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Periodically in someone's radio cluster we've made a case for the importance of social arts. The irony of a performance based business is that there is an absence of emotion among the very people who are supposed to create it on and off the air. One social competence is measurable by how effective or ineffective people express their own emotions.
Paul Ekman uses the term "display rules" for the social consensus about which feelings can be properly emoted and when. Cultures vary from place to place. For example studying facial recognition with students in Japan while watching ritual circumcision among adolescent Aborigines with adult faculty in the room, their faces showed only slight hints of reaction. But when they were alone their faces shows anguish, disgust, and distress.
People in our culture take three approaches to "display rules" or showing degrees of emotion says the learned Dan Goleman, a pioneer in finding the value of Emotion Intelligence (which says Dan can be even more important than traditional IQ as a predictor of success). According to Goleman, "One of these display rules is minimizing emotion. This takes us back to the observation of Japanese students showing little or no emotion in the presence of authority. In your own organization, you may see people with poker face response to otherwise emotional events. Another "display rule" is exaggeration. This is the ploy used by the six year old who dramatically twists his or her face into a frown with lips quivering. Adults are no different.
A third among these parameters of emotion dubbed display rules comes with substituting one feeling for another. You can see this when a staff member knowing it would be impolite or inappropriate to react with their true, most visceral emotion, substitutes another reaction; all the while burying some resentment. We learn these rules early on; partly through a parent, teacher or mentor's explicit instruction (smile and say 'thank you') even though you hate the gift or the event of the moment. Goleman reminds "emotional displays have immediate consequences in the impact they leave on the person who receives them."
Radio talent-especially morning shows-are artists of the emotional display; their expressiveness is what evokes responses with their audience. If they aren't adept at this skill, they're simply not very good. Some of us come into the world as natural actors or performers; others may never acquire those traits.
The lessons we learn as kids or emerging adults have a lot to do with our relative comfort in organizational settings and what we've learned about "display rules." As mentors to performing talent we can't remake someone's early life scripting. The best talent developers can however often find the buttons to push that endow permission to "act" or entertain when the setting is right. Most successful morning shows for example practice completely different display rules when the light goes on. More on this important process in next week's Motivator.
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