this might be, returning to our example of the staff member coming to see you about a staffing publication, if you were to ask this person: “How can we improve it? What’s the downside to this?  What are the weaknesses in it?  Those sorts of questions sometimes elicit a little more honesty and encourage more personal power on the part of the staff member to tell you what he or she should be telling you, rather than what they think you want to hear necessarily.  Of course, it is up to you to make that final decision about how you respond to comments expressed.

At this stage, perhaps I should reassure the less emotionally inclined of you that I am not advocating, indeed far from it, turning your organisation into a ‘bunch of emotionally charged misfits’; in other words, full of people who can’t control their emotions, who behave erratically and who are unable to focus on their task. This is not the case at all. My firm contention is that emotions are a significant part of your repertoire, of relationships, of organisational learning and development, in staff and management alike, and they substantially increase the power of the organisation overall.  Emotions acknowledge everyone’s humanity and give the organisation a “level playing field”, where all staff can be themselves.

Emotions and the COMET model

In the earlier post on the COMET framework (Chapter 2), I showed you how the ‘E’ in COMET represented emotions, both in terms of giving and receiving, while the ‘T’ represented truth in how you were feeling and how the other person was feeling. I would now like to return to this double concept, which I will refer to as ‘ET’, since the practice of both ‘E’ and ‘T’ in an organisational context is vital for its effectiveness and life. What do I mean by ‘practising ET’ in an organisation?

ET is the practice of stating honestly, truthfully, and in an up-front way, how we feel about anything – how we feel about some interaction, how we feel about each other, another person in our group, in our executive team, or otherwise, or indeed, about how we ourselves feel as a result of something that another party has said to us or about us, or has done to us. It is being able to do this in a non­threatening environment, whereby people feel and know that these comments or statements will not be used against them once they walk out of that room, or in fact, while they remain in the room. Obviously this requires a tremendous amount of teamwork development and trust within that group of people before this process can occur.

It requires the total support of the CEO.  A warning here, that if the CEO does not support ET, it will not work, and cannot work, as he or she is the role model needed for its success.

Practising ‘ET’ in the organisation

How can you encourage or promote the practice of ET in your organisation?  There are a number of things you can do.  Firstly, you can set the example (i.e. role model) by always practising ET yourself. You will need to recognise, however, that some of your colleagues may feel uneasy or threatened initially.  The reason they feel threatened is because it is not “normal” or usual that people actually talk about how they feel face-to-face with others.  In fact, if your organisation has a strong “male” culture, it probably wouldn’t like the ET approach at all.  What I mean by a ‘male’ organisation is a “can do” organisation, one that is very operational.  It’s an organisation that relies on its task achievements to show its worth. One that has to undertake some operational function to show its worth.  A “learning” organisation encourages discussion about what it does well, and why. Importantly, ET must be practised as part of this and other discussions which occur in the organisation.  In fact, a learning organisation will strive to encourage ET. ET means that you can say what you feel and say it without fear, even about your fear that your employment might be terminated for ‘speaking out’. In other words, as ET becomes more and more to be part of the fabric of the organisation, it overcomes the so-called ‘organisational fear’ or ‘fear culture’ that staff often talk about.

A particularly insightful CEO may decide to initiate ET meetings within the organisation, whereby say at the executive level, periodic meetings are held without agendas and without business items per se being discussed.  Rather, the CEO would initiate discussion and encourage others to follow suit. The discussion could be about whatever topics occurred to him or her at the time, which related to how they were feeling, what seemed to be going well, what wasn’t going well in the organisational context, but always stopping short of designing detailed solutions for any issues uncovered.  These could be left to the appropriate executive in charge of that area or could be followed up at a more formal executive meeting.

The usefulness of ET in this situation is that the true so-called ‘corridor discussion’ is brought in to the meeting room, is uncovered, is worked through, is understood and therefore can be taken account of when framing strategies and solutions to issues.  How many times have you, as a member of an executive team, been in a planning session, or a training session where all sorts of wonderful things are said and everyone makes a passionate commitment that they will do ‘this and that’?  How many times do you walk out of the meeting, and while you are having your cup of coffee or cup of tea, you and your fellow executives say: “What a load of rubbish”, and “What are we doing wasting our time here, we should be back in the office getting on with the real work”.  However, we then finish our morning tea, go back into the session and we are immediately back to planning or training mode as if that tea-break discussion never occurred.

ET seeks to bring the reality of the ‘corridor discussion’ back into the workplace mainstream, thereby giving energy to the organisation.

As CEO, you might initiate such discussions by calling your executive team together, say, once a month for an hour.  You will need to understand that the first few meetings may well be difficult, for reasons we have outlined. You may struggle to find things to talk about.  But it is important that you persist, both in using the hour you have allocated for each meeting and also meeting regularly, as well as avoiding the tendency to fill up any uncomfortable gaps with the safe and comfortable refuge of direct business topics, which must be kept for separate discussions.

Here is some structure for your ET meetings. ‘Structure’ is an interesting term to use in this context, but you do need it for your ET meetings.  The structure is this: it is helpful, if possible, to use a facilitator who has not only the trust but also the support of preferably all the executive members.  Certainly the support and trust of the CEO is vital for the success of the facilitation. Because of the nature of the issues to be talked about, it may not be appropriate to have another non-executive member of the organisation present unless that person is an in-house organisational counsellor or similar.  You may need to go outside the organisation for someone who can be truly objective and maintain the strict confidentiality standards which are so essential for this endeavour to be successful.  As I said before, trust is an essential part of this process.

Another element of structure is to have a time limit. One hour is usually enough. More than one hour and people lose concentration. If you walk in to the meeting and people have nothing to discuss, then it is most important to acknowledge publicly that they don’t have anything to discuss.  A very good facilitator will pick up any non-verbal cues or other issues and identify and draw out any resistance. It is most important that the facilitator is able to relate at this level, and does not relate only at the so-called “professional level”.  If the facilitator cannot relate at the ET level, this process will not work.  You will know if the facilitator is working because you yourself will begin to feel uncomfortable at some of the questions that are being posed or statements made by that facilitator.  Uncomfortable in the sense that you may feel, “I really don’t want to discuss this right now”, or “I don’t feel like I want to talk about this”, or “I am very uncomfortable in discussing this”, or “I am not used to discussing this”. The facilitator is then performing their role.  You also know if the ET sessions are working when you find that people are saying things that they would otherwise feel very threatened in talking about, given the power structure in the organisation, especially if they are saying things that in past years could have had them sacked, at least in their perception.

Benefits of practising “ET”

You should not expect immediate or overnight results from such an intervention.  These meetings will need to continue indefinitely for long­term benefits to evolve, but you will certainly see some improvement after six months of working together at least once a month.  What you should be seeing by then is a lot more genuine interaction within the group, which might be the executive team.  You should observe more executive members going into each other’s office to talk. There will be fewer secrets with each other, in fact no secrets in time.  There should be less backstabbing and other anti-organisational and unproductive behaviour. You will notice more meetings with the CEO, either in groups or on a one-to-one basis, where honest communication occurs.

If you are the CEO, you will notice that your executive members:

• will not criticise each other and will gradually give up their “secrets”,
• will be prepared to meet each other and confront each other with any truth or difficult issues,
• will be prepared to come into your office and state truthfully how they feel about particular issues,
• will also have more respect for you. They will be prepared to give their view but they will also be prepared to accept your decision, especially if your decision is very different to their view.

Look for these indicators to confirm that ET is working for you.

Case study – ceasing the practice of “ET”

To further illustrate the benefits of practising ET in the organisation, let me relate to you what happened in one organisation which did practice ET over an extended period but where, following the departure of the CEO, the practice ceased.  In a very short space of time, less than six months after the CEO left, many interesting developments could be observed.  The executive group no longer functioned as an executive, as a cohesive group, but merely as separate senior managers of their respective “silos”, organisational silos with no connection to each other. Less one-to-one interaction took place between executive members about corporate and personal issues.  Less cross-fertilisation of ideas occurred.  There was less group and individual interaction with the CEO.  There was a reduction in trust among the executive members, as well as on the part of the CEO. There was a reduction in their honesty with the CEO, along with an increase in ‘good news’ reporting, meaning that people reported what the CEO wanted to hear, rather than what was really going on.  This, in turn, resulted in secrets developing between executive members and other staff down the hierarchy.

While this was occurring, the operational effectiveness of the organisation was being reduced, because staff felt they could not trust people higher up.  Decision-making was being pushed up all the time, rather than being pushed down. Staff felt they were only really performing a processing function and stopped taking responsibility even for basic services processing.  Staff turnover also increased because the support structures and trust structures no longer existed; staff had become used to them and were critical of the organisation for not having them any more.

This is a simple, but tragic – and easily avoidable – example.

Once you have experienced ET and once you have seen its benefits but then someone takes it away, you and the organisation certainly notice and suffer from the consequences.  But, if you have never experienced it, you don’t really feel as if anything is missing.  This is not an argument, of course, for not encouraging ET in your organisation, since as I have pointed out, without it, your organisation simply cannot be fully effective.

‘ET’ meetings helpful at all levels

Of course, ET meetings should not be confined only to the executive ranks – they need to be cascaded down to all levels, including middle management as well as supervisory levels.  The message will then filter through the whole organisation and have a lasting effect in terms of facilitating the change process.  This cascading will be difficult to achieve because the lower down you go, the more hesitant staff will be to open up in the way that you wish them to.  Part of the difficulty is that the whole process takes time, and going down to the lower levels could take as long as three years.

You can encourage the use of ET sessions by being a role model to the organisation.  If the senior executive group is involved in ET sessions, it is most important that all those senior executive members help the cascading process, or reinforce the process, by discussing what ET is about and then developing their own ET group by bringing on board their management team.  The executive member becomes the facilitator. It is most important that the senior manager plays this role with his or her management team, to promote ET both within the team and between it and him or herself.  Once this process occurs, it is then up to those managers to become facilitators for their teams and so on. As you can see, this process will take a long time because it takes at least six months for a group to get going properly as people get a feel and an understanding as to what these meetings are all about, and develop the necessary trust and confidence.  Remember, there are no agenda topics for these meetings, apart from being honest and truthful about what is going on, and how you feel about things, in the organisation.

A new and different organisation emerges

But, I can hear you say: “I may not be here for another three years, or a number of my staff may not be”.  “It is going to take so long, it all sounds pretty airy fairy, is it worth tackling at all?”  The answer is a definite yes. It is certainly worth tackling because it means that the organisation becomes full of “soldiers”, of people who are committed to the cause of communication and relationships in the organisation.  It means the organisation is more focussed and heads in the one direction, but is prepared to explore different strategies and different ways of doing things.  It means the organisation becomes robust and able to manage on-going change well and cope with the effects of that change.  It means that the organisation has a system whereby there is active discussion (and subsequently resolution) about taboo topics, and topics that would otherwise never come to the attention of a senior manager.  It means that the organisation has people committed to it, where they bring their hearts, souls, expertise and business sense into the organisation.  In other words, you get 100% commitment from individuals, not the 50% commitment as happens in most organisations.  This culture is seen and adopted by new staff too. What’s stopping you?