Chicago Booth Review Podcast Can Emotions Be Good for Business?

Chris Collins: Having the emotion is one thing. Your ability to communicate it and express it in a meaningful way, absolutely all these social factors make a big impact in terms of what's normative, what's accepted, what there's going to be uptake for, what there's going to be pushback for.

Hal Weitzman: Most of us have been trained to keep our emotions out of the workplace. We think emotions can cloud decision-making, lead to irrational behavior, and make others uncomfortable. But can getting in touch with your emotions actually make you a better leader? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking insights in a clear and straightforward way.

I'm Hal Weitzman, and today I'm talking with Chicago Booth's Chris Collins about how treating your emotions as data can help you to manage people and situations better.

Chris Collins, welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Chris Collins: Thank you for inviting me to be here, Hal.

Hal Weitzman: We are here to talk about emotion. Let's get emotional, Chris. Emotion is a difficult topic. Why is it difficult? And we're talking, just to clarify, about emotion in a professional setting, emotion in leadership.

Chris Collins: Right. I would like to start actually just for a second about what we're talking about and what we're not talking about. Are you a hugger?

Hal Weitzman: I mean, with the right person.

Chris Collins: Yeah. But let's say you saw a good friend last week, gave him a hug, you're seeing him again this week. Are you going to hug him? Are you going to embrace him again?

Hal Weitzman: Yes. I think once the hug barrier's been broken, there's no going back.

Chris Collins: Then it's just all hugs. This is lovely. So a silly question, but I wanted to start with the idea about what we're not talking about. We're not talking about being touchy-feely. We're not talking about kumbaya. We're not talking about whether you're a hugger or not. It's not about the naked drumming. What we are talking about though is this fundamental aspect of being a human. And it's so foundational and so fundamental. I think if we ran into someone who didn't have access to emotional experience, we'd actually be worried about them. This is a situation where we would say something's not right here.

Hal Weitzman: You mean someone who does not display any emotional or feel-

Chris Collins: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: Absolutely.

Chris Collins: We would take this to be a deep problem. And so what I want to make sure that we're not talking about is just this sort of sensibility about being touchy-feely. And instead we're really talking about this fundamental part of being human. But I do find that it's a very challenging part of our humanity for people to approach, particularly in a work context. I don't know. You probably know more about the intellectual history of Western civilization, but there is this kind of dichotomy that we have between intellect and emotion.

And even as a species, homo sapiens, we value the idea of intellect and prize it. And rightly so. Rightly so. But we take it as sort of a characteristic, a defining endowment of our humanity and tear it apart from emotion as discreet. These two are separate and even opposed. And it's part of our sensibility. Sometimes we see it in the language that we use. If I think about some of the common phrases that we use when we talk about emotion, we might... Sometimes we talk about it as a thing. You can carry anger or you can have grief, but it's not just any old thing. It's like it's an active substance, something that it has its own life. So we might explain an outcome by sort of saying, "Well, Hal got emotional and that's why it went the way it did."

Or we might also say it's not just an active substance, but it's kind of tricky. You could be overcome by grief. It could overwhelm you. You could be sunk by sadness. And so there's this idea too of it being overpowering, maybe even dangerous a little bit. So it is a tricky thing, and we don't often think about it in that way, but I do feel like those sensibilities often are lurking in the background when we even think about emotion.

Hal Weitzman: Sure. Well, we discount emotion. The emotion is not a good thing. As you say, if someone made a decision and we explained it afterwards by saying he was or she was emotional, we would assume that we're saying somehow decision was suboptimal in some way. And we're taught to discount that, set your emotion to one side and try and make a rational decision, rational meaning non-emotional.

Chris Collins: Right. And just even the discomfort we have displaying it, right? So if we were with someone and they were to break down and cry, quite often they'll start apologizing for being emotional, for having emotions, as if somehow that made them, I don't know, deficient in some way.

Hal Weitzman: Where do you think that comes from, that sense that we should discount emotion? Is it from science and economics? Where do we get that? No, because I mean, as you say, there's a sense that being non-rational is bad. That kind of underpins... Well, does it underpin behavioral science? Maybe behavioral science suggests actually that we always diverge from rationality, but it's not considered a good thing necessarily. It's just considered the way things are.

Chris Collins: No. Yeah, it's not necessarily a good thing. And most of us... This comes up with my students and we'll have a conversation about their attitudes, about emotion. That's usually the starting point for introducing this in class because they walk in with attitudes. And where it comes from... The question I would ask for you, Hal, would be either in your family or in the friend group where you grew up, how was emotion treated? What were the early signals about being emotional or having emotional experience in your own life?

Hal Weitzman: You're asking me as a serious question?

Chris Collins: Yeah, I am.

Hal Weitzman: I think it was not viewed as necessarily a good thing all the time, but when certain circles, if you're in a... I mean, I say to my students, if you're in a family or with loved ones, you can use emotion to get stuff done, emotional blackmail, et cetera, in a way that you wouldn't use perhaps in a professional context. It's a different context. So I would say growing up in my family, there definitely emotion was used a lot, not necessarily in a positive way.

Chris Collins: Yeah. Even that term emotional blackmail gets back to some of the ways we talk about it. In my family, my dad was an engineer, my mother taught science. Both of my brothers went into finance, very numbers, analytic driven. And emotions were seen as sort of like, "Hey, you're being immature." A friend of mine told me in her family, it was like an inconvenience if she were emotional. It's like, "Oh, we're just waiting for you to settle down."

I don't know exactly where it comes from. We've talked about some cultural sensibilities, but a lot of us pick that up. Not all of my students, but a lot of us pick that up. So one of the first things I do for them is lay that on the table and get them to think about what are their attitudes about emotion, right? Because that heavily conditions their ability to work with their own emotions, to observe them, to even give them credibility.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. And that's your thing, is about observing them, treating emotions like you would treat data. This is information that you can use. Is that right? Am I getting it right?

Chris Collins: You are. And it's a form of data that's available to us that we can start to use to make sense of experiences and really be smarter about both what's happening with us, what's happening with other people, what's happening in the situation. So it's there just as if you're running a regression, there's a certain knowledge set and a certain skill and acumen you have. It's the same thing with emotional data. To use it is not simple and you can misuse it or misread it, right? So I'm not saying it's clear, it's easy. It's a muddy piece of data and a muddy signal, but an important one that we can derive a lot of information from.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. What sort of information?

Chris Collins: Yeah. What sort of information? Well, I feel like there's two things. One, when we have an emotional experience, we're inclined to read that as sort of like an echo of our own history or something that relates particularly to us or how we are experiencing a moment. And there's definitely that element of it and we should probably talk about that. But I also want to note that a lot of times emotions signal something about the context, something about the situation or the interaction between you and the situation. So I think that might be part of the reason for the apologies when someone cries, is that it feels like, "This is about me. I'm having this meltdown. I'm so sorry. I'm burdening you with my story or my problem." But a lot of times emotion has as much to do with what's happening in the environment and the situation. And accessing that emotion is about getting smart about the context in which I'm embedded and what's happening in it.

Hal Weitzman: What would be an example? I mean, it obviously tells if someone's under stress.

Chris Collins: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: What else?

Chris Collins: Well, let me give you an example. I did some work in an investment bank. They were having turnover issues and exit interviews with employees seemed to indicate that a lot of people felt incredible pressure and that any kind of misstep was met with pretty harshly. So people experienced it as a difficult and as a punishing environment. And they had emotions about it. This is stressful. This is what they would be reporting. And as we examined it, the environment, what became clear was it was a very stressful environment. Almost anyone would feel the stress of it. In fact, we had some sideline data. I don't often have this data or use this data, but we had some measurements of neuroticism, a particular personality measure of all the managing directors in the group. And interestingly, all of them scored very high neuroticism. There's a lot of demandingness in the group. And even the managing directors themselves felt a lot of pressure and stress, and they translated that.

So you might get the message at some point like, "Hey, get a grip on yourself." And what the person is telling you is that you are not meant to feel the emotional experience that you're having in this moment, that that is disallowed either for you, your role, someone who looks like you, that that's out of bounds. And at that point, you're learning more about the situation maybe than you are about yourself. Helpful?

Hal Weitzman: Yeah. So you're learning about the situation. Well, I'm just wondering what you do with that. I mean, how does that help you? What does it help you to do? Okay, so now I recognize that I'm in a situation with somebody else and I'm feeling the certain emotions and I'll recognize them and identify them and not judge them. And the same with the other person. Then what?

Chris Collins: Well, this idea of gathering information about the environment, it really depends. If I'm a worker in that environment, I might start to ask questions about, "Do I want to be here? I don't know that this is fixable. This isn't about me becoming more resilient. This is just a very tough and very punishing environment and nothing's ever going to be perfect and any imperfection is going to be dealt with pretty roughly. Do I want to be here?"

If I were one of the managing directors in the group who I was working with on this project, it was kind of like, "Do we want this? Do we change the cultural DNA of this organization at least somewhat? Because we're having a lot of turnover and we're losing some good people." So what you want to do with it depends on where you're situated, what your concerns are, but misreading it is just sort of like, "Oh, I feel I'm particularly stress-prone and would not be super helpful."

Hal Weitzman: I mean, just to take the other view for a second. So if I just said, "Well, the work is stressful. We want people who can handle the stress. If they can't handle the stress, they're better off not being here." What's wrong with that?

Chris Collins: Yeah. If we talk about hiring and looking for really good cultural fit, this towering resilience becomes a criteria. And the question is, can you always find enough of that in all the people that you need?

Hal Weitzman: So we're just limiting ourselves to those who can take the extreme pressure that we're bringing.

Chris Collins: Right. And I'll be honest, in that environment they're creating legal documents where the numbers really matter. So some of the stress and the emphasis on precision couldn't be let go of. That was going to be part of the work environment, but maybe the punishing nature of it, that could be moderated in some way.

Another example, and it's in my memory just because there were two interactions that happened that on the surface-level mirrored each other, but headed in different directions. So one week I'm talking with a student and he's saying, "Ah, I have these feelings that I'm not good enough." And it sounds like imposter syndrome and we're talking about this. And we explore it over the course of a couple of conversations. And indeed, it really feels like he's getting positive validation about the work that he's doing at school, his ability to make friends, his ability to succeed in class, but he still has this deep self-doubt about his own capacities and efficacy.

And that's a place where you're sort of like, "Oh, maybe there's something here and there's something here to work on in terms of how you think about yourself." But two weeks later, I was talking with an alum and she is maybe six, seven years out. She's working in this finance area and she too is having this sense of like, "It's not good enough. I'm not sure that what I'm delivering is good enough." And we explore it and it goes in an entirely different direction. She's actually really confident in her finance skills. She's very proud of them. She worked hard to get them.

But as we explore, we discover she's one of two women in a group of 30. She's five years older than the average person. Almost everyone had a banking experience and she found a different route there. And a lot of what she was feeling was a sense of like, "I don't belong or I wonder if I belong and I feel like I'm getting the message from my environment that indeed I don't belong." And I won't go into any more of the details. We had to explore that, but part of our conclusion was that was as much or even more about the environment than it was really about her.

Hal Weitzman: If you're enjoying this podcast, there's another University of Chicago Podcast Network show you should check out. It's called Big Brains. Big Brains brings you the stories behind the pivotal scientific breakthroughs and research that are reshaping our world. Change how you see the world and keep up with the latest academic thinking with Big Brains, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network.

Chris Collins, in the first half we talked about your thoughts on emotions in professional settings and how it's often a reflection of what's going on, not necessarily personally or interpersonally, but in the structure of the organization. We left off there just before the break talking about an example of a woman who felt that she maybe didn't quite fit in. And that makes me think of gender dynamics because I can imagine that some women listening to this conversation will say, "Well, that's fine. You're two guys talking about it. It might be easy for you to say, 'Let's get in touch with our emotions.'" You mentioned the drum circle earlier but if, and there are many examples of this, a woman is angry, if a woman is forceful, she's considered to be angry. If a woman is softer, then she's considered to be weak or whatever. So I'm just wondering, how does gender play into this? Because it might be easier for men to be in touch, maybe not in touch is the right word, but to recognize and perhaps even display their emotions than for women in certain environments.

Chris Collins: Yeah. No, if we come to display rules, broadly, it feels like this touches upon that. And that can vary widely by industry, by the particular company and organization that you're embedded in, certainly by gender, by culture. So having the emotion is one thing, your ability to communicate it and put it, express it in a meaningful way, absolutely all these social factors make a big impact in terms of what's normative, what's accepted, what there's going to be uptake for, what there's going to be pushback for.

And I think you're right. We'll stick with just a North American context. There's definitely a sensibility that women are more emotional, men are more rational. And so what does that mean when a woman expresses emotion? Do people just go, "Oh God," which is an outrageous situation for her to find herself in, but I think it's also one a lot of people would say, "Oh yeah, I've been there." And then flip side, I think it could be equally hard for a woman to then go against a script and to come in as more purely rational.

And then, to some people, she doesn't seem womanly or doesn't... And that's a problem. So there is, I think for women, especially about the experience and expression of emotion, it's double bind. And it's a little bit different than the kinds of dynamics that men experience, absolutely. Absolutely.

Hal Weitzman: What do you advise women leaders who identify with what you say? Yes, emotion, it's our data, we want to use them, but are cautious about as you... What did you call it? Display?

Chris Collins: Just display rules and [inaudible 00:17:33]

Hal Weitzman: Display rules and cautious about displaying it. And as you say, the context is different. I think of sport, it's very common to express your emotions. It's a good thing. You show your passion. It may be in finance it's less acceptable, but still somewhat acceptable. In manufacturing, maybe completely unacceptable. So it depends on the industry, it depends on the context. But what would you advise a woman who's concerned about those display rules?

Chris Collins: Yeah. Well, one, I might say, I don't know that it's all for women to fix. I do.

Hal Weitzman: Of course.

Chris Collins: I feel as men that we should be paying close attention to this. There's not a man I know who doesn't believe in, admire, have affection for a girl or a woman in their life. There's not a guy I've met who... That isn't the case. And just being sensitive to the fact like, "Oh, this is a crappy dynamic. And what's my role in starting to think about this differently and even be active in my team or in my organization about what the uptake is or how this individual is received." So I think it's a collective problem. That said, I think a lot of women might say, "Yeah, what are my options?" And I don't know that because we're talking about a social structural problem.

I'll throw out one thought that at least there's some longitudinal data that suggests work, and that is really dynamically adjusting according to the context. You mentioned sports versus finance versus whatever, right? And this is something actually that we all do pretty naturally. Some of us a little bit more and a little bit more definitely. Some of it is a little less or a little more clumsily, but it is really just choosing your moments, reading the cues. Some of the longitudinal data from some students at Stanford that looked at career progression for women who are successful and effective in doing this, found that they had more pay raises and more promotions over the duration of the study than even the male counterparts in the study. So it's an approach that can be effective. It probably takes a little bit more time to elaborate how that might look for any given individual.

Hal Weitzman: We've probably all worked with somebody who we think is too emotional in some sense, angry, petty, whatever. Should we think about that differently as well? Because we've been talking about ourselves and how we should think about our own emotions. It's easy to look at somebody else and criticize, isn't it?

Chris Collins: But one of the things when I think about management, I think one of the things managers manage is emotion. And I don't know that necessarily we talk about it a lot. Maybe we do, maybe we talk about it more than I know. I don't hear people talk about it a lot, but I would say you care deeply about how your team feels. If people you worked with were indifferent, had no feelings at all about their work, that would be a problem. You would want them to experience either some kind of pride or satisfaction in the work that they do. You'd want them to believe that their work is worthwhile or important. So I do feel like we manage emotion. And right there we're saying, "Oh, actually, no, it's not like emotion doesn't belong. I need it. I need it."

But you're kind of describing a situation where there's too much or not the right kind or unhelpful emotion. And that can definitely be the place, right? That can definitely happen. And I think there's a certain amount of empathy, a certain amount of care and interaction with people who are either in a rough spot or a rough moment and a grace and allowance for that. Likewise though, if this is a pattern thing, that's a different conversation. That's a different conversation. And I think we need to be thoughtful then. Are we just saying this kind of emotional experience just is disallowed at work or are we saying that it really impacts what's happening for us as a team or a group, our work, our ability to accomplish what we're trying to accomplish? But that's the kind of conversation I might be tempted to want to have.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. That was fascinating about managers managing emotion. I very much recognize that. And that makes me think about leaders. We talk a lot at Booth about managers and leaders and maybe the differences between the two. What about people who want to lead or are leading large organizations or initiatives? How should they use emotion or how should they think about emotion as something to, like you say, data to collect or to observe?

Chris Collins: Right. Two thoughts. Well, three actually. I do feel like emotions are kind of, you're trying to engineer some kind of change. Emotions are a cue about where the rough points are, where the rubs lie. And so being especially attentive to that, that can signal different factions, different sensibilities in the system about who's in favor of this, who's against it, why, what's at stake for these different groups. So that being sensitive to it is super important. It makes you smarter.

A second thing that I would say is that if we're engineering change, there's going to be some people who don't like the change. There's going to be some sense of loss. It could be loss of familiarity. That could be loss because the way the organization was reshaped and so a role doesn't exist. It could be the loss of colleagues who have departed because they either didn't like it or there were layoffs. There's all kinds of loss. And dealing with that loss is super important. I'm just talking with an alum about a sense of loss that he experienced in his organization from 2018. It's still live for him many, many years later, many, many years later. It's still live, right? So being attentive to the loss and dealing productively and successfully with that, I think is really helpful.

And then I do feel like part of the role, back to the managing emotion, part of the role is like, "Hey, what do I need to do to generate some positive momentum about where we're going and why we're going there?" And there are lots of different tactics that I might do, but those are the ways in which I might be attending to emotion in that work of trying to lead change.

Hal Weitzman: So Chris, if you're a leader, those are the ways to think about emotion. What about for the rest of us or all of us, leaders and non-leaders, who are thinking about how to manage, use, deploy, emotion, learn from emotions? What are some practical tips you would give us?

Chris Collins: Yeah. I'm going to focus on that last one, learning from them, because that's what we really started with. The idea is that these are data, right? And we've been talking a little bit about reading emotion to draw conclusions about a system. We've been talking about trying to manage or engineer change and how I might think about emotion, but it is ultimately personal. I have feelings about the way things are going. And the first thing I think in terms of really harvesting insight is to name them clearly, which sounds silly at one hand, but it's remarkable the paucity of vocabulary.

Hal Weitzman: As in I feel?

Chris Collins: Yeah. And people's vocabulary, their ability to elaborate the difference between emotions. If we talk about guilt and shame, what's the difference between guilt and shame? What do you think, Hal?

Hal Weitzman: What's the difference between guilt and shame? Well, guilt is, I know that I did something wrong. Shame, I guess, is how other people think about me. It's exposing that in public. Then that produces a different reaction.

Chris Collins: Yeah. And that exposure in public, especially to be undone in public, makes you feel like, "Oh, maybe I didn't just do wrong and I'm guilty about something, but actually I am wrong. There's something maybe wrong with me." And very subtle, both involve a violation, but significant difference. So this ability of ours to really wrestle with the meaning of different emotions, have a robust and sophisticated vocabulary is one of the best things you can do, both in terms of understanding the people around you, understanding the loved ones in your life, understanding the people you work with at work, but really also getting a handle on your own experience.

And so when we can start to tease out and have a much more granular vocabulary and tease out the differences across emotions, that can be really powerful. Some tools that people will use as emotional trackers. There's one that Yale puts out that you can track how you feel at different times of the day, two or three times a day, and try that for a month and they'll give you a vocabulary and just see where you end up with it, just paying a little bit of attention to it. And we're talking about spending maybe 10 minutes a day at most doing this. But that emotional granularity has been shown to be really valuable overall, just in terms of subjective wellbeing, but also improving relationships. It does a lot for you. Just being able to name-

Hal Weitzman: Just the act of being aware.

Chris Collins: Just being aware, being able to name them, being able to also recognize the intensity. I think beyond that, there's a sense of like, "Hey, how do I interpret it?" And there are two things that I think about there. I have a sense that I feel envy or I am really pissed about this. The next thing I might be focusing on is, what was the key? What was the activating event? A mood is one of these things that we just carry and doesn't necessarily have a discernible cause or it might be biochemical, but an emotion is a response to a particular happening in our social world. And so being able to say, "It was this, right? It was this." And then starting to ask the question, "Is this about me? Is it about the situation? Is this about an interaction between me and the situation?" And starting to tease out. And I don't have a precise formula of how you do that, but starting to ask questions about the experience can make you a lot smarter about it.

And then I think as you start to derive an understanding, you get to revisit that. We talked about emotion as a muddy signal. It's not that it always reveals. Sometimes later on you're saying, "I overreacted. My reaction was out of proportion, either too big or too small to what happened." So I'm not saying that the veracity of emotional data is always there. Again, it's having the skill and the acumen to interpret it. But once I have that sense of, "I think this is what set it off and I think this is what it means in context," now I can revisit it and I can ask new questions about, does that feel right? And I can also start to incorporate others in conversation to check my opinion. So it's not just me and I can engage in some kind of collaborative empiricism to get a fuller sense of, is this a reasonable way to look at things or a sensible way to look at things? But I think all of those would be key skills to work at cultivating.

Hal Weitzman: Well, Chris, I feel enlightened. I feel curious. I'd love to talk more, but we don't have time. Our time is up, but I also feel very grateful for having had you as a guest on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Chris Collins: Thank you for having me, Hal.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis and insights, visit our website, chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research.

This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.