In this episode as part of some research for his next book, Rick interviews Tyler about his experience with emotions in the Less Annoying CRM workplace. Here are some of the takeaways:
- There are frameworks out there for emotional intelligence, self-regulation, but there isn’t much stuff out there about how emotions impact company culture, team performance, and leadership.
- There aren’t a ton of CEOs talking about their own experiences.
- Most of the stories out there are from therapists about their anonymous clients.
- There isn't agreement on the definition of emotion.
- One model is Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions (see image below) that defines 8 primary emotions:
- joy and sadness
- anger and fear
- trust and disgust
- surprise and anticipation
- One model is Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions (see image below) that defines 8 primary emotions:
- A leader who priorities trust may be more likely to create a safer culture where people are free to express their emotions.
- This makes it so that the emotions that you and other people experience happen in a way that is healthy, and has a mostly positive impact on other people (and team performance / culture).
- It also makes it safe for everyone to inquire about clarifying the meaning of each others’ emotions (instead of making assumptions).
- When you're in a distrusting situation, emotions are probably more violent in a negative way.
- Trust relies on character and authenticity.
- You might experience trust when you see someone do something that's not in their own best interest, but they do it because they think it's right or some set of values.
- Competence may also play a part.
- Distrust leads to distrust
- If you hire and keep people who you don’t trust, it can lead to a negative cycle of distrust.
- One source of potentially negative emotion for leaders is the time between becoming aware of a problem and figuring out what to do about it
- If you have don’t have a high-trust environment, this can be a risky time period when emotions might be misinterpreted
- Another source of potentially negative emotion is when an employee leaves
What else would you add to this list?
Source: Wikipedia
Context
Rick: It's my week for the topic. I don't really have a critical problem per se to bring you that I want to brainstorm with you, at least not more important than what I'm bringing to you today. So taking a slightly different approach with the topic I'm bringing, and it could be a total bust, so I'm prepared for bad feedback from this from the audience. But maybe this works. I guess listeners out there, if you listen to this and you don't get value, please tell us so that we don't repeat this. But if you do like it, please tell us because we'll have more confidence covering topics like this in the future. Now that I've got my writing cadence going at RickLindquist.com, I spend two to three hours every morning before 9:00 AM researching and writing about a topic of my choice. My goal is not to just throw out content, it's primarily learning through the process of writing. And so I want to write a book about emotions, leadership, and teams, and I'm starting to outline that book in terms of what would the table of contents be so it can drive my research. Because I'm going to be learning a lot as I go because I'm not an expert on emotions by any means, I know that the specific angle I'm going to take and the specific outline is going to change over time, but I hope that by constantly revising the outline based on what I'm learning, it can drive my short-term and short-form writing on a weekly so that I'm killing two birds with one stone. I'm writing and fulfilling what I want to do at RickLindquist.com in terms of outputting content, but I'm also learning the things necessary as part of research for this larger book. It may take me a whole year to write this thing. It's just a question of putting a couple of hours in a day most days. I started this week researching emotions and building the outline. I'm stunned at how little agreement there is on how emotions work and how they impact people. Most of what I'm reading is research and academic papers. I have not been able to find a ton of CEOs talking publicly about the role of emotions in leadership and in teams. Kind of coming back to listeners out there, I personally think that this is a topic that we all need to talk about more because I hypothesize that we can become better leaders if we're more in touch with our own emotions and others' emotions because it's the basis for how we form trust with our strong relationships. And trust is the ultimate success factor for a highly functioning team. But I'm trying to do research. I'm having trouble finding like layman's explanations of the stuff with consensus. I was hoping today that I could, I don't want to say interrogate, but I kind of have a feeling that I need to ask you some tough questions. I want to ask you some tough questions about your experience with emotions, both from how they happen in your head and within your body, as a leader and CEO. Then also, how you react and observe and handle emotions of team members in the day-to-day stuff. We've talked offline I know you've, we've talked offline and made sure that was okay, but is there anything that's off limits in terms of asking you questions?
Tyler: No, I mean there might be ... I'm happy to share my own experiences and I might be a little more secretive if I feel like I'm exposing something about someone else who hasn't necessarily given permission. But for myself, now I think I'm an open book. We'll see.
Rick: Yeah. Cool. Listeners, I think that the other thing that we want to do here is I want to model talking about this openly, so I'll also jump in with my own insights on emotions. I'm a pretty, in terms of like emotional spectrum, I wear my emotions on my sleeve much more than Tyler does. Not to say that we're both not emotional people, it's just we may have very different experiences with emotions because of our personalities. I'll jump in when I can add a personal take. Would you add any anything?
Tyler: I'm curious here, so I don't hear people maybe using the word emotions a lot, but I hear people talking about m...