CHAPTER TWO
MANAGING EMOTIONS BEGINS WITH ME

In order to deal effectively with feelings, everyone needs to be aware of his or her own full range of emotional states. This will help one to avoid being trapped or hijacked (to use Daniel Goleman’s term) by emotions. Goleman, in his bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence, defines self-awareness as “a neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness even amidst turbulent emotions.”¹ The term “awareness” is closely linked to both eastern and western philosophical traditions. Socrates, considered by many to be the father of the field, summarized philosophy with the simple phrase “Know thyself.”

Customers come to our businesses riding in on the ship of their own emotions. Service providers join them on that ship. By being aware of the emotional connections within this transaction, service providers can help guide the ship in the best direction for everyone concerned. This requires both self-awareness and other awareness. It also demands involvement and objectivity, control and reaction, self-focus and outer focus.

The Power of Self-Awareness

Becoming an emotion-friendly organization requires a basic understanding of human emotions and an awareness of personal emotional states. Through awareness we, in effect, become both the actor and the audience. This active participation and observation enables us to better understand ourselves and others. Awareness enables us to experience our emotions while simultaneously creating them; it also enables us to consciously influence our emotional states in a positive direction. Finally, self-awareness lets us delve into a deeper unconscious understanding, making it more likely that we will reduce the impact of unconscious reactions, such as prejudice and hostility. Self-awareness, in short, lets us live consciously.

Often poor service results from behaviors that are not intentional but unconscious, including racial, social-class, and sex-role treatment differences. One study of both male and female sales clerks, for example, found that clerks give male customers more positive expressions (smiling, eye contact, thanks, greetings) than they give female customers.² Men tend to get waited on before women, not only in men’s departments but also in women’s and “neutral” departments, such as luggage sections of stores.³ The authors, both female, have noted this difference in levels of treatment when they travel. When flying business class, they frequently wait for their coats to be put away and many times are not asked if they want refills on their beverages. One of the authors, while fully awake, was once completely skipped over for meal service. We don’t believe service providers do this intentionally, but they certainly aren’t operating with a great deal of self-awareness either! TWA recognizes the importance of treating its female travelers better. It has sent 10,000 frontline employees to a two-day training program in part emphasizing better 35service to female travelers, including how to deal with females’ perception that men get preferential treatment while flying.⁴

Psychologists Heath Demaree and David Harrison have looked at how poor awareness of physical arousal and felt emotions increases the likelihood of hostility. In simplest terms, if you don’t know what is going on with yourself physically and emotionally, according to Demaree and Harrison, in stressful situations your system reverts to hostility.⁵ In the customer service environment, this hostility leads to blaming customers.

If a person suffers a severe injury to specific portions of the brain, self-awareness can be considerably reduced. If this capacity is not restored as the brain heals, the patient faces a major barrier to successful social rehabilitation.⁶ Self-awareness is more than a modern-age luxury. It is a critical element of healthy human functioning and it is the emotional foundation of service.

By using self-awareness, healthy service providers can avoid hostile and prejudicial unconscious behaviors. Perhaps more importantly, they can be consciously involved in their emotional exchanges with customers and colleagues without denying their feelings and yet without engaging in inappropriate responses with customers. By mastering awareness, the most basic of emotional intelligence skills, service staff can create a solid foundation for authentic (real versus faked) service transactions.

Once we know how we feel, we have several choices available to us. We can (1) accept our mood or feelings and make no effort to change, (2) be overwhelmed by our feelings, or (3) rationally decide if this is the best emotional state for us to be in at the moment and then do something about it if it is not. If service providers can accomplish the latter for themselves, they have a chance of being able to do the same with customers.

Application

Name That Feeling. One of the easiest ways to increase self-awareness is to periodically check how you are feeling. You can think of it as 36“Name That Feeling.” Start by listing all the emotional words you can. Look up more in a thesaurus if necessary. Some people have just a few emotional descriptors for their conditions: sad, angry, happy, jealous, surprised, or afraid. One could almost think of those six words as categories of emotions, rather than emotions themselves. Sad, for example, could include unhappy, depressed, bummed out, dejected, gloomy, heartbroken, crushed, bowed down, sick at heart, in the doldrums, feeling low, crestfallen, downcast, despondent, mournful, in the pits, miserable, wretched, bitter, joyless, sore, oppressed, sorry, pathetic, crummy, dreary, lifeless, and so on. Each descriptor is a slightly different emotional feeling. Then, using these subtle gradations of emotions, describe exactly what you are feeling. Check in with yourself throughout the day.

Visual Self-Awareness

One aspect of awareness is visual self-awareness. Its power was demonstrated in an experiment conducted in the Psychology Department at Towson State University. Researchers exposed students to music designed to elevate moods. One group was given small mirrors to observe their reactions while background music played; a second group was not given mirrors. The group with no reflection of themselves showed no reaction to the music, while the group that could see themselves reported an elevated mood.⁷ This research supports statements we have heard from literally hundreds of call-center employees who say they work “better” if they watch themselves in a mirror.

Application

Increase Awareness through Visual Self-Awareness. Place a mirror by yourself when doing some normal activity, whether at work or at home. Get a mirror that is sufficiently large so it will be impossible for you to ignore your reflection. Note your feelings as you periodically 37watch yourself throughout this activity. Notice the reactions you have to seeing your facial expressions.

A type of visual self-awareness can be accomplished through journal writing. Organizations could encourage exploration of service experiences through writing and in so doing reap the benefits that seem to accrue to people who keep journals.

Researchers at both the State University of New York and North Dakota State University have found that writing about stressful experiences is an effective way to decrease the burden of stress. These researchers found that over half of their experimental groups actually experienced a reduction in a variety of ailments by keeping a journal.⁸ Might it be possible for organizations to encourage this practice, perhaps even on electronic groupware so all service providers could benefit from shared insights of those willing to write about their service experiences? We are not aware of any organization that currently does this, but it could certainly be supportive of an emotion-friendly culture.

Awareness in Teams

Awareness can help an entire team provide better service. Staff could point out inappropriate customer treatment by their colleagues so they could be made more “aware” of their behavior and thereby consciously decide whether to continue customer-alienating behavior. Our experience, however, is that most staff do not get involved. Just recently, one of the authors flew from San Francisco to Chicago. She had checked her luggage outside the terminal, and she was in a long line at the gate waiting to confirm her seat. A man at the counter was talking with the gate agent to help his family with their tickets because only he spoke English, though the gate agent hadn’t yet figured that out. When she realized that this man was not the passenger, she hysterically shouted at him, “Who is the passenger? I need to talk with the passenger!”

The Spanish-speaking wife looked bewildered and said something feebly in Spanish. The gate agent, finally comprehending the language problem, then demanded, “Where are the rest of the passengers? They all need to be standing right here! I need to see everyone’s identification!” The other passengers were toddlers, who were standing a few feet away playing with their grandmother. “They don’t have ID yet,” nervously explained the father. The man standing in front of me turned and commented, “That gate agent needs to take some Ex-Lax.” Several of us laughed, though what this gate agent needed was a dose of awareness and then a mood adjustment.

Even though the other two gate agents were only a few inches away from the nasty tone of voice, the demands, and the put-downs this gate agent visited upon the hapless family, we understand why they didn’t speak up to help their colleague through her unpleasant mood and inappropriate treatment of customers. When someone is emotionally aroused, he or she generally does not respond favorably to criticism. The gate agents probably feared making a bad situation worse. Special skills are needed for dealing with colleagues who act inappropriately, and managers need to address this issue in training or coaching sessions.

Application

Awareness and Team Communication. The next time you observe a colleague mistreat a customer, approach your colleague and let him or her know that the action was inappropriate—without alienating your colleague. To do this, imagine yourself as your colleague. How would you like to be approached so you would maintain an open, receptive attitude to what you were about to hear? For example, perhaps you could start by asking in a supportive tone of voice, “What happened?” It’s an open-ended question, and it will give your colleague an unlimited number of ways to respond, which will give you an unlimited number of ways to react. Then listen carefully and follow your instincts. How you approach your colleague will determine whether you “save” the situation or make it worse.

Awareness Is for Managers, Too

Self-awareness can have a major impact on managers as well. Allan Church with Warner Burke Associates compared high-performing managers with average-performing managers. His bottom-line conclusion is that high-performing managers are significantly more aware of their managerial behaviors than are average performers. In short, managers do better when they more closely monitor their own behavior.⁹

Fortune magazine’s lead article in June 1999 was titled “Why CEOs Fail.” In this wide-ranging survey, Fortune reported: “So how do CEOs blow it?… What is striking, as many CEOs told us, is that they usually know there’s a problem; their inner voice is telling them, but they suppress it.” Fortune points out that many CEOs simply refuse to see what is happening around them. Fortune concludes: “The failure is one of emotional strength.”¹⁰ No doubt this failure of emotional strength at the top is felt throughout the organization. Milt Koult, founder of Horizon Air, used to drive this point home, in his favorite terms, to one to the authors when she worked at Horizon: “The speed of the chief is the speed of the crew.”

In order to build an organization that is emotion friendly, senior managers must create an environment where it is possible—and safe— for managers and supervisors to discuss their own emotions. This, in turn, will give permission to staff to consider their emotional issues. A growing but small number of today’s senior-level managers purchase this opportunity by hiring personal coaches.

Most psychologists agree that suppressing thoughts contributes to increases in negative moods. Suppressed emotions of service providers can also “leak out” in inappropriate ways, frequently far away from managers’ oversight. Nonetheless, the solution is not to turn organizations into therapy sessions. We have to reach a balance between spending excessive time focusing on emotions and silencing them. This demands that conversations about feelings and emotions be a comfortable, regular 40part of a corporate culture, with the understanding that awareness makes it easier to add emotional value to customers.

Managers need to reach the point where emotions are as much available for discussion as balance sheets, computer systems, product quality, staffing levels, or customer buy rates. Emotions must take on a tangibility that is as real as any other business asset of an organization. No longer should decisions be made that focus merely on speed, cost saving, or efficiency. In an organization with an emotion-friendly service culture, new telephone systems, for example, would be installed only after considering the emotional impact on customers as carefully as the number of years it takes to amortize the equipment. In such an organization, customer value would be considered not just in terms of “value for money” but in terms of “value for emotions” that retain customers.

A major retailer in the Seattle, Washington, area recently installed a new telephone system in its stores. When a shopper calls to inquire about the availability of a product, the system asks which department the customer wants, leading the caller through an elaborate menu. Once the correct connection has been made, the caller is forced to wait for an extended period before anyone live picks up the phone. When finally connected, the customer is once again asked which department he or she wants and is then connected to the “right” department for another wait, even though supposedly the menu system should have connected the customer to the appropriate department in the first place.

When Dianna called one of these stores, she was on hold, longdistance, for an inordinate length of time, then finally reached the department she wanted, only to be disconnected when the clerk put her on hold to check on the availability of a product. Having invested a considerable amount of time in the project already, Dianna called back again long-distance, only to go through the entire menu once more. Finally, she reached the same clerk and shared her concerns about the “new” phone system. The clerk agreed, “It’s brand new, and nobody likes it.” How does a phone system that both staff and customers hate get installed, unless 41managers neither tested nor discussed the emotional ramifications of the changes? When Dianna asked the clerk to tell the store’s management about her reaction, the clerk responded,”Oh, I can’t do that; I don’t know who handles phones.” How does something as important as the telephone system get installed without staff knowing who is responsible for it? As Dianna says, the store thinks it has solved a problem, but in actuality, it is only going to make customers angrier.

In an organization with an emotion-friendly culture, staffing decisions would be made not only by considering profitability issues but also by looking at the emotional impact of any staffing increases or decreases. Positive affect needs to be as real to staff as room temperature. Emotions need to move out of the “virtual” discussion and into the concrete discussion of what they mean to an organization and the people who staff it and buy from it.

Building an emotion-friendly culture places additional knowledge demands on all staff, including managers. Mastery of technological methods or skills does not prepare one to discuss customer emotions. Many businesspeople who have been educated in technical areas will require assistance to reach the bar set as high as Susan Fournier, at Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration, places it:

Application

Ongoing Education for Emotional Competency. Because it is unrealistic to expect that staff will walk in the door with their education and knowledge complete, organizations have to provide such learning in 42a cost- and time-sensitive manner. Holding brown bag speaker lunches is one way to provide continuing education for emotional competency. You may already have in-house expertise with staff who have studied psychology. Many high-quality videotapes are also available. The teaching staff of a local university may also be available for speeches. Build a library, and link its existence to your corporate strategy of increasing emotional value.

Language literally allows us not only to talk about emotions but also to categorize and understand our feelings more precisely. Infants experience emotions, but they do not know what they are feeling or how to change these feelings. Infants are capable of experiencing their emotions only physically, as bodily states. Eventually they learn language skills so they can recognize various shades of emotional states. As parents help their children identify what they are feeling, anxiety and fear, for example, become distinct gradations of feelings. However, the process of emotional awareness and identification is more than simple language development. It is a means of becoming more sophisticated about feelings in general.

Psychologist Bernard Baars at The Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, uses the theater as a metaphor for understanding consciousness.¹² Consciousness, writes Baars, is the stage on which feelings, thoughts, sensations, and perceptions play to the audience of the unconscious mind. Focus, he continues, is normally at the center of the stage, though it is constantly being pulled one way or another in the drama that is being played out. Sensations and emotions, various competing parts of one’s brain, are all tugging on our awareness.

Baar’s metaphor applies equally well to both organizational dynamics and customer service. In the service arena, service providers and managers not only watch what is happening onstage but also actively participate in the drama. If customer representatives or managers are not aware of what is happening around them, they can be led by their emotions with little ability to understand or direct them. Customer service representatives can experience a difficult telephone 43exchange early in the day and hours later still act peeved by what the morning customer “had the audacity to suggest.” Just as computer viruses are widely spread when they are not yet identified, the danger of spreading an emotional virus is highest when managers and representatives have no awareness or understanding of what is occurring onstage in the theater of their consciousness.

Application

Dissecting Emotions during Customer Moments of Truth. Organizational leaders need to define the essential mood/emotional states they would like their customers to be in while doing business with them. This can be done by identifying specific customer Moments of Truth, those critical moments in which your organization is being judged. Imagine yourself to be the customer experiencing these Moments of Truth. How would you feel about the level of service you have been offered? How would you like to feel? In order for you to want to return to this organization, how would you have to feel?

Application

Dissecting Emotions during Staff Moments of Truth. Just as customers evaluate the organization at their points of contact, so do staff judge their work environment. What are the critical MOTs your staff experience with you, the manager? Imagine yourself as a staff person reporting to yourself having experienced these Moments of Truth. How would you feel? How would you like to feel? In order for you to wake up motivated to go to work, how would you have to feel?

Organizational Culture and Emotional Awareness

Without the discussion and full understanding of emotions within groups, we have the organizational equivalency of the disorder alexithymia, 44a term conceived by Harvard University psychiatrist Peter Sifneos.¹³ Alexithymia is the condition of people who experience emotional states but do not know what they are feeling and do not know how to talk about their feelings. When alexithymics experience emotions, they have no sense of what is happening to them. Psychologists’ best guess is that alexithymics feel puzzled about what is happening to them. Strong emotions feel “awful” to them, though they can’t describe what “awful” feels like. As a result, many alexithymics keep their lives as bland as possible, avoiding situations that elicit strong emotions.

Of course, it is not possible to say that an organization is alexithymic. Organizations aren’t humans, and many managers attempt to reinforce this reality by refusing to consider the pulsating reality of emotional dynamics within office walls. Other managers pretend to encourage emotional connections with customer interactions by asking their representatives to use evocative words in their greetings. These can be words that the staff don’t necessarily feel. When this happens, the experience of the customer is that of faked emotions.

A friend called the telephone company. The first words he heard from the cheery telephone representative were, “Good morning. How can I offer you excellent service today?”“I’d like to order an ISDN phone line,” said our friend. “What is your telephone number, sir?” she asked. “I already punched it in when I was first connected to you.” There was dead silence on the other end of the phone. This type of exchange is like playing at emotions without being able to name them, understand them, and interact with them. It is almost as if managers, through many sincere attempts to improve customer service, create alexithymic customer interactions, which undoubtedly leave both customers and service providers feeling flat. These managers must then wonder why what seemed like a good customer service technique failed.

Most managers understand the necessity of “friendly” service, but they undermine the “friendliness” by too tightly scripting the experience. We suspect a manager or supervisor told the telephone company representative referred to in the above example to start her telephone greeting in precisely that way. However, “How can I offer you excellent 45service today?” is such an odd opening sentence. Most of us do not normally talk this way. And clearly, the representative did not know what her next lines were to be if someone resisted giving his or her telephone number twice. This situation is equivalent to putting an actor on stage and giving him or her two or three opening lines, and then nothing more—unless you know the actor can improvise. In fact, theater improvisation more closely resembles customer service exchanges than a stage show. Improvisation is a theater technique in which the scene has been described, but no one has been told exactly what to say. Interestingly, theater improvisation demands three abilities, all of which are necessary in customer service: flexibility, self-confidence, and huge amounts of awareness.

Again, we bring Harvard University’s Susan Fournier into the discussion:

Application

Easing into Discussions about Emotions. If managers jump too quickly into a discussion of emotions, everyone may become nervous, and some may ask the question, “What new book has the boss read now?” Some staff will be downright suspicious that the manager is probing for information that may be used against them at some point in the future. Building an emotion-friendly culture requires a subtle activation, not a shock. Managers can begin by asking staff, “What do you think about that?” “How do you see that?” 46These are questions that build to a more direct “emotion” question: “How does that make you feel?” Managers must also recognize that because of the transitory nature of feelings, people may give one answer one day and have a totally different reaction the following day. If managers grasp that the purpose of inquiring about emotional reactions is not to “pin” staff down but rather to increase awareness and to invite discussion, then questions about emotions take on an entirely different slant.