Using your Emotions to Navigate Complexity
A Leader's Field Guide for Putting Emotions to Good Use at Work
If you're a senior leader, you’ve likely heard two messages about emotions over the course of your career. One, that emotions make you weak and aren’t of much use in decision-making, so you should strive to overcome them for the sake of objectivity. Or two, that you’re too intense (often steam rolling others in the process) and that getting in touch with your emotions would make you easier to work with.
A common response to the first message is to shove down or ignore your emotions until you deal with them – a time that you never seem to set aside. The emotional debt piles up and your relational bills start to come due without knowing how to get through it all.
For the second message, you might consent to the HR director’s training or read a few articles – often through gritted teeth. Maybe you pick up some new behaviors and techniques, but when the chips are down, you default to your intensity and your relationships suffer for it.
In other words, you’re being told either not to feel or to let yourself feel – but neither message treats the emotions that you will inevitably have as productive companions at work. The missing message is that your emotions can be useful sources of insight for better leadership.
I see over and over again how a thin understanding of emotions keeps senior leaders stuck. In the short run, that stuckness might show up as scatteredness, decision misfires, avoidance, pushing harder with fewer results, or just a vague sense of “what am I missing?”. In the long run, without an effective way to metabolize what you’re feeling, your emotions can come out sideways in ways you don’t want them to. Often that release shows up as outbursts, blame, working harder, distraction at home, or self-medicating in some way.
Fortunately, there’s a better way of dealing with your emotions at work . . .
Your emotions can provide you with useful information about how you’re experiencing the world; and that information can be leveraged for clarity, better decisions, and more productive relationships within the business. In short, emotions can be productive.
With practice you can become more adept at listening to the wisdom your emotions have for you. As you gain awareness and skill at interpreting your emotions as data, you also gain a more complete picture of the complexity that confronts you on a daily basis—and you in turn elevate your leadership.
You might have concerns about breaching your emotional dam. Something I often hear is that if I start to talk about my emotions, where does it stop? Or, feelings are inappropriate for the workplace.
My view is that:
Our emotions are signals not guides - and so we can listen to them rather than impulsively react from them.
That through awareness and interpretation we can convert them into productive knowledge we can act on.
The goal is strength and resilience, not entitlement or accommodation.
This book will provide you with intuitive, simple frameworks that will help you notice your emotions, interpret their meaning, and ultimately use them or dismiss them for increased clarity, trust, and productivity at work and home.
I've researched, tested, and refined these frameworks over years of working as a consultant and coach to senior executives in finance, nonprofits, life science, manufacturing, and design. Though my work is informed by the abundant research out there about emotional intelligence—and there's lots on that topic you can read if you're interested—I'm writing primarily from experience. I’ve seen again and again how senior leaders struggle with knowing they have emotions to deal with, getting feedback they need to behave differently for others, and not knowing how to metabolize those emotions for productive ends. “Ok I feel sad, bad, or mad . . . now what?” is often the question. This book answers the “now what.”
How to use this book
This book is intended to be used as a field guide, something you keep handy and reach for in moments of inner confusion or intensity to help you understand what’s happening, work through your emotions, and get to clarity on what they’re telling you more quickly.
The first section of this book provides you with a brief explainer about why emotions might have been hard for you, and why you should even care about them in the first place.
In the second section, you’ll see a process that takes the guesswork out of productive feeling. While emotions are rarely linear, starting with sequential steps can help you build the inner muscles needed to move through confusion to clarity more quickly.
The third section is like a series of emotional flash-cards. These are intended to be quick, visual references for a busy executive to flip to in order to identify an emotion, interpret it, and put it to work at work.
While you might read through the book cover to cover once, its better use will be as a concise desk-top reference.
Productive Feeling Matters More in Complexity
Complex environments are inherently unpredictable. “These are situations (like battlefields, markets, ecosystems, and corporate culture)” that are “impervious to a reductionist, take-it-apart and see how it works approach” because your own actions change the situation itself in unpredictable ways. In other words, how others experience you – including the emotions you’re transmitting – matters a lot in complex systems. And if you’re missing the emotional data from your environment or the vocabulary needed to interpret it (yourself’s and others) you’re missing out on essential elements needed to lead well through complexity.
From my experience, when faced with complex environments leaders tend to default to management techniques (control it), analysis (understand it quantitatively), or crisis mode (stabilize it fast) – none of which require much emotional data. In complex environments, a leaderships’ job is to effectively create a new way forward through experimentation, sensing, and responding. For your team culture in particular, your emotional awareness and experimentation is so important for moving a group of people together in a new direction.
In The Complexity Genius, Jennifer Garvey Berger explains it this way:
“Yet we know that in complex human systems, it’s not just the facts that matter; emotions, rumors, stories – all of these are core elements of human communities. . . We miss that for us as a species, there are multidirectional connections between the facts, the emotions, and the stories . . . we also miss valuable information about how to shape the system. If we treat emotions as key pieces of data, we learn about how things are currently going. Without taking emotional data into account, we might have a picture that is both incomplete and unhelpful. And without understanding the way that our emotions create our mindsets, our stories, and even the facts we see, we miss one of our most important ways to intervene in a system: by shaping our emotions, mindsets, and stories.”
Put differently, emotions are a design constraint. And since you’re a part of the system you are designing, you better know how to use them!
A Process for Getting to Productive Feeling
This process is a starting point. You can use it verbatim at first, but over time as you practice, it will become less mechanical and you can adapt it to what works for you.
Notice: You may experience emotions first as an increase or decrease in your energy. Pay attention to shifts in your body–heart rate, muscle tension, and breathing are good indicators. Other indicators include: confusion, avoidance of certain work or people, boredom, or irritability with others. To build this noticing muscle, just start with keeping a log of activities and conversations throughout your week and putting a simple up or down arrow based on the energy or tension you experienced in that event or activity. Essentially, the question you’re asking yourself here is: “Is something happening that I need to pay attention to?”
Pause: It’s easy to react impulsively, so a conscious moment of hesitation can start to break that pattern. Practically, when you notice that you might be having an emotion, take a deep breath before any other action. This serves not only to insert a slight pause into your processing, but also helps to shift your body and brain into a less instinctual mode.
Identify the Emotion: After noticing and pausing, you need to identify more precisely what that emotion is. This can be particularly difficult because emotions don’t come in as nice clean logic packages. For that reason using something like the feelings wheel can be helpful. This version I’ve created below is intentionally lower fidelity and hones in on the more common emotions that executives experience
To use this wheel, start in the innermost circle. Locate yourself in one of the quadrants based on two simple dimensions – high or low energy AND pleasant or unpleasant. From there, move to the next rung out. Read through the brief definitions and decide which one best describes what you’re experiencing. Lastly, move to the last rung. Through a process of elimination, read each of the definitions in that section and decide which best describes your inner state.
For instance, you notice you’re having a strong reaction to something a colleague said so you go to your office and pull out this feeling wheel. You decide that the feeling is unpleasant and that it has some high energy associated with it. After reading the short definitions of anger and anxiety, you decide that anxiety best describes your inner state because you’re thinking about the future and negative possible scenarios. You could stop there and go on to the next step, or you might think that your experience needs a little more precision. If you take it one step further, you read both definitions in the anxiety section and decide that since you turned internally to your thoughts, which are now on an afflictive loop, that you’re ruminating.
Once you orient yourself on the feeling wheel, you can move onto the next step.
Interpret it: Once you have a more clear sense of what emotion you’re experiencing, find the corresponding emotion in the productive feelings section. Here you’ll see the concise definition, an intuitive visual that captures the logic of the emotion, a series of questions to help you analyze the emotion, and finally some potential actions that are appropriate responses for the emotion you’re experiencing.
Choose an Action: After noticing, identifying, and interpreting the emotion, you can choose an action that would logically fit with the emotion you’ve experienced. In the definitions section of the book, I’ve included possible right-actions in response to an emotion. These aren’t comprehensive by any stretch, but offer some hand holds for starting to experiment. Don’t act yet, though, simply choose what you think the best action would be and then move onto the next step.
Check your work: Emotions are confusing, even for the most experienced of us, which is why you need to check your work with a peer, partner, or coach that can help you more precisely navigate your interpretations. You could actually share the wheel with them, point to what you think you’re experiencing, walk them through the logic of the emotion you’re experiencing, and then invite them to give you feedback or help realign your perspective about what you’re experiencing. Alternatively, you may put your experience in the form of a short story and then ask them for feedback:
I feel [emotion] because [event] and that means [logic of emotion named previously] and so I will [appropriate action].
“I feel disappointed because the product didn’t perform as well as I had hoped and that means my expectations were misaligned with reality and so I will communicate my expectations more clearly or otherwise lower them to more accurately fit reality.
Experiment and Learn: Now with your emotions and logic aligned, go try out the action. You don’t have to get it right, especially if you tell others you’re practicing some new leadership behaviors. Take the action and observe the impact: what do others experience? Does the action result in increased clarity? Does the action increase trust or maintain the relationship? What was hard about that action for you? What will you adjust for next time?
Taken together, this process looks something like this:
If you’d like the full e-book, which includes definitions, reflection prompts, and actions send me an email at wes@creatio.space.