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Last week's column explored the implications of "display rules" referring to how well or poorly people manage their emotions in a professional setting. We promised a sequential set of ideas to flesh-out and put in motion this everyday condition happening around us.
It was early in the Vietnam War and an American platoon was hunkered down in some rice paddies, in the heat of a firefight with Vietcong. These flash encounters were sudden, violent, and usually lasted as long as it took for one side or the other to bug-out. Suddenly a line of six monks started walking along an elevated berm that separated paddy from paddy. Perfectly calm and poised in full view, the monks walked directly toward the line of fire.
"They didn't look right, they didn't look left. They walked straight forward" said the American Lieutenant in command. "It was really strange because nobody shot at them. And after they walked across the berm, suddenly all the fight was out of me." It must have been that way for everyone engaged since the shooting just stopped. "Everybody on both sides quit-we just stopped fighting," said platoon members. The power of the monks' quietly courageous demeanor to pacify soldiers in the heat of a fierce firefight illustrates a basic principle of social life. Daniel Goleman describes it this way: "Emotions are contagious. This battle account marks an extreme, as most emotional contagion is more subtle; a tacit exchange that happens in every encounter. We transmit and exchange moods from each other in what amounts to a subterranean currency of the psyche, in which some encounters are toxic, some nourishing."
Experiments such as Facial Recognition show us that emotions often transfer from one person to another; gestures, motor mimicry, tone of voice, body posture and other non-verbal markers of emotion. Through this imitation says Goleman, people recreate in themselves the mood of the other person. When two people interact the direction of the mood transfer is from the one who is more intense in expressing feelings to the one who is more passive. Dominant partners talk more while a subordinate partner talks less. This does not suggest a value difference in either as it applies to the fabric of your organization and the people who populate it.
So what does it really mean? Everything we do as managers, subordinates, or advisors from the outside, has an impact on how people cue off us. Much is unspoken like the monks walking straight through a battle line, altering behavior for that moment in time.
Emotional Intelligence is not just a term or pop-psychology. It's real, measurable, and always apparent in the ranks of companies. The more "people-sensitive" an organization--like radio clusters--the greater the impact of this aspect of human competency, or the lack of it. Raise your awareness of your effect on people around you. Things will go better.
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