be radically transparent

When people ask me, "What's the secret to great communication?" my usual response baffles some, because it can seem so counterintuitive: "Be radically transparent."

Radical transparency does not mean telling someone to his face in front of his peers that his polka-dotted tie is ugly. It's having the emotional courage to stand up to someone or something when you feel violated, to speak from a deep place tugging at your heart, or to cut through healthy conflict now to avoid unhealthy conflict later.

Marcel Schwantes

How Can You Tell Someone Has True Leadership Skills? Look for This 1 Rare Sign. Inc. 6/15/2017

real emotional intelligence

Real emotional intelligence is more than just being sensitive or “nice,” more than understanding how to read the mood of a conference room or having insight into whether a colleague is more analytical or expressive in her approach to problem-solving. While those are important skills, effective emotional knowledge demands a profound level of self-reflection, an active imagination, and an ability not only to envision alternate approaches to a given situation but also to understand that there are entire invisible galaxies of salient emotional facts behind almost every workplace.

Anne Kreamer

It’s Always Personal: Navigating Emotion in the New Workplace. Random House. 2011.

looking for character

Wright: When you bring someone into the Spurs organization, what do you look for?

Popovich: Oh, boy. This is going to be a long interview. For us, it’s easy. We’re looking for character, but what the hell does that mean? We’re looking for people -- and I’ve said it many times -- that have gotten over themselves. And you can tell that pretty quick. You can talk to somebody for four or five minutes, and you can tell if it’s about them or if they understand that they’re just a piece of the puzzle. So we look for that.

A sense of humor is a huge thing with us. You’ve got to be able to laugh. You’ve got to be able to take a dig, give a dig, that sort of thing, and feel comfortable in your own skin that you don’t have all the answers. People who are participatory. The guys in the film room can tell me what they think of how we played last night if they want to. Sean Marks would sit in on our coaches meetings when we’re arguing about how to play the pick-and-roll or who we’re going to play or who we’re going to sit.

We need people who can handle information and not take it personally because in most of these organizations, there’s a big divide. All of the sudden, the wall goes up between management and coaching, and everybody is ready to blame back and forth. And that’s the rule, rather than the exception. It just happens, but that’s about people. It’s about finding people who have all those kinds of qualities, so we do our best to look for that, and when somebody comes, they figure it out pretty quick.


Michael C. Wright
"Gregg Popovich on Kobe Bryant: 'You can't help but just watch him'" ESPN. 2/20/2016

give people the feedback they need

“There’s a Russian anecdote about a man who loved his dog so much that when the vet told him he needed to cut the dog’s tail off he couldn’t do it all at once, so he did it an inch at a time. Don’t be that kind of manager.”

Giving unclear, infrequent feedback has somewhat of the same effect — though slightly less violent. You end up hurting the person receiving the feedback more, even though you’re just doing what your parents always told you empathetic people do: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all.

This is where Scott says she’s seen managers make the most mistakes. “No one sets out to be unclear in their feedback, but somewhere along the line things change. You’re worried about hurting the person’s feelings so you hold back. Then, when they don’t improve because you haven’t told them they are doing something wrong, you wind up firing them. Not so nice after all…”

In order to give people the feedback they need to get better, you can’t give a damn about whether they like you or not. “Giving feedback is very emotional. Sometimes you get yelled at. Sometimes you get tears. These are hard, hard conversations.”

Interview with Kim Scott

"My Management Lessons from Three Failed Startups, Google, Apple, Dropbox, and Twitter" firstround.com 3/19/2014

how we process anger

Understanding how we process anger – our own and others’ – is helpful in learning how to deal with it on the job. If women understand that men are wired by nature to be more aggressive – with more of their behavior driven by the more primitive part of their brains, the amygdala, and the secretion of epinephrine and cortisol – then male anger should become less disturbing for them. We would know not to take it so personally. If women more clearly understand why they experience a double-whammy speedball when they get angry – that the oxytocin in their bodies is in conflict with the norepinephrine that they also produce when under attack – then they might be less negatively judgmental about their own and other women’s anger. If both genders realize that, as Browde says, “the suppression of an emotional response to being demeaned and belittled in the workplace has physiologic effects and can result in symptoms such as insomnia, irritability, anxiety, panic, and even depression,” then all of us might try harder not to upset each other.

Anne Kreamer

It’s Always Personal: Navigating Emotion in the New Workplace. 2011. Random House.

tears

Psychic tears aren’t specific to any single emotion but are rather the uniquely visible testament that one has experienced something overwhelming – anger, awe, love, fear, pride, embarrassment, or sadness. From the tears of joy at a wedding or the birth of a child to the tears of anger or outrage – often catalyzed by feelings of powerlessness – at a slight, to the tears of grief at the death of a loved one, each emotion elicits a different intensity and duration of crying. Psychic or emotional tears, because they are exceptional, force us and those around us to acknowledge that something important has just happened – my boyfriend proposed to me, my boss yelled at me, I was deeply moved by a sense of the divine, my dog died – and that we should pause and take a moment for reflection.

Anne Kreamer

It’s Always Personal: Navigating Emotion in the New Workplace. 2011. Random House.

express more emotions at work

I suggest that if men and women were to express more emotions at work routinely and easily – jokes, warmth, sadness, anger, tears, all of it – then as a people we might not implode emotionally so frequently, or feel the need to gawk at others emoting in inappropriate ways. If we can openly acknowledge our gender-based biological and neurological differences, we can feel freer to tackle whatever challenges we face at full capacity.

Anne Kreamer

It’s Always Personal: Navigating Emotion in the NewWorkplace. 2011. Random House.

the most basic of all knowledge

A report from the National Center for Clinical Infant Programs makes the point that school success is not predicted by a child’s fund of facts or a precocious ability to read so much as by emotional and social measures: being self-assured and interested; knowing what kind of behavior is expected and how to rein in the impulse to misbehave; being able to wait, to follow directions, and to turn to teachers for help; and expressing needs while getting along with other children.

Almost all students who do poorly in school, says the report, lack one or more of these elements of emotional intelligence (regardless of whether they also have cognitive difficulties such as learning disabilities). The magnitude of the problem is not minor; in some states close to one in five children have to repeat first grade, and then as the years go on fall further behind their peers, becoming increasingly discouraged, resentful, and disruptive.

A child’s readiness for school depends on the most basic of all knowledge, how to learn. The report lists the seven key ingredients of this crucial capacity – all related to emotional intelligence:

1. Confidence. A sense of control and mastery of one’s body, behavior, and world; the child’s sense that he is more likely than not to succeed at what he undertakes, and that adults will be helpful.
2. Curiosity. The sense that finding out about things is positive and leads to pleasure.
3. Intentionality. The wish and capacity to have an impact, and to act upon that with persistence. This is related to a sense of competence, of being effective.
4. Self-control. The ability to modulate and control one’s own actions in age-appropriate ways; a sense of inner control.
5. Relatedness. The ability to engage with others based on the sense of being understood by and understanding others.
6. Capacity to communicate. The wish and ability to verbally exchange ideas, feelings, and concepts with others. This is related to a sense of trust in others and of pleasure in engaging with others, including adults.
7. Cooperativeness. The ability to balance one’s own needs with those of others in group activity.

Daniel Goleman

Emotional Intelligence. Random House LLC, 2006. 358 pages, p.193,194

mapping the coast of the island of knowledge

Michael Smithson, a social scientist at Australian National University who co-taught an online course on ignorance this summer, uses this analogy: The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask. Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.

Mapping the coast of the island of knowledge, to continue the metaphor, requires a grasp of the psychology of ambiguity. The ever-expanding shoreline, where questions are born of answers, is terrain characterized by vague and conflicting information. The resulting state of uncertainty, psychologists have shown, intensifies our emotions: not only exhilaration and surprise, but also confusion and frustration.

The borderland between known and unknown is also where we strive against our preconceptions to acknowledge and investigate anomalous data, a struggle Thomas S. Kuhn described in his 1962 classic, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” The center of the island, by contrast, is safe and comforting, which may explain why businesses struggle to stay innovative. When things go well, companies “drop out of learning mode,” Gary P. Pisano, a professor at Harvard Business School, told me. They flee uncertainty and head for the island’s interior.

Jamie Holmes

"The Case for Teaching Ignorance" The New York Times. 8/24/2015

myopic misery

We hypothesized a phenomenon that we term myopic misery. According to our hypothesis, sadness increases impatience and creates a myopic focus on obtaining money immediately instead of later. This focus, in turn, increases intertemporal discount rates and thereby produces substantial financial costs….

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the English poet and philosopher, experienced profound bouts of anxiety and depression throughout his life. This life experience may have given rise to his famous phrase “a sadder and a wiser man”.  More recently, beginning with empirical tests of depressive realism (Alloy & Abramson, 1979), hundreds of studies have found support for the sadder-but-wiser hypothesis: Sadness and depression make individuals wiser than nondepressed or happy people. For example, sadness tends to be associated with careful, deliberative, System 2 thought (Kanhenman, 2011) as opposed to heuristic, impulsive System 1 thought (Keltner & Lerner, 2011). Sadness has been shown to reduce a range of otherwise robust cognitive biases, including having overly optimistic views of one’s importance, reputation, and abilities (Alloy & Abramson, 1979); relying on stereotypes (Park & Banaji, 2000); and overattributing causality to individuals (Keltner, Ellsworth, & Edwards, 1993)….

[Yet,] sadness makes one myopic. Although sadness may make people more accurate in some contexts (Alloy & Abramson, 1979), it also makes them prefer immediate gratification – and that preference is not an attribute associated with wisdom….


Jennifer S. Lerner, Ye Li, and Elke U. Weber

“The Financial Cost of Sadness” Association for Psychological Science. 2013

schadenfreude

'Taming the Donkey', painting by Eduardo Zamacois y Zabala, 1868

The difficult-to-translate German word schadenfreude, combining schaden (damage) and freude (joy), describes a universal human emotion: taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others. It’s what keeps us glued to reality TV and those star bashing magazines, with the endless, fabulous mess-ups of the Snookies or Kardashians of the world.

Schadenfreude stems from our human tendency for comparison.  In our society, where conventional and social media have spawned a multitude of arenas for people to compare themselves with one another, schadenfreude abounds. Those who may have made us feel puny by comparison (think domestic diva Martha Stewart) make us feel pretty darned good about ourselves when they fall from grace.

Before you accuse yourself of heartless insensitivity when you feel that little shiver of delight, remind yourself that every person feels it from time to time. Feeling envy toward someone or someone’s life is as normal as feeling simple happiness or contentment. Unlike those positive emotions, however, it can change into something ugly, especially when it becomes envy.

Envy occurs when we wish we possessed another person’s attributes, achievement or possessions or wish they did not have them. Although a natural human feeling, envy can cause some serious suffering when we compare ourselves to people nearby and find ourselves on the short end of the stick because it:

• Highlights what others possess
• Reminds you what you lack
• Triggers unpleasant or destructive behaviors
• Can interfere with successful, productive work relationships
• Makes you feel ashamed

Envy can also violate an equally powerful desire to see oneself in a positive light, as a good person who supports others and enjoys their successes, as opposed to a bad person who harbors envious or malicious thoughts about someone else’s achievements. The resulting cognitive dissonance (holding two conflicting ideas simultaneously) can create some difficult emotions to deal with. Envy also triggers that part of our brain that deals with conflict, emotional pain and rejection, experiences we all find unpleasant. The pain prompts some nasty behavioral responses that can undermine or even ruin trust, team cohesion, interpersonal relations and the general health of an organization’s culture.

So what do you do when these very natural feelings begin gnawing away at your self-esteem, self-worth, and self-image?  First, remember that emotions are not good or bad, they only become problematic when left unmanaged. Second, admit to yourself (or a trusted advisor) that it’s happening and that your ego has been bruised. Then pay attention to the tactics you are using to protect yourself by taking personal inventory. Have you been playing the victim role? Have you been acting like a gossipy teenager? Have you been backstabbing or sabotaging the target of your envy? Once you have gained a little insight into your feelings/behaviors, you can begin to dissect the problem by:

• Pinpointing the cause of your schadenfreude or envy and the events that led to these feelings.
• Describing your expected outcome before you felt these emotions.
• Identifying the people (intended and unintended) who might suffer from your actions.
• Considering advice you would give to a friend about coping with similar emotions, thoughts and behaviors.
• Identifying one or two steps you can take right now to rise above your circumstances, take ownership of your situation, and achieve your desired results.

Even though it may be humbling to admit your feelings, left unmanaged they can get pretty nasty. Talking through these steps provides some of the psychological distance we need in order to regain perspective.  Nothing cures a bad case of envy like a healthy dose of reality and some perspective taking.


Dr. Nicole Lipkin
"Envy at Work: Why It Feels So Good To See Someone Else Fail" Iris 8/20/2015

your brand: the people who report to you

Reflecting on his time as CEO, Hurt emphasizes that there is no better way to enforce culture and values than by the way you hire. “You’ll be most defined as the CEO by the people [who] report to you. That’s going to be your brand.” Moving quickly at startup speed brings out the true integrity of your hires — both the good and the awful. 100 mph work speed is where your top players step up, the people Hurt describes as “born to change the world.”

The individuals you choose to bring onto the team speak volumes. With each new hire, the CEO reinforces the values of the company, highlighting the traits perceived as most valuable for the organization. The same concept is applicable to firing. Hurt clarifies, “If you fire brilliant jerks, it says to everybody, ‘that’s not going to be condoned.’ If you hire people that have real passion, love your calling, it’s going to feed on itself.” The CEO sets the tone.

Drake Baer (presentation by Bazaarvoice CEO Brett Hurt)

"You Aren’t Born Knowing How to Be a CEO" First Round Review. 7/2/2013

my boss is a jerk

“My boss is a jerk” is pretty much the number one stressor in the workplace.... What to do? Well, if you really don’t think you can quit, here are some ideas....

Build yourself a really thick skin.

Part of the problem here is that you are taking personally the fact that your boss has a lousy personality. You just can’t. The fact that someone is an awful person has nothing to do with you. It is as disconnected from you as the weather. You don’t take it personally when it hails, do you? No. You wear a good coat and warm boots and you carry an umbrella. So treat your boss and his moods like the weather. Stay out of his way when you can, and when he does act out, observe the behavior and say to yourself “Wow, he is going off the rails again, how interesting.” Tell yourself that it’s not about you. It is about him—and the poor thing has to wake up as himself every morning. But you get to be you, which is way more fun. So put your thick skin coat on, carry your psychic umbrella, and get on with it....

Use Silence.

When it comes to communication, often the person who speaks the least has the most power. Your instinct might be to talk things out, but if you don’t have a willing participant in building or repairing a relationship, it’s really not worth trying. So, if forced into a conversation with your boss, prepare by being clear about the one or two messages you want to share and share only those.

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard 

"My Boss Is A Jerk—What Do I Do? Ask Madeleine." Blanchard LeaderChat. 8/22/2015

some might call it character

IQ offers little to explain the different destinies of people with roughly equal promises, schooling, and opportunity. When ninety-five Harvard students from the classes of the 1940s – a time when people with a wider spread of IQ were at Ivy League schools than is presently the case – were followed into middle age, the men with the highest test scores in college were not particularly successful compared to their lower-scoring peers in terms of salary, productivity, or status in their field. Nor did they have the greatest life satisfaction, nor the most happiness with friendships, family, and romantic relationships.

A similar follow-up in middle age was done with 450 boys, most sons of immigrants, two thirds from families on welfare, who grew up in Sommerville, Massachusetts, at the time a “blighted slim” a few blocks from Harvard. A third had IQs below 90. But again IQ had little relationship to how well they had done at work or in the rest of their lives; for instance, 7 percent of men with IQs under 80 were unemployed for ten or more years, but so were 7 percent of men with IQs over 100. To be sure, there was a general link (as there always is) between IQ and socioeconomic level at age forty-seven. But childhood abilities such as being able to handle frustrations, control emotions, and get on with other people made the greater difference. 

Consider also data from an ongoing study of eighty-one valedictorians and salutatorians from the 1981 class in Illinois high schools. All, of course, had the highest grade point averages in their schools. But while they continued to achieve well in college, getting excellent grades, by their late twenties they had climbed to only average levels of success. Ten years after graduating from high school, only one in four were at the highest level of young people of comparable age in their chosen profession, and many were doing much less well.

Karen Arnold, professor of education at Boston University, one of the researchers tracking the valedictorians, explains, “I think we’ve discovered the ‘dutiful’ – people who know how to achieve in the system. But valedictorians struggle as surely as we all do. To know that a person is a valedictorian is to know only that he or she is exceedingly good at achievement as measured by grades. It tells you nothing about how they react to the vicissitudes of life.”

And that is the problem: academic intelligence offers virtually no preparation for the turmoil – or opportunity – life’s vicissitudes ring. Yet even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige, or happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on academic abilities, ignoring emotional intelligence, a set of traits – some might call it character – that also matters immensely for our personal destiny. Emotional life is a domain that, as surely as math or reading, can be handled with greater or lesser skill, and requires its unique set of competencies. And how adept a person is at those is crucial to understanding why one person thrives in life while another, of equal intellect, dead-ends: emotional aptitude is a meta-ability, determining how well we can use whatever other skills we have, including raw intellect.

Daniel Goleman

Emotional Intelligence. Random House LLC, 2006. 358 pages, p.35,36

emotional brilliance

If the test of social skill is the ability to calm distressing emotions in others, then handling someone at the peak of rage is perhaps the ultimate measure of mastery. The data on self-regulation of anger and emotional contagion suggest that one effective strategy might be to distract the angry person, empathize with his feelings and perspective, and then draw him into an alternative focus, one that attunes him with a more positive range of feeling – a kind of emotional judo.

Such refined skill in the fine art of emotional influence is perhaps best exemplified by the late Terry Dobson, who in the 1950s was one of the first Americans ever to study the martial art Aikido in Japan:

One afternoon he was riding home on a suburban Tokyo train when a huge, bellicose, very drunk and begrimed laborer got on. The man, staggering, began terrorizing the passengers, screaming curses, he took a swing at a woman holding a baby, sending her sprawling in the laps of an elderly couple, who then jumped up and joined a stampede to the other end of the car.

The drunk, taking a few other swings (and, in his rage, missing), grabbed the metal pole in the middle of the car with a roar and tried to tear it out of its socket. At that point Terry, who was in peak physical condition from daily eight hour Aikido workouts, felt called upon to intervene, lest someone get seriously hurt.

But he recalled the words of his teacher: “Aikido is the art of reconciliation. Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate people you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not how to start it.” Indeed, Terry had agreed upon beginning lessons with his teacher never to pick a fight, and to use his martial-arts skills only in defense.

Now, at last, he saw his chance to test his Aikido abilities in real life, in what was clearly a legitimate opportunity.

So, as all the other passengers sat frozen in their seats, Terry stood up, slowly and with deliberation. Seeing him, the drunk roared, “Aha! A foreigner! You need a lesson in Japanese manners!” and began gathering himself to take on Terry. But just as the drunk was on the verge of making his move, someone gave an ear-splitting, oddly joyous shout: “Hey!” The shout had the cheery tone of someone who has suddenly come upon a fond friend.

The drunk, surprised, spun around to see a tiny Japanese man, probably in his seventies, sitting there in a kimono. The old man beamed with delight at the drunk, and beckoned him over with a light wave of his hand and a lilting “C’mere.” The drunk strode over with a belligerent, “Why the hell should I talk to you?”

Meanwhile, Terry was ready to fell the drunk in a moment if he made the least violent move. “What’cha been drinking?” the old man asked, his eyes beaming at the drunken laborer. “I been drinking sake, and it’s none of your business,” the drunk bellowed. “Oh, that’s wonderful, absolutely wonderful,” the old man replied in a warm tone. “You see, I love sake, too.

Every night, me and my wife (she’s seventy-six, you know), we warm up a little bottle of sake and take it out into the garden, and we sit on an old wooden bench . . .” He continued on about the persimmon tree in his backyard, the fortunes of his garden, enjoying sake in the evening.

The drunk’s face began to soften as he listened to the old man; his fists unclenched. “Yeah … I love persimmons, too .. . ,” he said, his voice trailing off. “Yes,” the old man replied in a sprightly voice, “and I’m sure you have a wonderful wife.” “No,” said the laborer. “My wife died….” Sobbing, he launched into a sad tale of losing his wife, his home, his job, of being ashamed of himself.

Just then the train came to Terry’s stop, and as he was getting off he turned to hear the old man invite the drunk to join him and tell him all about it, and to see the drunk sprawl along the seat, his head in the old man’s lap.

This is emotional brilliance.

Daniel Goleman

Emotional Intelligence. Random House LLC, 2006. 358 pages, p.124-126

the samurai and the monk

A belligerent samurai, an old Japanese tale goes, once challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell. But the monk replied with scorn, “You’re nothing but a lout – I can’t waste my time with the likes of you!”

His very honor attacked, the samurai flew into a rage and pulling his sword from its scabbard, yelled, “I could kill you for your impertinence.” “That,” the monk calmly replied, “is hell.”

Startled at seeing the truth in what the master pointed out about the fury that had him in its grip, the samurai calmed down, sheathed his sword, and bowed, thanking the monk for the insight.

“And that,” said the monk, “is heaven.”

The sudden awakening of the samurai to his own agitated state illustrates the crucial difference between being caught up in a feeling and becoming aware that you are being swept away by it. Socrates’s injunction “Know thyself” speaks to this keystone of emotional intelligence: awareness of one’s own feelings as they occur.

Daniel Goleman

Emotional Intelligence. Random House LLC, 2006. 358 pages, p.46