A certain amount of emotions in the workplace is expected. Heck. Positive emotions are a good thing and help motivate a team and keep them happy. But what happens when they’re NOT positive emotions? How do you deal with emotional employees and keep them from disrupting the rest of the team?
Follow these steps and you’ll be well on your way to a calmer employee and a happier, more productive team:
- Recognize it early
- Provide a pressure valve
- Stay… C.O.P.P.
- Acknowledge
- Strive to understand
- Provide a different perspective
- Focus on performance
- Utilize resources
- Train managers and supervisors
Before getting into each of the steps to help a leader deal with an emotional employee, let’s take a closer look at the role of emotions in the workplace.
We already know that many of our decisions are made due to how we feel about a person or situation. People are emotional creatures, and our actions are guided by emotions. We often put reason to actions after we’ve experienced an emotional response.
How Do Emotions Play a Role in Workplace Dynamics?
To answer this question, we turn to research developed by two researchers, Howard Weiss and Russell Cropanzano, which became the Affective Events Theory. In their research, they looked at how emotions affect the workplace. Specifically, they examined how different events at work affect people differently. They noticed that people generally reacted to various events with one of the 6 major emotions ( fear, love, joy, sadness, anger and surprise). According to this theory, small emotional responses, over time, inherently affect an individual’s job satisfaction.
When employees are asked or expected to perform differently than the way that they feel it causes what is called cognitive dissonance. This difference between the expected behavior and how one deeply feels about a circumstance can cause the individual a lot of stress until that person can get their emotions and behaviors in alignment. This is done by: 1) changing behavior, 2) changing beliefs, or 3) adding new information which changes the importance of the events in the mind of the individual feeling the emotions.
Here is a quick example.
Let’s say you are a customer service representative at a fast food restaurant. It’s policy to say, “my pleasure” after interactions with customers, yet you often experience customers who are impolite. Here, there is misalignment between your expected behavior and your belief. Bridging the gap can happen by changing your behavior, changing your belief about the customer or situation, or changing the importance of the expected behavior (i.e., you will be removed from the position.)
As a leader, the ability to recognize how emotions play a role in the workplace is incredibly important. A true leader must work on their own emotional intelligence to be most effective. So…
What is emotional intelligence?
Emotional Intelligence is a term that’s been used for decades, but in scientific papers written by Salovey, Mayer and DiPaolo they describe emotional intelligence as being an individual’s ability to recognize and monitor their own emotions, as well as those around them and use the information they gather as a way to direct behaviors. According to these researchers, there are 4 components to emotional intelligence, and while some break them out into individual and social components, they can be combined to be these 4:
- Perception of emotions- this is the actual awareness
- Reasoning- putting the emotions into a logical context
- Understanding-knowing the meaning behind the emotions
- Management- Regulation of one’s own emotions; responding to others’ emotions appropriately and constructively
Just as the intelligence quotient (IQ) can be affected by observation and study, emotional intelligence (EI) can also be learned. For this to happen, the person must be motivated, open to learning, receptive to feedback and willing to practice skills.
In, Knowledge Solutions, Olivier Serrat writes,”By developing their emotional intelligence, individuals can become more productive and successful at what they do, and help others become more productive and successful, too.”
Some Stats on EI in the Workplace:
- 71% of Employers surveyed in a 2011 Careerbuilder study said that they valued an employees emotional intelligence over their IQ.
- And 75% said that they would probably promote an employee who demonstrated emotional intelligence over someone who didn’t
- 59% of employers stated that they would not hire a candidate who demonstrated high intelligence by low emotional intelligence. (4)
So now that we know a little about what emotional intelligence is, it’s just important to know that emotional intelligence can be developed, and, by doing so, it can dramatically change a leader’s ability to work with the emotional dynamics within their own team.
“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion. “
Dale Carnegie
Now, let’s get into the steps. The first thing to do is…
(1) Recognize it early
Have your radar up and be ready to identify when people are your team are likely to have a negative emotional reaction. This can be a reaction to another person at work, an event at work, or it might have to do with people or events in their personal life. Regardless, recognizing emotional stress early will enable you to tackle it before the stress grows, and potentially rubs off on others.
(2) Provide a pressure valve
Most of the time, when people get to the point where they’re showing a lot of negative emotion at work, they’ve had a lot of emotions building up and finally break. Respectfully give them a little time to and space to collect themselves.
Did you know? The American Institute of Stress suggests activating the body’s natural relaxation response through deep breathing exercises. According to AIS, reaching a state of deep rest can change both the physical and emotional ways we deal with stress. It can positively affect the heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension and sense of calm. (1)
Give them an opportunity to calm down away from others in the office. It also helps to get them out of the office spotlight, and gets others back to work.
Note: there are some people who derive satisfaction through emotional outbursts at work. Initially, their responses may even be calculated. They get some sort of win out of a demonstration of anger, hurt, etc. As a leader, you’ll need to determine when this type situation arises; providing the benefits for this sort of behavior will only encourage it to continue.
(3) Stay… calm, objective, positive, and private
In order to effectively deal with an emotionally distraught employee, you have to remain calm. You’ll want to stay objective to help them think through the situation. Maintaining a positive demeanor that’s truly authentic can also help the individual, as well as the office dynamic.
Respect their privacy. If they’re forthcoming about their issue, ensure that you keep it confidential if it doesn’t relate to others in the office.
(4) Acknowledge
When the individual is ready to discuss their concern, listen. Sometimes, all a frustrated employee needs is an opportunity to talk through what’s bothering them. If it’s an angry associate, acknowledge that they’ve been heard. Recognizing their issue is just showing that they’ve been heard. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to agree with them, and making that decision may just come later, anyway.
(5) Strive to understand
Ask questions to get at the reasons behind why they’re upset. Versus focusing on the emotions, what was the intent? Once you know their intent, empathize with them, letting them know you understand. (You can’t empathize if you don’t know the true problem.) Ask how you can help. Making assumptions certainly WON’T help. Knowing the heart of the problem will enable you to really communicate with them. And if you’re able to eliminate their concern, it also may help to avoid an emotional situation in the future.
(6) Provide a different perspective
Often, emotional employees are so wrapped up in their feelings that they are blinded to other ways of looking at the issue. Reframe the scenario. Have them look at things from a different angle. Starting by asking them, “What if…?” is an example.
Giving them a different, positive way to look at the situation, where it’s warranted, can turn a negative situation into an opportunity. The more they practice making a negative situation into an opportunity, the more that might just turn into a habit.
“Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.”
Paul Hawkin
(7) Focus on performance
This step may or may not be part of your plan depending on the reason the employee is upset. Obviously, if the employee is emotional over a personal issue at home, focusing on their performance may be completely out of place. But frequently, employees get emotional because of feedback they’ve received about their performance.
Organizational psychologist (and parenting coaches!) stress this: focus on the behavior, not on the individual. leaders just don’t often recognize the slight differences in delivery.
It’s the difference in between “What you did could have been better,” and “You could be better.” People have a much easier time taking constructive criticism on their performance than on themselves, as a person, and, in most cases, it’s much easier for leaders to deliver constructive feedback if they think of it in terms of behavior.
One way to diffuse an employee’s emotional response due to negative performance feedback is to conduct regular feedback sessions that make surprises over their work performance non-existent.
(8) Utilize resources
There may be times when an employee is dealing with emotional issues that are far outside of the scope of what you may feel comfortable dealing with as their leader. During these times, it may be best to refer your employee to resources available to your organization. Many companies have employee assistant programs (EAPs) for this type of situation.
EAPs provide a host of services to employees of an organization which may include confidential assessments and counseling services, and referrals to other professionals, where needed. These are offered as a free service to employees as a resource for those dealing with either workplace or personal issues.
(9) Train managers
Just as you can work on your own emotional intelligence, so can managers or supervisors who work for you. Managers need training – on how to deal with emotional concerns in the workplace, as well as other aspects of leadership.
Check out these stats on training:
- 86% of respondents in an international survey conducted by Deloitte said that leadership is the top, most urgent issue facing companies. (2)
- A study by Careerbuilder divulged that 58% of managers surveyed said that they received NO training to become a manager of other people.
- 93% of managers need training on coaching their employees, (according to the SHRM/Globoforce Employee Recognition Survey). (3)
- Emotional Intelligence “accounts for nearly 90 percent of what moves people up the ladder when IQ and technical skills are roughly similar (see “What Makes a Leader” in the Harvard Business Review, January 2004).”
- Following training on emotional intelligence provided by Motorola for their manufacturing plant staff, productivity improved 90% in those trained. (Bruce Cryer, Rollin McCraty, and Doc Childre: “Pull the Plug on Stress,” Harvard Business Review, July 2003).
Want some good resources for training? Check out our page on training. Here you’ll find a lot of training resources on a variety of leadership topics.
So what might be some of the benefits of training your managers to improve emotional intelligence?
- They will have a better understanding and control over their own emotions
- Their methods of communicating with their team will likely change, improving communication within the entire team
- Employees may experience more job satisfaction
- Employees will become less focused on negative emotions, opening pathways for greater creativity and increase productivity
Summary:
Understanding how emotions are involved in the workplace dynamic – employees’ decisions, their happiness, and overall team productivity – is essential to effective leadership. Learning how to develop your own emotional intelligence can help you get there.
BusinessDictionary.com defines discretionary effort as the “difference in the level of effort one is capable of bringing to an activity or task and the effort required only to get by or make do.” Developing emotional intelligence can help any leader capitalize on their entire team’s discretionary effort. How? Acknowledging their feelings and helping them work through emotions helps leaders connect, and those team members will be more likely to tap into that discretionary effort for the betterment of the team. The leaders will be getting the most productivity from their team… and the team will enjoy the journey more in the process.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to sense, understand, and effectively apply the power and acumen of emotions as a source of human energy, information, connection, and influence.
Robert K. Cooper, PhD