I will never forget the moment I heard this statement in a meeting. My eyes shot over to the person who said it, and I thought to myself, “Then what are we even doing here?” It was like a ripple effect of thoughts in my brain. “That’s so close-minded. Does he know anything about leadership? He’s clearly not self-aware. But a lot of managers have this mentality….older generations think the younger generation is ‘too soft’. Feelings do matter. Why do they matter? Why does it make a difference to business?” Not only did I go on a mission to find the answers, but I started a company to help ag businesses understand why feelings do belong in farming, and why we should be paying attention to them.
They say every business is a people business. So if you have people, you have feelings – whether you like it or not. Neuroscientist Paul Zak says, “Emotions are valuable information flow that leaders ignore to their peril.”
I agree.
Generations before mine have seemingly always considered feelings as weak and irrelevant. But emotions guide our decisions, behaviors, and motivations. Which means some of the issues we may have with an employee are more likely emotional than performance-related. How people act or react will tell you a lot about what they are feeling. However, a lot of us never learned the importance of paying attention to our emotions and how to react to them appropriately personally, let alone professionally.
Let me give you some examples that I’ve experienced in workplaces, and the possible emotions that are behind them:
- “Whatever” responses.
- This person isn’t feeling seen or heard. They feel irrelevant. They feel their input does not matter. Maybe they have lost the passion or fulfillment in their role, and they have disengaged.
- Withholding relevant information.
- This can be a retaliation or survival tactic. Perhaps, they felt they were wronged by someone or they feel insecure in their role and they withhold information to make themselves feel superior.
- “You’re the boss.”
- This person may have an issue with authority (e.g., an older person taking direction from a younger person) or they may not agree with what they are being asked to do for a variety of different reasons.
Attitudes and behaviors such as these are often ignored, because we don’t know how to address them. We send that employee to training hoping someone else can fix the problem, because we don’t have the patience or the tools to deal with it ourselves. What we miss though, is a single training or series of trainings are typically generic and impersonal. With employee buy-in on improvement, through self-assessments and ongoing engagement in our coaching and leadership development services, we can target the root of these issues to create stronger managers.