Emotional Connection: The EmC Strategy

How Leaders Can Unlock the Human Potential, Build Resilient Teams, and Nurture Thriving Cultures

Lola Gershfeld, Ramin Sedehi

• Editorial: Business Expert Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781637420270
• Categoría: Negocios y empresa
• Categoría: Liderazgo

This book lights the way to appreciating the importance of developing the emotional language to describe, acknowledge, and address emotions in the workplace using a proven and methodical approach absent in most other EI strategies.

Ann was agitated and troubled as she summoned the courage to recount what had happened. The intensity of her remarks was gripping the whole team; all eyes were on her. She took the extraordinary step of sharing her emotions with her team; she felt alone, helpless, unimportant, and rejected.

In reflecting on our individual professional experiences, we each remember occasions when we were Ann; desperate for connection. At times we reacted by retreating to our offices and at other times by becoming angry, shouting, or being overly defensive. Has this ever happened to you? Have you felt that emotions don't belong at work?

We assert that underlying all of our interactions are the emotions we are all operating with, both consciously and unconsciously. Emotions, and not the content, are the most powerful presence in the room during conflicts and stress. But knowing this is not enough.

This book lights the way to appreciating the importance of developing the emotional language to describe, acknowledge, and address emotions in the workplace using a proven and methodical approach absent in most other EI strategies. The EmC strategy will enable the leader inside you to connect more effectively, energize a harmonious workplace culture, and nurture creativity and innovation to achieve unprecedented results.

• Invigorate creativity, innovation, and collaboration
• Boost engagement and wellness
• Build psychological safety to enhance trust and authenticity
• Nurture leadership throughout the organization
• Foster strong relationships to create a thriving culture

Enduring relationships give us the strength to face volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and adversity. When we are connected, we can thrive, we can achieve unimaginable success.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction into the Dynamics of Human Connection

Thriving teams are easy to spot. They are made of individuals with high levels of trust who have emotional safety within their organizations to be vulnerable and, thus, authentic.¹ This allows them to fully appreciate and support each other through the strong bonds they have built, using their unique abilities to deliver innovative and creative solutions to unprecedented problems. These teams function at high levels of performance, seemingly unlimited in their capacity to meet uncertainty and volatility in the business world.

This book is focused ultimately on helping you build and nurture a thriving culture that extends to all the individuals in your organization. Their ability to have positive relationships with each other and the organization’s hierarchy are the bedrock of a flourishing business. There are many books, training programs, and courses to help teams achieve higher levels of performance; however, in my experience working with hundreds of people, the results are often temporary, leading to frustration and setbacks. The primary reason behind the frustration felt by leaders and teams using the current approaches is that most programs are either cognitively based, which focus on the content, or are behaviorally based, which focus on individual behaviors. In this book, we will show you a different and more effective way to deal with workplace conflict, team dynamics, and build relationships that provide resilience—ensuring creativity and strong performance.

Human beings naturally form strong emotional connections or bonds with each other, and this is very important in teams. In a healthy team, the members support each other and can accomplish magnificent results. But, team leaders and members must understand how to nurture their relationships and bonds so that when problems arise, they are able to deal with them in a productive and transparent manner. Insights from psychology about the impact we have on each other when we work together and the importance of adult bonding can provide the skills to supercharge team performance.

Why Do Teams Struggle?

We have observed that struggling teams are often fraught with numerous conflicts, many of which have gone unresolved. Conflicts are deeper than arguing or disagreeing; they are symptoms of emotional disconnection and injured relationships. When unresolved at their roots, conflicts result in unproductivity, lack of accountability, project delays, and physical health problems, demonstrated by higher sick calls.

According to one study, 85 percent of the employees deal with conflict at some level during the workday, and it is estimated that 360 billion U.S. dollars in paid hours are lost each year to workplace conflicts.² Conflict at work is real, and it is worth solving permanently not just for the health of the individuals, but also for the health of the bottom line. To understand why we respond emotionally to each other, causing and inflating conflicts, we have to understand our innate need for attachment. Attachment is defined by psychologists as our need for continuous connection with whom we depend on. We are wired to be connected and struggle when we are not.³ Solitary confinement is considered unusually harsh, as it deprives individuals from connections with others for long periods of time.

In evolutionary terms, emotion has acted as our alarm system. Emotion comes from the Latin word emovere, which means to move. If we think about it, emotion tells us what matters. It steers us toward what is worthwhile and away from danger. Emotions are contagious. Psychologists have found that we actually simulate the emotions we see other people experiencing. In fact, scientists have also discovered intriguing evidence that we have mirror neurons that fire when we see and experience emotion, helping us to mirror and feel the emotions we observe others exhibit.⁴ Emotions that turn on our panic button are triggered by incongruences in our environment and give us the message that something is disconnected in our interaction with people we depend on. The key is, the people we depend on are our lifeline to our success, and we are the same for their success.

During the time we lived in caves, our tribe was there for hunting and safety; our quick responses were crucial to surviving: eat or be eaten. The way our brains are wired has not changed. Even though there are no longer saber-toothed tigers, our brains respond the same to panic or stress. While our work environment is no longer in caves, we consider those whom we work with as members of our tribe, thus depending on each other in times of stress. If we do not work well together, we are stuck, and we cannot move forward with our projects. Because of our dependency on each other, our brains become hypersensitive in our interactions with any type of signal, whether facial, verbal, or physical, that sends the message of disapproval, rejection, or disconnection.

When we have a strong connection, or what we call a secure attachment, our brain is less sensitive and less reactive to the changes in our interactions. For example, if a teammate or a boss does not respond to us when we expect it, our brain does not go into a panic. It says, “It’s okay, I had many experiences with this person when he or she was there for me. The person is probably busy.” However, if we have a weak connection or insecure attachment, our brain is vigilant and a lot more sensitive to these changes in our interaction. We say, “You see? I am not important to this person, and he or she does not care about me.” or we say, “Oh my goodness, I have done something wrong; my boss is probably upset with me.” This response happens automatically because the connection is not secure, and how does the brain respond when there is a change? It presses the panic button and goes into a survival mode—fight, flight, or freeze. The whole point of learning about emotions is to understand that they send us cues about the state of our connections. As humans, our ecological niche is to be a member of one or more groups of people. That is how we have been able to survive so well as a species. We both help and depend on each other.⁵

Emotional Bonding Vital to Human Survival

Being bonding animals (meaning we form strong, lasting emotional attachments or connections with each other) was vital to our survival because we have the most vulnerable offspring of any species on Earth. A human child is completely helpless for the first six months and unable to fend off any predators. That fact and our need for care—to get a response from those we depend on—has structured our nervous system. Furthermore, it has a massive impact on how our biology works. For example, if we think of someone we have an emotional bond with, our body produces the bonding hormone, oxytocin, which calms us down, gives us emotional balance, and opens us up for social interaction. It makes us less afraid and more open to exploring. Because we evolved to be bonding animals, we depend on our team members and look for specific responses from them. That, in turn, impacts the way we engage, perform, and collaborate.

By learning how to recognize these cues and knowing how to address emotions, we can slow down the process before the brain presses the panic button. How great would it be if we could all recognize the patterns in our emotional responses before we press the panic button? It would save us so much time and the pain of disconnection. If we look at children, we observe how open they are to express their emotions explicitly and clearly. As adults, we have learned to protect ourselves by hiding our emotions. The better we are at this, ironically, the more we stand to create and feed conflicts, ultimately leading to disconnections. How does this relate to teams?

Understanding Emotions: A Roadmap to Team Success

Understanding our emotional responses, patterns, and behaviors provides us with a roadmap for team success. It helps us know what team members need to feel safe and connected, how to coach them, how to understand what is happening when they feel vulnerable and threatened, and how to lead the team members into having a more cohesive and secure connection with each other. Also, it gives us insight into where teams get stuck. It helps us learn what team members do to create patterns of interaction that are positive or negative. A positive pattern of interaction can lead a team into a more secure bond with each other, while a negative pattern can lead the team into a state of perpetual emotional disconnection.

What Is Attachment, and Why Must We Understand It First?

“What should we call this?” John Bowlby, a famous psychiatrist, having studied emotionally disturbed children at a London clinic, was sharing with his wife the theory he had formulated about what was missing in the children’s lives that caused their psychological problems.

She responded, “You should call it a theory of love.”

Deciding that it was too controversial, he called it, the attachment theory.⁶ Bowlby defined attachment as a “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings.”⁷

To develop a good team, we must understand the concepts of the attachment theory and the science of emotional connection. Bowlby discovered that people need secure emotional attachments to be healthy. These bonds start with the child’s connection with the mother and other care providers, but they continue to be important after the child becomes an adult. Our need to bond continues into our adulthood and our workplace. The bond among team members is nurtured through positive emotional feedback loops, giving us information as to how we feel about each other, especially during times of stress. The attachment theory explains how our internal emotions affect our interactions with others and how the patterns of those interactions affect an essential part of our self. It also explains how we regulate our emotions and the emotional signals we send to other people.⁸

Other researchers built on Bowlby’s work and have expanded our understanding of the science of Emotional Connection. The attachment theory was quickly complemented by the addition of humanistic theory, systems theory, and experiential theory to help us understand and describe emotions, work with emotions, and create the roadmap for the process of reconnection. Humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers, who revolutionized psychotherapy with his concept of client-centered therapy, stressed the importance of having unconditional positive regard and unrelenting empathy—and the fact that we have an innate ability to grow and develop. To establish a healthy emotional connection with each other, team members need to experience empathy and demonstrate an empathic response toward others.⁹ Salvador Minuchin, a psychiatrist who radically changed the approach to family therapy, studied family systems. Minuchin revealed that families are systems whereby each member has an impact on the whole. An intervention must involve the whole system in order to be effective. In a family or a group or a team, when one member is stuck, the entire team is affected and is constricted and rigid. It cannot move forward and adapt to a new environment.¹⁰

Positive emotional connections create and restore the team’s flexibility, enhancing its ability to adapt and deal with external and unforeseen changes. Fritz Perls and his wife Laura Perls were originators of the experiential theory in psychology. The key concept that was taken from their theory is experience; in the process of Emotional Connection, the goal is to be in the moment, to be fully in the present.¹¹ That is why, the key question is always: What is happening with you at this moment? Because when we can address the present emotion—what we are actually experiencing right now, we can experience the core attachment needs and what is needed to restore a healthy emotional connection. This process helps us be clear on our message to each other and what we need from each other to feel safe and comfortable.

What Must Team Members Learn?

As with couples, team members work well together when they learn to become accessible and responsive to each other. They must learn how to recognize emotions, recognize when they get emotionally disconnected from each other, and understand that being disconnected is dysfunctional. In teams, recognizing the underlying emotions and resulting disconnections is an important step to changing the whole dynamic and repairing bonds that are needed for teams to be functional. But, repairing those bonds requires a special process, which we introduce to you in this book. It is a process intended at repairing and building strong emotional connections. The Emotional Connection (EmC) process is built on the foundation of the scientific work on attachment and years of on-the-ground experiential learning through working with clients in multiple industries. The EmC process helps create the language of saying what we really feel, more authentically expressing our emotions, helping us to connect with others, and nurture the relationships that we need to make flourish. People with high levels of emotional responsiveness are better able in general to function well in society and develop successful personal relationships of all kinds, including in teams.¹²

Making Space for Expressing Emotions

Let us return from the theoretical background to daily reality with teams. If you think about your team and how you communicate, is there any space for the expression of emotions? In most businesses and organizations, the predominant subject of communications is content-based as it should be. Fortunately, thanks to Daniel Goleman¹³ and others, the concept of emotional intelligence at the workplace has taken center stage as candidates are evaluated and individual performance is measured. However, while arguably we have a greater number of emotionally competent people at companies, the concept of emotion-based connections within teams and within individuals during times of stress and conflict is poorly understood and not well recognized. The lack of such recognition creates an environment promoting significant disconnections and a ripple effect leading to poor team performance. Here is an example of the disconnection and its ripple effect.

Linda, a director of the Western Region for Alfa Insurance Company, called me to help her with her team. She has been leading this team for 11 years as their director. They have worked closely together and have gone through a lot, but recently, Linda was furious about her team’s behavior. She was going on a trip, and it was really important for the whole team to be at the meeting before her departure. She explained to Lola that two of her vice presidents did not show up at the conference call that was very important to her. Here is how the rest of the conversation went as Linda explained what happened:

I mean, how can they do...