Chapter 6-3: Bringing Humanity into the Workplace

Many jobs require people to work together, and good teams require harmony between the members and strong leadership.

It takes a lot of top-level teamwork to fly an airplane. When a crash occurs, 80% of the time it’s because of a mistake made by a pilot that could have been prevented if the team had worked together better. Because of this, pilots in training must learn certain social intelligence skills, like open communication, listening, cooperation, and speaking up.

Of course, in everyday jobs, someone making a mistake isn’t going to result in a plane falling out of the sky and potentially killing people -- but teams that are poorly managed experience low productivity, an increase in mistakes, missed deadlines, and the loss of team members to other, better workplaces.

Emotional intelligence is particularly important to the leaders in business -- CEOs, managers, and the like -- and yet these people are usually the biggest believers in cutting emotions out of business.

• One study in the 1970s surveyed 250 executives, and found that most of them thought their jobs required intellect but not emotion, “heads but not hearts.” They thought compassion would directly interfere with their work goals, that they wouldn’t be able to make the necessary decisions without closing themselves off emotionally, and that they wouldn’t be able to deal with their employees if they had to pay attention to their emotions.

The same negative effects we discussed in the Chapter 1 still happen in workplaces: stress and emotional distress make it harder to remember things, learn new things, make decisions, and work together.

Leadership shouldn’t be about dominating people, it should be about persuading them to work together for a common goal. An ideal workplace is one where every member is attuned to each other’s feelings, the team can handle disagreements without allowing them to escalate, and each member can get into a flow state while performing their job. To accomplish all that, we need emotional intelligence.

One major thing that gets in the way of workplace harmony is prejudice.

Prejudice in the Workplace

Humans have prejudices: our brains, as we read in the first chapter, are designed to identify something and whether we like it or not in the first milliseconds of seeing it, and this means our responses to things are deeply ingrained in our psyche.

But the workplace is no place for prejudice, so even if managers are humans who will have biases, they need to make a conscious effort to make decisions as though they had none. Not only is this the more humane way to manage, but it’s a more practical way to manage too:

• Combating prejudice and embracing diversity in the workplace has become much more important in the last 30 years, as white men, who previously dominated the workplace, are at least now matched if not outnumbered by other races and genders. Workplaces need to function, and when there are employees from different backgrounds, prejudice will hinder day to day operations.
• Companies are also widely international these days, so understanding and accepting different cultures has become crucial for international success. Companies who have better relations with international markets will have a competitive advantage.
• Lastly, diversity enriches any environment. Differing perspectives leads to more creativity, higher energy, and a larger pool of ideas and solutions.

Many companies have “diversity workshops” that last the length of one video, one day, or one weekend. The data suggests that workshops this short do little to actually shift the prejudices of the employees who need the training most.

Worse, sometimes these short workshops can bring up extremely emotional issues of discrimination or entitlement and then run out of time to resolve these issues, effectively calling attention to the differences, increasing tension, and then shortchanging the employees on any of the difficult work it takes to improve upon these dynamics.

How to Handle Prejudice

First, it helps to have an understanding of where prejudice comes from:

• Prejudice is, first and foremost, passed down through generations. Each new generation is raised with the biases of the generation that came before.
• Learning prejudices occurs very early in life, as we watch our parents move through the world with their prejudices. If we see them discriminate in any way -- through comments, actions, or even nonverbal judgements -- this gets imprinted on our brains.
• We learn the emotions of prejudice before we learn the beliefs or the (false) logic that cause them.
• Stereotypes are self-confirming: we remember instances that support the stereotypes we believe with more frequency, while we tend to discount any example that doesn’t reinforce the stereotype as an outlier.
• People can reject racism or prejudice intellectually but still operate under covert prejudices. Discrimination isn’t always active and conscious, sometimes it’s things like:
  • A white senior manager rejecting a Black applicant because his resume isn’t “right for the job” while hiring a white applicant with roughly the same education and experience.
  • A white manager giving helpful tips to a white salesperson but neglecting to do the same for a Hispanic salesperson.

Though it is extremely hard to change a person’s innate and long-held biases, we can change what we do about them. Here are a couple ways you can begin to change prejudices in your workplace:

• Acknowledge it. The first mistake managers make in regards to prejudices is assuming that they ignore them, they’ll go away. Ignoring prejudice or hoping it will resolve itself only allows discrimination to thrive in your workplace. Doing nothing is an endorsement of the prejudice.
• Take an active stand against it. The norms of a workplace are set by the top echelons of management and handed down to the lowest employees. Changing prejudice requires the top-level employees to be vocally opposed to and take action against prejudice in the workplace.
• Encourage your employees to speak out. Even low-key instances of discrimination should be addressed, and that requires employees coming forward about them. Like children, we learn how a workplace will respond to prejudice by watching someone try to address it: if that person is shut down, humiliated, or worse, it sends a very clear message. It sends a different message if management actively encourages employees to bring forward issues of this nature, and handles them with emotional intelligence once they’re presented.
  • For example, an offensive joke in the breakroom might not seem like a big deal -- but again, if this behavior is allowed to continue, it reinforces prejudice, shows that the workplace supports this behavior, and will ultimately lead to worse instances down the line.
  • In one study, research showed that when one employee in a group used an ethnic slur, other employees in the group began to do the same: the first instance going by unacknowledged or unpunished gave others permission to do it.

It’s not enough to just have people from different backgrounds working at the same place. When schools in the US were desegregated, white and Black students did not immediately get along just by nature of sharing space. However, when people have to work together directly to achieve a common goal, they begin to see each other as human, and stereotypes generally start to break down little by little.

How authority figures address prejudice sets the example for how everyone else will address it. For a better workplace with less prejudice, tackle it with the same rules as effective criticism. It’s most effective to suppress the expression of prejudice, instead of trying to rehabilitate the attitude itself. As a manager, you can’t necessarily change what a person believes, but you can change how they behave at work.

• People can certainly learn how to overcome their prejudices, just like they can learn emotional intelligence -- but this is something they’ll have to do on their own time.

Working in Groups

Assuming that prejudices have been handled, now employees can focus on working well together.

Many people today are “knowledge workers,” workers who specialize in adding value to knowledge -- computer programmers, data analysts, writers, and so on. The productivity of these workers depends on their coordination in an organized team--computer programmers program the software but don’t distribute it, writers write but don’t publish. In other words, they rely on other people to help make the work happen.

Instead of serving as an individual work unit, knowledge workers are part of a team, and the team becomes the work unit. Just as emotional intelligence is important for an individual to navigate work, for a group to do their best work together it’s important for a team to have a collective emotional intelligence (Shortform note: Goleman somewhat confusing refers to this as group IQ, despite it being emotional intelligence).

• And, similar to IQ’s impact on an individual, a group’s average IQ does not determine their success: their average emotional intelligence does.
• Of course, a team can only be as good as the sum of its parts -- emotional intelligence won’t compensate for lower IQ or lack of skill. But individual members can be extremely smart, skilled, or talented, and still do poorly in a team. Teams with a high collective emotional IQ will be able to use their individual skills to the greatest success in harmony with each other.

A handful of things can bring down a group’s performance, all of them in the realm of emotional intelligence:

• Overly controlling team members will bring down group performance by being too domineering -- teams require a give and take, not a dictator.
• Conversely, overly passive team members will also bring down performance -- they might as well be deadweight, not contributing to the group effort.
• Groups with a lot of friction between its members won’t be able to utilize everyone’s skills to the best of their potential.

There are a variety of circumstances in any workplace where group emotional IQ comes into play: meetings, emails, conferences, work teams, and even informal individual networks. Managers or team members looking to improve their group’s IQ should organize some emotional intelligence training, both for themselves and the other members.

Networking

Even workplaces without organized team efforts still benefit from employees with emotional intelligence.

Individual “stars” at a workplace do something that sets them apart from other employees: they have an informal network of fellow workers they can call on when they need something specific, on account of developing and maintaining personal relationships with these workers.

The formal hierarchy and network at an organization is designed to deal with anticipated problems on the job -- but having an informal network of fellow workers becomes more important in the face of unanticipated problems. These informal networks are good in a crisis because they do not have to go through the typical channels, allowing workers to focus on specifically what needs to get done and bypass unnecessary functions.

There are three types of informal networks, based on the type of connection needed.

• Communication networks are based on who talks to whom at work.
• Expertise networks are based on who people go to for advice about certain issues.
• Trust networks are based on who trusts whom.

Workers with high emotional intelligence have networks in all three categories. They form these networks by making themselves available for all three: they talk to other employees, share their expertise, and are dependable, responsible, and tactful (which builds trust).

What Work Can Do

Criticism, or feedback, is one of the major workplace areas that we need emotional intelligence.

People need feedback to do their jobs better and keep their work on track. Like cogs in a clock, every part of a system needs to be running at its best to keep the whole system going; in a workplace, people are the cogs, and everyone needs feedback to improve their performance for the sake of the whole.

When people don’t get feedback, they’re in the dark: they don’t know how their boss or their peers feel about their work, they don’t know exactly what’s expected of them and whether they’re meeting those expectations, and if there are any issues with their performance, they’re left to get worse as time goes on.

Managers must be good at both giving feedback and receiving it. It makes a difference in how successful a workplace is. The better you are at giving feedback and receiving it yourself, the more satisfied and more productive your employees will be. Feedback should be used to motivate your employees to do better.

• One study of managers and white-collar workers found that inept criticism was the biggest cause of conflict at a job, ahead of distrust, personality clashes, and disagreements over pay or position.

When Feedback Goes Wrong

If you want to give good feedback, here are things to avoid:

• Expressing criticism as personal attacks. Personal attacks can’t be acted on, they can only serve to upset the person suffering them. As we discussed in the previous section, personal attacks lead to defensiveness, stonewalling, and emotional hijacking.
• Making negative blanket statements. “You messed up” is not feedback by itself. It does not communicate how someone messed up, why it’s important not to mess up this way, and what the person can do differently to not mess up next time. Feedback is about giving your employees actionable things to work on, not about demeaning them or punishing them for doing something wrong.
• Using anger. Giving criticism from a place of anger starts a vicious cycle wherein the manager angrily attacks the employee, the employee gets defensive or stonewalls, and then the manager gets annoyed with the employee for responding that way, which leads to more criticism and anger, which leads to more defensiveness and stonewalling, on and on until the employee quits or gets fired.

Mishandling feedback can demoralize employees, causing them to refuse to cooperate or avoid managers altogether.

Some managers delay giving feedback for long periods of time. This is counterproductive: employees don’t suddenly develop problems in their performance, usually the problems develop over time. Managers have to use feedback proactively -- they can’t let criticism come only when things are at their breaking point. When feedback is given earlier, the employee has more time to fix the issue and can catch it before it gets worse.

Also, managers are human, too: when managers let criticisms build up in their minds, they usually end up giving criticism in the least helpful way, as a long list of personal attacks on the employee that have been festering over time.

Some managers only give criticism, and this, too, can be bad for morale. Praise and criticism should be balanced: letting employees know what they’re doing well reinforces good habits and keeps their spirits lifted. A healthy balance of praise and criticism lets the praise motivate employees to fix the criticisms.

Feedback Done Right

Here’s how to give good feedback:

• Give praise first. Tell your employees what they do well first, and be specific. This will make them more receptive to your criticism and will boost their spirits at the outset.
• Keep it specific. If you can, pick one specific example that summarizes what you’d like them to change. Breakdown what they did that was successful and what they did that was not successful.
• Offer solutions. Presumably, if you’re giving them feedback, it’s because you have an idea of how it should be different -- so include ways they might fix the problem. They might come up with other ways to fix the problem after receiving your criticism, but you should point them in the direction of a solution or a couple solutions that they can try.
• Do it face to face, if possible, and be present. Written communication is impersonal and can be misinterpreted (since it lacks the 90% of the communication that nonverbal cues would make up). Don’t make giving feedback easier on yourself by doing it via an email or memo -- criticism is most effective privately and in person.
• Use empathy. Managers without empathy are far more likely to give feedback that does not improve the performance of their employees. The better you understand your employees and are attuned to what they’re experiencing emotionally, the better you’ll be able to identify the issues they’re having and help them figure out a solution.

How to Receive Feedback

Here are some approaches for receiving criticism to the best results:

• Good feedback helps you get better. Try not to see criticism as a personal attack, but as an act of caring designed to help you improve.
• Take responsibility. It’s easy to get defensive when we perceive that we’re being attacked. If you feel the criticism is unfair, you can express that -- but if you find yourself making excuses, try to pause and listen to what your manager is saying first, before you launch into defending yourself. If your manager is capable of giving good feedback, she has probably identified something you know you struggle with. Accept responsibility for your mistakes and motivate yourself to learn how to correct them.
• Feedback is an opportunity to work with your manager towards improvement. Criticism should be a cooperative endeavor. Much like it helps to go into a job interview with the mentality that you’re interviewing the company as well, it can help to go into a feedback meeting with a manager assuming that this is a project you’re working on together.