Once More with Feeling: Emotions at Work

By Paige Churchman (New York City)

Two senior managers, both direct reports to the CEO, are faced off in a heated discussion. Their eyes flash. Their voices rise. Neither will give an inch. Then one shouts, “Come back when you’re not so emotional” and walks out. End of confrontation. It happened to Betty-Ann Heggie. At the time, she was the highest-ranking woman at PotashCorp and one of the few women in the mining industry. Her equally angry peer was a man. In business, to let your emotions get the best of you was to be weak, and in the dirty, sweaty, tough-guy world of mining in which they both dealt, a display of emotion could be career suicide.

When Heggie entered the workforce in the early nineteen eighties, she learned to steer clear of emotion. Since she was the head of advertising, this took some doing. Occasionally words like “feel” or “pretty” would creep into one of her sentences and she’d be told, “Our customers don’t feel things. They’re men. They think.” Or “Let me explain our business. Mining is not pretty.” She also reined in her natural exuberance and modeled herself on the guys at the top. “Senior managers are strong and stoic, powerful and emotionless,” she said. “They have drive to move things forward. So if you’re a woman and you want to be in senior management you have to display those characteristics.” She learned to play the game so well that in 2006 she was named to Canada’s Most Powerful Women-Top 100 and to its Hall of Fame the following year. But the rules they are a-changing (and so has Betty-Ann Heggie but more on that later).

Get a Grip

Even today, most of us believe that business is business – straightforward, nothing personal. A 2002 study by Michael W. Kramer and Jon A. Hess (Communication Rules for the Display of Emotions in Organizational Settings ) showed that we don’t want coworkers to express large emotions of any kind, negative or positive, in the workplace. We prefer that people mask their big emotions and be “professional.” But is this realistic?

No, says Sigal Barsade, a Wharton professor of management. “I think it is entirely unrealistic, and unhelpful, to hope for an “emotions-free” workplace. We are people, we have emotions, we have them at work (and suppression of emotions comes with its own set of costs), and emotions can serve a very helpful function as well. Ultimately emotions are a type of information, just as cognition is a type of information – for best effect, employees should use both wisely.”

We’re not as good at hiding our emotions as we think. One of the most intriguing ways that our inner emotional lives slip out of us is through microexpressions – involuntary facial expressions that come and go so fast (about 1/25th of a second) most of us don’t notice them on others’ faces, nor are we aware when they pass over our own. For example, the CEO may be telling you how strong the business is, but microexpressions of anguish, fear or panic might make you start thinking about selling your stock. Paul Ekman has categorized facial muscles into 46 action units to study microexpressions as well as what we do with our faces when we mean to. Did you know that a “professional smile” doesn’t engage a crucial muscle that a real smile uses? When you fake it, your orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis , a muscle around the eyes, is not involved. In other words, your eyes aren’t smiling, which is something you probably sensed way before you knew what a muscle was.

Come Back When You’re Not So Rational

Maybe it’s not that emotions don’t belong in the workplace but that emotions are an undeniable, and even valuable, part of everything we do. Take the case of Elliot the Accountant on Radiolab’s excellent episode Choice. Elliot was an accountant with a successful career, a house in the suburbs, a family, the whole bit. In 1982 he developed a tumor on his orbitofrontal cortex. He had surgery. It seemed to be a great success – no language or movement difficulties, Elliot still scored high on the IQ test. But then his problems began. Given a contract to sign, he’d spend half an hour trying to decide whether to use a black or a blue pen. All decisions, no matter how trivial, flummoxed him. He could analyze no end, but the conclusions never came. Noticing that Elliot spoke flatly and seemed devoid of affect, a neurologist named Antonio Damasio tested him. Elliot was shown evocative pictures: a burning house, a severed foot, a naked person. But Elliot registered nothing. It turns out he no longer had any emotions. He was completely rational. And he couldn’t function. He was unable to make a decision. He lost his job; his marriage collapsed; he moved back in with his parents and even fell victim to a financial swindle.

“We can’t get a glass of water without emotions,” says Denise Shull, president of Trader Psyches. She’s a neuroeconomist and day-trader who applies what she learned studying the brain for 20 years to the markets and trading. “Everyone says control your emotions, but this is wrong,” she says. “Only actions need to be controlled. Emotion never lost a dime on its own. The smart money is learning how to use feeling and emotions in a systematic way.” Not only are emotions vital, they can carry important messages from inchoate and vaster parts of ourselves. “Feelings can be seen as responses to facts and sensations that exist beyond the tight horizon of awareness,” says Jonah Lehrer an article for the Boston Globe. “They can also be thought of as messages from the unconscious, as conclusions it has reached after considering a wide range of information -they are the necessary foundation of thought.”

So now that the value of emotions is being recognized, even lauded, does it mean that women, emotional creatures that we are, will be welcomed as models of a new kind business leadership, one that’s more balanced and thus stronger? Not so easy, says Betty-Ann Heggie. It’s more like what happens when you’re the only woman in a roomful of men as she so often was. You open your mouth, you offer what you think is a great idea. It hangs out there in the ether a few seconds. No response. A few minutes later, a man repeats the idea, and, well, you know the story. “Every woman knows it,” she laughs, “And no man believes it’s true.” Now that men have realized emotions can further strategic objectives, “they’re beating us at our own game,” says Heggie. “We already know we’re good at the soft part. Let’s make sure we can do the hard part too.”

However, she suggests that women don’t do it the way she did it twenty years ago – by suppressing large parts of yourself. Heggie’s own personal growth in the past year is as remarkable as her climb to Canada’s Most Powerful Women list. Last year, she retired early and set out on some extensive self-examination which led to her reincorporating the parts of herself she had cast aside twenty years before. She emerged 100 pounds lighter. She’s still whacking away at the glass ceiling, but now she does it as a speaker and mentor. Do it your way, and do it as your full self. Or as Heggie says, “Don’t judge your insides by other people’s outsides, especially in a corporation where image is everything.”

When you step way back, this idea of our rational and emotional sides being interconnected isn’t really anything new. “The Wise Mind is a Buddhist principal based on the concept that each of us has a rational side and an emotional side to our brain,” says coach Kathleen Burns Kingsbury. “The Wise Mind is the part of the brain where the two intersect. The most prudent decisions are made when both minds are considered.” Balance – what a concept! It may just be what’s needed to help us reshape the world into a more just and compassionate place.