7
Emotional Engagement
Do not engage to find things as you think they are.
— HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Chapter 5 described the importance of a leader’s ongoing dialogue with his followers as a vehicle for winning their intellectual commitment. Such dialogue is described as a “flow of meaning in the whole group.” It is marked by the desire to create a new understanding within the group; an understanding that leads to action upon a common purpose. This dialogue is important to enrolling and educating followers and to helping them discover their own ways of contributing. Dialogue is described as thinking together. Emotional engagement between a leader and followers is the emotional equivalent of their intellectual dialogue with one another. Rather than describing the flow of meaning in a group, emotional engagement describes the flow of feeling. Emotional engagement is feeling together. It is a critical competency for gaining emotional commitment.
Michael Jones provided a metaphor for conceptualizing the leader’s role in both thinking together and feeling together with followers. When asked to describe what happens between himself and an audience listening to him play piano, Jones said, “There is a feeling of connectedness. In that moment I am speaking for the whole. I am capturing a truth that all of us resonate with. I am able to bring it into form. I am a medium for the current that is moving within the group and am able to capture and articulate that field of energy so it becomes available for all of us.” Leaders who win emotional commitment begin to do so by acting as a medium for the emotional energy that is moving within the group, making that energy more available.
Inviting Emotion to Be Present
No leader can win emotional commitment unless emotion is permitted to be present; emotions, like ideas, need air time. Too often, however, would-be leaders discourage or suppress emotion in favor of intellect. They do so partly because they hold the unexamined belief that intellectual commitment is enough, partly out of personal preference, and partly because their training has honed their intellectual competency at the expense of their emotional competency.
Those who hold positions of leadership and who discourage or suppress emotion are usually least tolerant of emotions they judge to be unconstructive to their insights, visions, and attempts to mobilize others. Such emotions are often classified as “negative.” But emotions themselves are neither positive nor negative. For example, anger might be considered positive if it is about something a competitor has done, but negative if it is about something a colleague has done. From a leadership standpoint, it is best to avoid classifying emotions as either positive or negative, but as more or less constructive to bringing a vision to reality. Leaders who discourage or suppress emotion fail to recognize that all emotion is energy, whether the emotion is or is not constructive to the leader’s common purpose with followers. The leader’s task regarding emotion is to help people transmute energy of any kind into emotionally committed action through emotional engagement.
There are four primary facets to a leader’s emotional engagement with followers: first, the ability to manage her own emotions; second, the ability to make creative use of the self; third, the ability to empathize with followers; and fourth, proficiency at helping others to transform their uncomfortable or unconstructive emotions into committed action.
Self-Management
A few definitions will be useful when thinking about the first of the four facets of a leader’s emotional engagement with followers—the ability to manage his own emotions. Self-awareness, as described in Chapter 6, is moment-to-moment alertness to what we do, how we feel, and what we think. Self-knowledge is recognition of the various aspects of the self that we carry around with us everywhere we go, such as our typical ways of reacting, the aspects of ourselves we prefer, and the aspects we would rather keep hidden. While self-awareness is alertness to the moment, self-knowledge is alertness to the totality of what we know about ourselves.
A third useful term is self-management. Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee describe self-management as, among other things, managing disturbing emotions and impulses, being open with others about the self, and adapting to new challenges.1 Self-management then is a decision-making process and, in particular, a practice of choosing behavior. It rests upon both self-awareness and self-knowledge; we cannot manage what we are not alert to. In relation to emotions, Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee say that, “Self-management . . . is the component of emotional intelligence that frees us from being a prisoner of our feelings.”2 In other words, if we can recognize the presence of potentially destructive emotions, we can then choose to behave in ways that do not allow them to fulfill their destructive potential. For leaders this means choosing to behave in ways that maintain or win commitment.
When self-management is shut down we “give in” to our emotions, acting impulsively and usually ineffectively. Self-management is an attempt to avoid giving in to emotions, while at the same time recognizing and valuing their presence in a state of full self-awareness. The ultimate goal of any leader’s self-management is to enable her to lead in a way that makes best use of who she is, is most personally fulfilling, and is best for the group of people or the organization from which commitment is being sought.
Creative Use of Self
The second facet of a leader’s emotional engagement with followers is the ability to make creative use of the self. Leaders who win emotional commitment generally possess a varied repertoire of behavior and of sub-selves. David Hollister said, “You have multiple selves and you use different ones at different times.” Hollister thinks of himself as a visionary. “I enjoy reading about the future,” he said, “I like to study and think about what is going on around the world.” He understands that sometimes this aspect of who he is needs to be front and center. There are other times when he is a strategist—a pragmatic and political realist, setting aside his vision temporarily.
Leaders have many options for choosing aspects of who they are that they might draw upon at any particular moment. They are multifaceted human beings and, unlike many other people, they give reign to their various facets and work to develop them, even those that at first seem unnatural. They strive to be thoughtful, empathetic, visionary, strategic, challenging, questioning, reverent, funny, withdrawn, outgoing, or any of many other qualities, all genuinely and all at the right moment. Leaders consciously choose who they will be—what aspect of themselves they will show—at any particular moment or in any particular circumstance.
Creative use of self is especially important to emotional engagement because leaders who can make conscious choices about who they will be at any particular moment are unlikely to be at the mercy of transitory feelings or impulses. They are also unlikely to mistake the present situation for one from the past and operate out of assumptions that do not hold. In making these choices, they must take care that the part of themselves which shows up is consistent with the story they are telling. If the story is serious they must not make light of it, if it is about compassion it cannot be told offhandedly, if it is about joy it must be told joyfully. Making these choices requires a leader to observe two places at the same time. The first place is the situation at hand; the second place is inside them.
Creative use of self is, then, a crucial element of a leader’s storytelling ability. When creative use of self is happening in front of an audience, the people in the audience will have the response described earlier by Odds Bodkin, “They say, wow, this person is creating before my eyes.” Improvising and storytelling are not just about the story; they are also about the identity of the leader. The leader’s abilities to make creative use of self while improvising and storytelling help followers to answer the questions, Who is this person? Is he trustworthy? Do I want commit to this insight, vision, mission, or cause? Can this person help me become better than I would otherwise be?
An Absence of Empathy
The third facet of a leader’s emotional engagement with followers is empathy. It is an elusive quality. When it is present, it is barely noticed. When we are with an empathetic person we think that she is likeable, understanding, a good listener, and perhaps sympathetic to our situation. But, like self-awareness, the absence of empathy can be very noticeable. Here is an example of a time and place where empathy was needed and it was absent. The story involves the executive team of a division of a multinational company. During the 1980s, the parent company had been having a rough time, punctuated by horrible press and by an across-the-board downsizing that was stunning because of the company’s rock-solid reputation and long history of loyalty to its employees. The divisional executive team met to plan how to respond to the feelings of betrayal, fear, and resentment they knew were rampant among employees. At the urging of this team, the CEO of the parent company produced a video for them to use in employee meetings. The team wanted the CEO to issue reassuring words.
The divisional team began its planning meeting by comparing their perceptions of the state of employee morale with one another. Everyone agreed that the spirit of the company was at an all-time low. Then they watched the video for the first time. In it the CEO of their parent company sat stone-faced at his desk and spoke woodenly to the camera about how proud he was of the company and its employees, how he knew they were excited about the company’s future, and how he “just knew” their usual pride and high morale were intact.
The man they saw in the video seemed so out of touch with the emotional state of his organization the divisional executives were at a complete loss about what to do. If they went ahead to develop plans to meet the current low spirit head-on, they would be in direct contradiction with the publicly expressed attitude of the CEO. If they did not go ahead, they too would seem out of touch; they would squander the opportunity to create an emotional bond with their employees and to transform unconstructive emotions into a renewed emotional commitment to the organization. They would also lose a chance to promote healing of the organization, and the morale problem would continue. They held the employee meetings without the video.
A leader who wishes to win emotional commitment—to win the hearts of followers—simply cannot do so in the kind of emotional vacuum created when feelings are ignored or denied. Emotions are ignored or denied when any feeling is considered unacceptable and when leaders, such as the executive in the story above, close their eyes to the pain in their organizations. Emotions are ignored or denied when organization members are encouraged to be “one big happy family” and never angry, lonely, or hurt. Emotions are ignored or denied when people misunderstand injunctions to “drive out fear” and instead fail to acknowledge fear where it exists, thereby encouraging others to be afraid of being afraid, and to be quiet about it. Emotions are ignored or denied when insincere celebrations are the norm, or when celebrating is the only sanctioned emotion. Emotions are ignored or denied when a group of people proceeds with the agenda that is on the table, while forgetting the vast sea of emotion sloshing just beneath the table, inevitably influencing whatever the agenda might be.
When emotions are ignored or denied, those in leadership roles miss the opportunity to lead because they are viewed as out of touch with their organizations, they do not get good information about the state of their organizations, they breed misunderstanding, and they fail to transform unconstructive emotional energy into emotional commitment. In doing so, they relinquish respect.
Empathetic leaders, on the other hand, are able to tune into the emotions of others, to value those emotions, and to accept them as legitimate even when they are uncomfortable or inconvenient to the leader’s purposes. Empathy is at the core of what Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee call resonance, being “in synch” with the mood of another individual or with the emotional tone of an entire group of people.3
Imagining Emotion
Empathy has two ingredients. The first is the experience of stepping into someone else’s emotional world without getting lost in it. A useful metaphor is watching a movie in which we are able to enter the emotional world of the characters on the screen while remaining firmly in our own seats. We, the audience watching Gone With the Wind, know exactly how Scarlett O’Hara feels when she cries, “As God is my witness, as God is my witness, they’re not going to lick me! I’m going to live through this, and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again—no, nor any of my folks! If I have to lie, steal, cheat, or kill! As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” We sense both her despair and her resolve.
We also know how Rhett Butler feels when he tells her, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” He is dismissing her, proud of doing so, and quite pleased for the opportunity to let her know about it. And we know how Terry Malloy, the washed-up fighter of On the Waterfront, feels when he says, “You don’t understand! I could’ve had class. I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.” We sense his keen disappointment about the course of his life.
Entering into the emotional world of another person requires a special kind of imagination—a re-membering, a putting back together, which involves returning to our own past feelings, or calling up feelings that are with us but that we do not readily acknowledge or express. This kind of imagination is not merely an intellectual “remembering” but also a return to the sensations that characterize the feeling: we may cry along with Scarlett, nod our heads in concurrence with Rhett, or squirm uncomfortably as our own sense of failure and loss resonates with that of Terry Molloy. When we re-member we reconnect with a part of ourselves.
As an audience, we are afforded the opportunity to step into the emotional worlds of Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, and Terry Malloy by virtue of watching their lives unfold on-screen. We enter their emotional worlds in our imaginations, sensitive to the changing flow of feeling in each of them and re-membering our own feelings. As we watch, we know it is not our emotional world, we know that our participation in it is temporary, and at the same time we know how they feel.
Of course, we can imagine how they feel only if we have developed the self-awareness that permits us such knowledge.
For some leaders it is easier to imagine the emotional worlds of their followers than it is for others. Alice Harris, known affectionately as Sweet Alice, is one such leader. At sixteen Harris was homeless, with two infant children and no food, and pleading for work in exchange for food and shelter. A woman offered her work, a small salary, and the use of a garage apartment. She asked in return that Harris help others in the future. Today, some forty years later, Harris is executive director of Parents of Watts, an organization she founded. She oversees more than a dozen programs that provide emergency food and shelter, health seminars, legal and drug counseling, support for unwed mothers, and help to prepare young people for jobs and for college. The programs are housed in eight homes in Los Angeles that Harris owns. She has earned a degree from California State University and was honored in 2002 as the California lieutenant governor’s Woman of the Year. She has been a panelist at Pepperdine University’s annual Call to Leadership, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Black American Political Association of California.4 Her support is often courted by California politicians. One of her many fans said Harris may be the person most responsible for the relative peace of Watts since the riots of 1965.
When she talks about the people around her, Harris says, “I have worn the shoes of most of the people I have heard. I understand what they are going through. And I also understand that they have no resources. It is a pain that they have that people don’t understand—a hard pain.” Harris is able to imagine the pain of the people she helps because she too once felt that pain. “I have weathered that storm,” she said.
This sense of wearing the shoes of the people they lead echoes from other leaders. Matt Catingub is the pops conductor of the Honolulu Symphony. He was named one of “10 Who Made a Difference” by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 2002 for his work in drawing top-notch talent to perform with the orchestra, for his musicianship, showmanship, and recordings, and for beginning the Music and Artists of Hawaii program to provide local musicians opportunities to perform with the symphony. Catingub can imagine the feelings of the musicians he selects for his bands because he has faced the same struggles they face. Wilma Mankiller can imagine the emotional worlds of other women, and of other Native Americans who have suffered prejudice, because she has suffered prejudice on both grounds. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi can imagine the emotional worlds of anxious elders because he was also once anxious about growing old. Marvin Israelow can imagine the emotional worlds of other parents in Chappaqua who also want their schools to continuously improve.
It is clear that leaders have the best chance of winning emotional commitment from others when they are able to imagine the emotional worlds of their followers because they too have had the same or a very similar experience.
Communicating Understanding
The second ingredient of empathy is the ability to communicate to another person that his emotions have been understood and accepted. This communication requires a deep and honest caring about how other people feel, as well as avoiding attempts to minimize the importance of any feeling or to change it either by offering advice or judging it.
In the early stages of her career as an administrator and leader, a single incident taught Beverly O’Neill lessons about empathy that she says she will never forget. In 1994, O’Neill was elected mayor of Long Beach, California, the fifth largest city in the state and the thirty-third largest in the country. Four years later she was reelected, receiving nearly 80 percent of the vote. Long Beach prevents the name of an incumbent mayor from appearing on the ballot for a third term. However, in 2002, O’Neill was reelected as a write-in candidate. She was also elected as a trustee of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and president of the League of California Cities, and has received numerous awards for her work.
O’Neill recalls learning about empathy years before her electoral success, when she had responsibility for the buildings and grounds operations of a college. She had a corps of gardeners and another of custodians who worked for her. One custodian, a man in his fifties, came to her to tell her he was resigning.
“He was so upset, and so emotional,” she said. “He was falling apart. The man started to cry. I was listening but I didn’t know what the issue was. He was a good custodian, but here was this man in tears. He was quitting.”
After much patient listening she began to understand. Gardeners were in charge of anything that was in the dirt; custodians of anything on the sidewalk. The tearful custodian had seen gardeners kicking cigarette butts out of the dirt and onto the sidewalk where they would not have to pick them up. O’Neill says that often, when she tells this story, people laugh. But it wasn’t funny to her at the time.
“That taught me such a message about how relevant and irrelevant things are to different people,” she said. “I couldn’t believe he was so emotional about this issue. But when you visit it daily, and you are involved with it daily, you see it happen daily, and it affects you personally, you get to a breaking point.”
She said, “I listened and I empathized with him. I told him, ‘I can see how you are feeling about this because you are obviously so upset and so emotional about this issue. It is something that we can take care of.’ ” The custodian stayed at his job.
O’Neill’s lessons? First, she said, “Issues are all relevant to the person that is talking about them.” And beyond that, “You have to be prepared to listen. Sometimes that is all people want—to get something off their chest.”
O’Neill also understands it is important for a leader to engage with emotions that are constructive to her common purpose with her electorate, and not just those that are unconstructive. She said, “It is important for me to be places where I can tell people what a great job they are doing and how important that is to the community. I love doing it. It isn’t ‘put on’— as if you have to thank people. I really mean to tell them—it is a heartfelt thing.”
Practical Empathy
Many times people do want action from leaders as well as empathetic understanding. Leaders are not therapists. President Bill Clinton’s catchphrase, “I feel your pain,” became a national joke in part because of his choice of words (he might have been better off saying “I can imagine your pain”), in part because people such as AIDS sufferers and Native Americans were not convinced that he could either feel or imagine their pain, and in part because many of the people whose pain he claimed to feel wanted more than that from him. Listening empathetically and communicating that one has heard and understood a person or a group of people can promote healing—people can become unstuck and can move past emotions that impede progress—but that is not enough. Healing alone will not give reality to a vision unless the vision is solely about healing.
Leaders also inevitably take actions that upset followers or those who they would like to have become followers. Beverly O’Neill, as a mayor who must balance the needs of different constituencies, said, “You have to say, ‘If I were in your shoes I might feel the same way. But in my shoes I have to take into consideration this, this, and this.’ I really understand how you are feeling, but I have to be responsible for more than just that.” With this stance a leader acknowledges her differences of opinion with others, while also acknowledging the other person’s feelings and offering the empathy that encourages emotional engagement and commitment.
Transforming Emotion
The fourth facet of a leader’s emotional engagement with followers is his ability to transform the unconstructive emotions of followers into committed emotional energy. While unconstructive emotions may be difficult for leaders to hear, their expression is necessary. Leaders want emotional commitment; they want excitement about their visions and enthusiasm for their plans. When people experience excitement and enthusiasm, things get done. But emotions are interwoven with one another and are not easily isolated. Leaders cannot dismiss any unconstructive emotion without running the risk of also banishing the emotions that they want—excitement and enthusiasm.
Leaders who encourage the expression of unconstructive emotions grant themselves the opportunity to transform the energy of these emotions into more constructive emotions such as enthusiasm and hope. This transformation can occur when leaders allow unconstructive emotions to simply be what they are, and when they acknowledge them—when they communicate that the feelings have been heard and accepted. Remember that feelings obey the paradoxical theory of change—change occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not.5 Feelings can change when they become what they are.
When unconstructive feelings are blocked from becoming what they are, they tend to get stuck. Then the person with the feeling is stuck—trapped in the emotion. When a person or group of people is stuck in an unconstructive emotion they are blocked from moving forward toward hope and positive action. It is as if the unconstructive emotion is caught in the throat, preventing the swallow of hope that would allow change to occur.
Beverly O’Neill sometimes faces the unconstructive emotions of constituents. Her natural inclination is toward people, and when she first began to take on leadership roles, she found it difficult to focus on the issues that came before her. “I felt like a square peg in a round hole,” she said, “I was more interested in the person than the issue.” Then she discovered that her ability to heed the emotional tone of others gave her an important advantage. She said, “If someone came to me very angry about an issue, by the time we talked about it, and they could see that I was interested in them, then the issue became . . .” and here she searches for just the right word to describe the transformation that takes place in such conversations, and concludes that it is, “. . . softer.” In that statement, O’Neill describes what can happen when an unconstructive emotion is heard and valued by a leader—when the leader can empathize. The unconstructive emotion is transformed.
Development Strategies for Emotional Engagement
Self-awareness, the subject of Chapter 6, is a precondition for developing emotional engagement. Those who remain unaware of their own emotions have little or no hope of resonating with the emotions of others. But as self-awareness develops, so does the capacity for emotional engagement. Most people can be powerful sources and sensitive receivers of emotion, and when a leader and her followers can get on the same emotional page, emotional commitment becomes possible.
Practicing Empathy
Empathy is often presented as a simple set of skills such as listening and paraphrasing what we have heard. But the person who is most often quoted about empathy, psychologist Carl Rogers, saw it as much more than that. For Rogers, empathy is, “a complex, demanding, and strong—yet also a subtle and gentle—way of being.”6 Developing in this way of being begins with extending awareness by practicing a special kind of listening wherein a leader both grasps the other person’s meaning and senses the underlying feelings at the same time. When a leader can do both—understand both the content and the emotions—he can then focus on imagining being in the shoes of the other person.
Focusing on Similarities
Emotional engagement between a leader and her followers can begin when the leader focuses attention on the similarities between them rather than on their differences. What hopes and dreams do we share? What feelings? The more a leader can see these similarities and concentrate on them, the greater the possibility of developing emotional engagement and winning emotional commitment.
Speaking the Unspeakables
Jim Wold likes to give people permission to speak the unspeakables during meetings. He explained, “The unspeakables are those things that are bothering you and you just don’t know if you should say it or not.” Speaking the unspeakables offers the opportunity for people to not only say what is on their minds, but also to diminish the anxiety and fear that is often a barrier to emotional engagement and emotional commitment. Of course, any leader who offers permission to speak the unspeakables needs to be willing to hear, acknowledge, and value whatever comes up.
Hanging Out
Beverly O’Neill points out that emotional engagement between a leader and followers is part of an ongoing relationship in which there is a free flow of information. “Communication never ends,” she said, “You don’t wait until you have an issue. You don’t wait until you have a crisis. You don’t wait until you just happen to call a meeting. Communication is constant. Communication is proactive.” The purpose of the communication is not so much dissemination of information as it is building and maintaining the relationship that fosters emotional engagement and emotional commitment: “That is what you constantly have to work on.”
Matt Catingub echoed O’Neill when he spoke of “hanging out” with his musicians to talk about life in general. And many of Marvin Israelow’s conversations about improving Chappaqua schools occurred on the sidelines of the soccer fields where his son Jacob was playing. O’Neill said, “If you don’t talk about the time of day—which is what most conversations are—about the weather, the children, the last holiday; unless you can talk on a human level you don’t ever really communicate,” And Bill Strickland put it very succinctly when he said of being a leader, “You have to stay in touch with human beings.”
It is, of course, not always possible for a leader to “hang out” with every follower. Still, leaders can set a tone within their organizations that encourages a free flow of information that includes how people feel and what is happening in their lives. O’Neill said, “The CEO of a big company can be very concerned about the people he works with, and I hope that the people he works with are communicating the same concerns about the people they work with.” As Monsignor Dale Fushek learned on the day he chauffeured Mother Teresa around Phoenix, “People don’t give to things, they give to people.” And, according to Beverly O’Neill, people will give to a leader who is continually, “Touching their life in some way.”
Summary
A leader’s emotional engagement with followers stands at the center of his attempts to win emotional commitment. The first leadership competency for winning emotional commitment—self-awareness—is a prerequisite for emotional engagement. The third—fostering hope—is a leader’s raison d’être for emotional engagement.
Leaders who engage emotionally with followers are able to make creative use of the self, thereby avoiding placing themselves at the mercy of fleeting feelings. Just as important, they are able to empathize, imagining the feelings of others and communicating that these feelings have been heard and accepted as valid. When feelings have been heard and accepted, a leader then has the opportunity to capitalize upon the energy of constructive feelings and transform the energy of unconstructive feelings.
Questions About Yourself to Contemplate or Discuss with Others
Who, in your life experience, was practiced at emotional engagement?
To what degree are you practiced at emotional engagement?
What is it about emotional engagement that rings true for your current leadership role?
How important is emotional engagement to your further development as a leader?
Notes
1.Daniel Goleman, et al., Primal Leadership (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002): 254.
2.Ibid, 46.
3.Ibid, 5.
4.Eric Rapp, “Charity, Service a Family Tradition for South Bay Division Operator Louvenia Harris,” MTA News, <http://www.mta.net/press/stakeholders/scoop_stories/110_harris.htm>. Also “Sweet Alice Harris: A Biography,” <http://www.calstat.org/sweet_alice.pdf> (January, 2003).
5.Arnold R. Beisser, “The Paradoxical Theory of Change,” in Joen Fagan and Irma Lee Shepherd, eds., Gestalt Therapy Now (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1971): 77.
6.Carl Rogers, A Way of Being (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980): 142–143.