More every day, we see the need for emotional intelligence in the business world. Our thinking can only take us so far. We can gather data to rationalize our decisions, but often we’re better off using our intuition.
Yes, you must be analytical about choosing your new computer or phone system,
but when it comes to trying to figure out why Allen’s team is failing, when you
know in your gut, it’s Allen, isn’t productive. It doesn’t provide any more information
that you already know.
And no amount of intellectual arguing is going to change someone at their core
and motivate action or change. You have to reach in and touch their emotions.
You have to find out what’s important to someone, and you have to model what’s
important to you – at the feelings level.
EMOTIONS IN YOUR FACE CHANGE PEOPLE’S MINDS
Kotter and Cohen give a marvelous example of this. A CEO takes a client out for
dinner and listens to him talk about his disappointment with a product that, supposedly
built to specifications, keeps being delivered defectively. “We ask again and
again for things to be changed,” says the unhappy customer, “and the person we
talk to nods his head but he doesn’t seem to listen.”
What the CEO does is send a video team over to the customer’s office the next
day and ask him to speak candidly, which he does, and then he shows the video
to his employees, many of whom had never interfaced with customers, and never
experienced this sort of “strong, negative feedback.”
THE ‘ARM CHAIR LIBERAL’ MOVES INTO THE WORK PLACE
I saw this happen repeatedly in my days in non-profits when I raised money for
the homeless. I spoke all over town on homelessness and encountered all sorts
of reactions, including “Why don’t they just get a job?”
If I could convince the person to actually come down to the shelter and meet “the
homeless,” things changed. It changes your mind to sit in the same room, face-to-face
with someone who was previously just a statistic. It’s impossible to retort, “Why
don’t you just get a job?” when you listen to a mother with 3 children tell how
she can’t make as much money at her minimum-wage job as she can on welfare, and
while she’d rather have ‘a decent job like everyone else,’ the numbers don’t add
up.
Why doesn’t she “just get a job?” Because she can live better on welfare. You
begin to see the complexity of the problem. She may be “homeless” but she isn’t
stupid.
You see a man with 4 children and no wife, who hasn’t a suit, washing machine,
computer, fax machine or answering machine to take calls while he’s out looking
for a job, and you begin to see the complexity of the problem. “Why doesn’t he
just get a job?” becomes “How could he get a job?”
NO ONE EVER CONVINCED ANYONE BY LOGIC
I could talk till I was blue in the face about “homelessness,” and not have any
impact, while 30 minutes in a homeless shelter, seeing real people, seeing a “face”
instead of “a problem,” reached in and touched people at their core. There’s no
place for “cold logic” in a homeless shelter. It assaults your heart, and therefore
it assaults your brain.
EMOTIONS TAKE PRECEDENCE
Emotions have a stronger impact, because they’re essential to our survival. We
don’t need to know a whole lot about the bear that’s standing in front of us snarling;
in fact if we DO stop to think,our life will be at risk, so our brain pumps us
full of “fight or flight” chemicals which preclude thinking and cause us to TAKE
ACTION.
MOTIVATION
In conducting tours of the homeless shelter, just the act was my main objective.
I knew that the reality of a face-to-face encounter would accomplish what I couldn’t,
and eventually didn’t even try, to do. Motivation is real when it comes from the
heart. Whatever the person decided to do after touring the shelter, was between
them and their heart.
The outcome was always a new understanding of a situation that had previously
existed as “cold facts” in their head. The changed behaviors it elicited were
different-some decided to volunteer, some sent a check, some went back to organize
others, but all were touched.
It never failed to touch me to go over there, and that showed too.
People’s general reaction changed from “there’s a problem,” to “what can I do?’
And each individual, moved from his or her armchair in front of TV to the reality
of the problem, as represented by real human beings, decided that there was something
THEY could do. They decided they wanted to make a difference.
I used it to motivate myself as well. Sitting over in my office, overwhelmed by
the workload and the enormity of a problem for which there is no solution except
day-by-day, one-by-one, I was often discouraged. A trip over to the shelter was
always the antidote to my flagging energy.
THE PROS
The Archbishop of San Antonio often spoke at our fund-raising banquets. He always
began by giving a specific example of a specific person in a specific encounter.
He put a face to a “problem,” touched people at the feelings level, and caused
change.
Susan Dunn, MA, Marketing Coach,
http://www.webstrategies.cc. Marketing consultation,
implementation, website review, SEO optimization, article
writing and submission, help with ebooks and other
strategies. Susan is the author or How to Write an eBook
and Market It on the Internet. Mailto:sdunn@susandunn.cc
for information and free ezine. Specify Checklist.
