I love how Adam taught us about the power of emotional contagions and that emotions can be felt by those around us. We can influence others through our emotions even when we don’t communicate our them because they can sense well beyond what we vocalize. The literature on this topic takes this principle even further and elaborates that the environment we work in can inhibit our ability to share our emotions or it can lead us towards feeling certain emotions just by the way a room is configured. For example, if there is tissue paper in the center of the room, this simple act can invite us to share our deeper and guarded emotions. Adam introduced us to Sigal Barsade and Olivia A. O’Neil who have written some great material about emotional culture in organizations, and I shared this article by them titled “Manage Your Emotional Culture” in the show notes of Adam’s episode that is linked again here: https://www.emcleaders.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Manage-Your-Emotional-Culture.pdf. Listen to the full episode with Adam on Apple Podcasts at: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/that-all-might-be-edified-discussions-on-servant-leadership/id1598799300?i=1000610700469
In this article Sigal Barsdade and Olivia O’Neil reiterate the points that Adam taught us on the podcast that positive emotions like caring, compassion, affection, tenderness and love are linked to greater job satisfaction, performance, accountability, and commitment. These emotions are also connected to a larger amount of customer satisfaction. In organizations with negative emotions like anger, contempt, fear, or disgust there is lower performance, satisfaction, accountability, and commitment. Adam also references the danger of indifference which is even worse than negative emotions because it treats people as thought they don’t matter at all. I shared some insights that I have learned from Captain Marcus Canady and Marquesio Robinson on the podcast episode about how dangerous even unintended indifference can be. Sigal Barsade and Olivia O’Neil declared “little acts of kindness and support can add up to an emotional culture characterized by caring and compassion” which shows that it is the day to day actions that create our culture of caring that leads to these positive outcomes.
Adam further taught us that the highest performing teams are linked to the highest emotional range and the lowest performing teams are linked to the lowest emotional range. This means we have to become more adept at sharing our emotions with each other in beneficial ways that enhance out teams. Sharing emptions should be done with intentionality because there can be too much emotional sharing that inhibits team growth and functionality. I created the image to get people to think about how they share their emotions with others and how they discover the emotions of others in helpful ways to extend the emotional range of your teams in a way that helps expand the performance of your team. I added some sample emojis to the image to get people thinking, but the idea is that you take an image and you think about what emotions are hidden in the case and what ways would it be beneficial for the team to work together to better understand each other’s emotions. It works better when the individuals spend time thinking about their own emotions first. Reach out to me if you want a sample image or other activities.