In every leadership situation, how people feel is of critical importance. It has the ability to make or break initiatives and yet emotions are often given the least consideration in the grand scheme of things. Time and time again, leaders have been surprised at the howl of rage that accompanies their announcements. They don’t see it coming: Bob Diamond’s – no doubt logical to him – view that it was time to move on, sent people ravening for blood. People’s feelings were not yet sufficiently appeased to allow them to let go their anger. Cameron’s ill chosen, Michael Winner catch phrase, ‘Calm down, dear’ inevitably provoked a paradoxical reaction.

Strong leadership will provoke strong reactions. Professional leaders seek to recognise the emotions they will engender by their actions and will plan in advance how they can bring people with them by provoking positive and constructive feelings. In every situation, emotions are a data stream – leaders neglect them at their peril. Above all, they should never just hope they won’t happen. In order to be a truly emotionally intelligent leader, you have of course to start with yourself. ‘Aye, there’s the rub’ – Hamlet. Learning to recognise your own feelings, give them legitimacy and then deal with them appropriately is a precursor to being skilled at dealing with other people’s emotionally charged reactions.

Those at the most senior levels have classically been expected to demonstrate stiff upper lipped stoicism, play their cards close to their chests and indulge in what psychologists would usually describe as denial – often because of their fear of how others might perceive their responses. As a result, they can be disfunctional due to lack of emotional literacy.

Science tells us that leads to pretty grim consequences for people’s health, well being and judgment. Recognising and categorising an emotion influences the emotional experience itself. For example correctly processing emotional reactions to traumatic events – e.g. loss of a job, restricted bonuses, delayed promotion – leads to health benefits, more adaptive behaviours, better relationships, faster results and better working memory.

Being able to label feelings, makes people more magnanimous towards others. All of which contribute to success. Social psychologist James Pennebaker describes verbally labelling an emotion as much like applying a digital technology (language) to an analogue signal (emotion and the emotional experience). If an emotion remains in analogue form, it cannot be understood or conceptually tied to the meaning of an event. Once an experience is translated into language then it can be processed in a conceptual manner. It can be assigned meaning, coherence and structure. The traumatic event can therefore be assimilated, resolved and eventually forgotten.
If this process does not happen, incomplete emotional processing has a deleterious effect on well-being, judgment and decision making. If you have time, catch the fascinating programme on Radio 4 on iPlayer to hear about Pennebaker’s work on Expressive writing.

What we are not suggesting is that you let it all hang out. Quite the opposite! We think you owe it to yourself to take positive action to master a practical emotional approach to processing emotion and events.

If you want to hear more about what you can do in fifteen minutes a day over four days to improve your emotional resilience, give us a call – 020 7036 8899 or drop us a line by return.

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• A Father dies and a manager is asked –‘How long do you think it will take to get over this? Three weeks, maybe?’ The answer was unprintable.

• The young woman widowed after 11 months of marriage. ‘You are young. You will love again’ The result – horror that she might be so fickle.

• The miscarriage. No-one ever mentions it again.

They avoid her in the corridor. The consequence – disengagement and a slowing of recovery. And, of course, no one ever talks to the desolate Father-to-be. We differ from each other in our ability to be compassionate. People often mean well, don’t know what to do, want to know how they can fix things or are worried that they will say the wrong thing. All of which makes them appear utterly lacking in compassion. How important is it for a leader to foster compassion in an organisation? On the one hand there is the humane argument about the right thing to do and, on the other, the blindingly obvious fact that all you have are your people. Until robots are able to replace them, you are stuck with these real life problems. The research shows that compassion at work matters because it impacts on resilience and builds a positive identity within the business. People are healthier and happier. It connects people to each other, it connects them to the organisation through loyalty and commitment and it connects them to their own humanity. Above all, research shows it builds trust in the workplace. Without trust, your workforce will be less engaged. Witnessing compassion elevates and inspires more compassion, giving and caring. Compassion is contagious. It is a virtuous circle. Where the whole person is valued, they are not expected to leave their personal identity at reception every morning. Some of the current working conditions in our organisations expose people to incivility, disrespect, injustice, corrosive politics, constant reorganisation and incompetence on a daily basis. Becoming compassionate involves noticing, feeling, interpreting and responding to the other’s pain. Being a compassionate leader involves building an environment where mere self – interest is not the norm, where high quality connections are encouraged between people, where the whole person is valued and shown care and respect. Sometimes there is a need for the more formal support of coaches or counsellors but more often compassion is shown in the small, inconsequential aspects of behaviour that reinforce how people are cherished and also in the way that bullies and the insensitive are handled and given the chance to develop higher skills of emotional intelligence. Organisational habits can work against this. No trust means no-one will admit to human weakness until it is impossible to hide. No expression of emotion can lead to dangerous repression. Fear of crossing professional-personal boundaries can stultify people’s more caring responses. Concerns about fairness-‘well, if I do it for one, I have to do it for everyone’ – can eliminate concern. Ineptitude leads to avoidance. Leading the way in compassion involves being able to:

• pay attention – compassionate leaders know what their people are going through

• Empathise – compassionate leaders realise that emotion is a data stream they cannot afford to ignore and they become literate in their reading of feelings

• Feel – and to let others see those emotions through careful self disclosure • suspend judgment – a compassionate leader understands that how they tackle challenges may not be feasible for all

• Be rather than do – you can’t always fix what people are going through. It would be arrogant to think you could find a ‘solution’ for some of the complexities of life. On occasions, being compassionate is the best and only thing you can offer. You can tell whether an organisation has compassion by the stories that are told by its employees about the way people have been treated, the care they have been shown and the values that have been lived. Leaders can create and support compassion – enabling routines rather than old, more psychopathic ways of treating people. They can ensure those high quality connections get built. They can foster real values in action by demonstrating good compassionate behaviour themselves. Averil, François and all at White Water Group

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• Global warming raises sugar levels in grapes, resulting in much higher alcohol content. This makes wines taste stronger and sweeter. It is tricky to control alcohol levels precisely, so many producers just give up
• Global branding means that all producers want to achieve the ‘Robert Parker taste’: a leading American wine critic whose scores carry a direct and immediate correlation to the price wine can fetch around the world. His preference is for wines which are highly concentrated – in order to rise above the alcohol perception threshold – and have immediate appeal, as opposed to subtle taste. Being concentrated they have a low yield are therefore more expensive to produce
• Finally, producers around the world are competing for the same predictable product and all wine ends up tasting the same. This week, I tried wines from Australia, Chile and the USA costing well over £50 a bottle, which were both remarkably similar and pretty undrinkable…

If wine is not your thing, then imagine listening to music on a boom box with all the settings turned all the way up: the resulting wall of sound will get your foot tapping due to its immediacy, but will also rapidly grow tiring. This lemming-like reaction to major change is not new: systematic benchmarking and business process re-engineering were essentially crowd reactions to the first wave of technological change in the late 80s . Benchmarking was a serious lapse of corporate imagination and resulted in products such as the ‘Eurobox’, where for about 10 years every European car looked remarkably bland and similar. As companies outsourced every possible function and adopted standardised software and processes, multi-nationals became clones of one another. Yet I would argue that every period of big change essentially represents a raising of the quality threshold, as well as an incentive for crowd behaviour. Cars today are infinitely better designed and built than in the 80s; the global supply chain has improved both product quality and affordability. So perhaps we can think of big change as a two-step process:

• a rush to adopt new technology or ways of working;
• followed by an opportunity for innovation and differentiation from competitors.

Going back to wine, modern techniques such as night-time harvesting and temperature-controlled fermentation have now spread to the remotest parts of the world, and the reliable screw-cap closure is becoming ubiquitous. This has raised the bar for quality and consistency globally. Yet the mistake that many businesses make is to follow the crowd for too long. There is now a space to be taken for a global brand or region of subtle-tasting wine – New Zealand seems to be in pole position. The learning for leaders, of course, is one of wisdom and courage:

• Do anticipate big change and embrace industry transformation when it is part of a deep trend
• Yet remember why you are in business: only you can answer the questions of where to compete and how to compete. Every industry has space for both mainstream excellence and deep differentiation
• The final step of course is to be able to tell the story in a congruent way to all stakeholders and demonstrate courage if you decide to go against the trend.

We drink to your success in achieving this! Averil, François and all at White Water Group.  

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1) Preparing: make a list of how your behaviour may have hurt someone

2) Saying sorry (obvious, but a good place to start!)

3) Telling the other person you understand the consequences of your behaviour

4) Clarifying the causes of your behaviour: was it poor judgment, an accident or even deliberate?

5) Stating what you would do in the future in a similar situation

6) Formally asking for forgiveness – don’t expect to receive it, this is just the start of the process

7) Promising to fix what is in your power to fix or influence

In turn, and in their own time, the hurt person may adopt Desmond Tutu’s definition of forgiveness: “To forgive is to abandon your right to pay back the predator in his own coin, but it is the loss that liberates”. Leader as instigator of forgiveness The framework for Yom Kippur is easy: God demands that you should ask for forgiveness. It is not so easy in the corporate world. How do you create the right environment? What gives you the authority? There are many reasons: we know for example that good leaders demonstrate humanity, personal imperfection and have a high degree of emotional literacy; there are very good at reading tensions between team members, whether or not they had something to do with creating them. The John Templeton Foundation sponsored numerous projects on forgiveness . The learning regarding the role of leaders in creating the right environment can be summarised as:

1) Leaders should provide vision and meaning. For example by recognising that ‘hurt’ is a feature of corporate life (e.g. downsizing) and remind colleagues of the higher purpose of the organisation and the need to focus on outcomes.

2) Leaders should also provide legitimacy and support: they should communicate that human development is as important as financial performance; they should also outline forgiveness as a corporate strength that sits along other strengths such as courage, wisdom or curiosity for example. They should also celebrate and amplify exemplar behaviour.

  Creating the space to ask for forgiveness Processes become institutionalised when they are rehearsed often. It would make sense for organisations to initiate quarterly reviews where teams take time off to think, not just about business performance and strategy but also about how well they are working together as well as with their customers and suppliers. Participants could prepare in advance for the meeting by thinking who they want to have a conversation with in order to clear their own emotional dead wood and prepare the quarter ahead. Doing it often lowers the stakes and also prevents resentment to accumulate. The leader’s role would be to ensure that conversations do happen – and that participants focus on positive outcomes. If you are interested in designing such a thinking space, get in touch. We’d love to help you set it up and create a really high performing team. Averil, François and all at White Water Group

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• We assume that pure facts will engage others
• We put ourselves outside of the story
• We show a perfect world without any of the fears and doubts of real life

  A good illustration comes from our work in investment road shows: investors receive perfect presentation after perfect presentation and are totally bored with yet another ‘hockey stick’ financial projection. The first thing they buy is people: therefore trust, therefore humanity. This is far removed from discounted cash flows. Take Cambridge Cognition  – a pioneer in the field of memory loss assessment, for example. When we started working together, their presentation was very precise: it gave huge credibility to the quality of their clinical research (over 1,000 peer-reviewed papers), yet failed to introduce the story of dementia and its terrible impact on individuals and families until slide no.20, by which time any interest had truly been extinguished. Yet the company had developed a 10-minute test, run from an iPad, that can diagnose dementia 18 months ahead of anything else on the market. In their effort to impress the City, the presentation buried the human story under layers of market size assessments and clinical tests. Today the company defines itself as a profitable ‘brain health’ pioneer, and their Cantab product is on course to become the equivalent of the ‘blood pressure test for the mind’. They have also just successfully floated the company in London.   Aristotle was the first to codify story telling in Poetics, defining notions of plot and character. He was also the first to outline the need for a change of fortune, but not necessarily a happy ending. Aristotle was also a teacher of Alexander the Great, not only a model military strategist but also a charismatic leader. Today’s leaders can learn not only from Aristotle but also from playwrights, novelists and film-makers. Narrative techniques are plentiful but an absence of fluency in using them can sometimes become an excuse to avoid addressing the bigger question of the psychology of the storyteller. The classic situation/ complication/ solution mantra needs a human element and it is the leader’s job to find an angle relevant to the specific audience. In order to do this, the leader needs to take a personal risk, which is why we often prefer to hide under the blanket of facts and figures in PowerPoint or Excel. For us, storytelling is probably less about narrative techniques and more about displaying courage and confidence by putting a very personal view forward. This is a fascinating subject – we are deeply interested in collecting as many stories as possible, in order to understand how different leaders approach storytelling and perhaps address any personal anxiety in doing so. We are running a special breakfast seminar in September to share this research and celebrate the best stories. Please get in touch if you would like to volunteer stories yourself or refer another leader you know. We can treat any story in full confidence or make you the star of the show! Just drop Gus a note at: gmoffat@whitewatergroup.eu   Averil, François & all at White Water Group PS: we are proud to sponsor the 2013 M&A Awards where we will celebrate the year’s best stories of companies articulating a compelling vision for their strategies, no doubt partly through great storytelling.   Image: Aristotle & Alexander The Great in debate at Mieza, 343 BC

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