Corporate America’s Biggest Inefficiency

Emotions are the core of all human beings but not managing them properly might be what is keeping your team from achieving the most efficiency in their day. 

Today’s post is by Jon Wortmann, thoughtLEADERS instructor.

How much time is strong emotion wasting in your office? You know the routine: someone says something in a meeting, someone else flies off the handle. The meeting is effectively over. Or someone gets pissed about an email and starts talking to everyone in the office about how awful the sender is. The time spent cleaning up the spin cycle is exhausting and a drain. Or perhaps the most wasteful: people get angry and simply stop contributing.

Strong emotion is inevitable in our digital, global world. So many of us are working harder, longer, and at all hours of the day. The stress level running through our veins is higher than it used to be from the first moments we wake. Complicating the demands are the interruptions. Multiple screens, communication channels, open offices, and the expectation to respond instantly are literally driving us mad. Studies of interruption by Gloria Mark of UC Irvine show that when people are interrupted, they work faster. Here’s the problem she also discovered: They get more stressed too. The stress causes us to get stuck in an emotionally reactive place, and most of us don’t know what to do next.

The first solution not being taught is deeply personal: stepping back. We get stuck because our brains literally are wired to stay emotional. If you were working with someone 1000 years ago and you got in a fight, the field didn’t get plowed. The family didn’t eat. Our corporate offices trade in ideas and we get away with huge amounts of inefficiency. Inviting people to step back from emotional responses can immediately impact a meeting, back-office chatter, and people’s willingness to share their best ideas.

To step back can happen in a number of easy ways. Pause a meeting where someone is losing it before returning to the agenda. Name the strong emotion then ask someone what’s more important rather than letting them stay out of control. Validate the person’s efforts, helping them to refocus on the work at hand when they struggle to be contributory. Stepping back regularly does two important things: it shrinks our amygdala, the reactive part of the brain and it also encourages our ability to think more clearly. When we are emotional, we lose the ability to think. When we know how to manage our emotional reactions, the trust built is infectious.

The second solution is to work in time blocks. Research with college students who had control over their own schedule revealed they felt like they did a better job than other students who didn’t control when they did their work. Why does feeling like your doing better matter? There are six big emotions all humans experience. The negative ones—anger, fear, sadness, surprise, and disgust—are biologically ready to fire all the time. They keep us safe. The positive emotion, happiness, easily gets lost in the stress and ambiguity of many offices and teams today. Happy employees who control their own schedules have less negative emotional days.

Finally, keep strong emotion in check by paying attention to personality. Don’t make your introverted employees spend time in endless meetings. They will get drained and they won’t engage when you need them to. If you have an extraverted employee, make sure they have enough people time. Expect them to work on their own for too long and when they finally get time with the group, they will be reactive from the moment they enter the room. Whether you have trained your folks on the big five personality factors or another system, what matters is that you set people up to use their best self as often as possible.

Strong emotion will continue to challenge leaders and managers across the world. Until we have all created cultures that enforce the 35 hour work week, pay every employee so they feel completely rewarded, and offer learning and career advancement equal to people’s perceived contributions, strong emotion will be part of our environments. The good news is we can create systems where we know how to manage and focus emotions in the workplace so reactions facilitate progress rather than shutting down good work.

Today’s post is by Jon Wortmann, thoughtLEADERS instructor and the author of Mastering Communication at Work: How to Lead, Manage, and Influence (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

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