L’Efficacia del Metodo ETaC di Paul Ekman nel proteggere gli “obiettivi sensibili”
3 November 2016
‘Knowledge, Skills and Abilities’ A Reflection from Knowledge to Well-being
14 February 2017
Recognising each other’s emotions to improve your own management
INTERVIEW WITH DIEGO INGRASSIA
Doctor Ingrassia, how does your background on emotional intelligence come about, and how do these skills help you in the business world?
These skills are now part of my being. I use them spontaneously, both in my professional and private life.
But let me be clear, these are not supernatural powers: following targeted training courses, choosing those of excellence, practising in the field and having valuable mentors (now dear friends of mine), has made all the difference in my personal and professional growth.
At the end of the 1990s, I was living in the United States, in San Diego, and after finishing my university studies in Communication and Marketing, I aspired to embark on a brilliant career in business in the States. Then came the turning point: the decision to deal with relationships and people skills, and to bring the best of US-made training to Italy.
Apparently a radical change, but this must be stated with care: the States gave me the imprinting of training, allowed me to understand how experience combined with innovation could impact on results; to this marked pragmatism I added a fundamental value for me: understanding people, that is, listening to them carefully, understanding their interests and the motivations that drive them.
I have always been driven by the desire to transform what for many professionals is a simple negotiating relationship for commercial purposes, into a relationship between people based on mutual trust, capable of enriching on a human level and generating agreements in a win-win perspective. This way of approaching me has always made a difference in terms of results, and many clients and suppliers from that time are now good friends of mine, with whom I still keep in touch.
When I chose to return to Italy, I wanted to convey this approach in my company, and today this value unites me and the other 21 professionals in the I&G Management team: ‘We develop RELATIONSHIPS, we take care of EMOTIONS’.
How did you approach the world of non-verbal communication and facial expressions, in short, the world of emotions and the secret language behind the lies?.
Thank you for your question, as this topic is particularly close to my heart and represents one of the most extraordinary changes that have made a difference in my professional and personal journey.
My encounter with Paul Ekman and his scientific methodologies was like a thunderbolt. In the positive sense of the word, of course.
In the USA, I had the opportunity to meet Prof. Ekman at a scientific conference in which he was involved as a speaker. At that time he had just been contacted as a scientific advisor in the television series ‘Lie to Me’.
In his presentation he spoke about emotions, but not in the theoretical terms we are used to. He did not argue in abstract terms, he spoke about his research in a very concrete way, referring to behaviours that we can observe in everyday life in the people around us.
Understanding the other’s emotions, according to Ekman, started from the careful observation of behaviour. There was, therefore, a method that could be learnt and applied immediately in private and professional life.
This concreteness of his applied to the world of emotions and their consequences, such as lying, made me fall in love with his method. Everything I knew about non-verbal communication was immediately swept away and replaced by the new information based on the scientific research that Prof. Ekman showed us. I realised that Ekman’s extraordinary gifts, or those of Cal Lightman in Lie to Me, were real, could be taught and learned.
The certainty of wanting to learn these extraordinary methodologies and to bring them to Italy for the first time became clear, and today I can proudly say that this dream has come true: since 2011 I&G has been certifying training on Paul Ekman’s Emotional Behavioural Analysis for private individuals, professionals, companies, and some institutional bodies such as the State Police and the Ministry of the Interior.
Tell us more about how this method works. We all have our own personal style.
Each of us has a personal style in speaking, moving, expressing emotions through our face. These habits are part of what we call the behavioural baseline.
But we also always act in a context, for example we may be at the airport and subject to a control, or at the bar with friends. Our baseline can change in these situations, and must always be re-measured.
We also communicate through 5 channels of communication: facial expressions, voice, body language, style and verbal content. There is often harmony between these channels, for example when we say we are agitated and our non-verbal behaviour and voice are consistent.
But when we notice something incongruent, e.g. a person who laughs with us but then manifests a micro expression of anger (micro expressions last less than a second), it is a sign that something is not right.
The emotional-behavioural analyst knows how to notice these small signals that manifest themselves at an unconscious or subconscious level, and knows how to investigate through targeted questions the credibility of the other person.
This valuable information emerges, regardless of the subject’s will. The fields of application, for those who know how to use them, are manifold.
Which professional figures are most frequently interested in these methodologies?.
Managers for effective relationship management, to motivate employees properly and accurately, or to manage stress or team performance in the company.
Those in commercial professions look to Paul Ekman’s methodologies for support and a useful method for negotiation and business development.
Those who support professionals find help in these new skills in coaching and counselling. HR managers contact us to request useful tools for personnel selection (especially the assessment of candidates’ credibility) to be used during interviews and assessments.
Psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists and doctors are interested in improving their ability to pick up on non-verbal signals related to their clients’ emotions in order to be more effective in the relationship and therapeutic adherence.
Lawyers, judges and members of law enforcement to enhance the questioning and interviewing of witnesses and suspects.
As I said, the fields of application are really manifold.
As far as companies are concerned, what skills are most in demand among managers?
Managers who contact us want to develop their skills in effective communication, improve their ability to inspire confidence and in creative and innovative decision-making. They are interested in managing emotions and their emotional intelligence as a whole. They want to be able to develop cohesion and cooperation in their company, align employees and pursue the company vision.
I know you are also involved in ‘Storytelling applied to business’. What is this about? Effective communication techniques or rhetoric? .
Words have the extraordinary power to make things happen: they are the most powerful medium that generates change. They can motivate, excite, ignite desire and thought.
Words have such a marked impact on our lives because they can inspire us, change our behaviour, both positively and negatively.
Storytelling is also a method that can be learnt, it helps us transform our communication into a message that can break through to our interlocutors. It makes us better leaders, able to influence others without resorting to an authoritarian style. It is therefore a tool that makes the leader’s communication clearer, through concepts that are easy to memorise and can generate action, thus creating alignment and sharing a common point of view.
What instead links emotions to motivations? What do you mean by motivations exactly?.
People, by culture, education, or personality characteristics, cultivate their values with care, and tend to reject environments or people who do not respect them adequately.
Let me give you an example: those who love harmony in relationships can often collide with people who are totally goal-oriented, or share these characteristics and detest others. If in front of him he finds a person whose motivations are completely different from his own, he may unconsciously feel discomfort and annoyance, or find him disliked ‘on the skin’.
How many managers reject new suppliers despite the fact that they have expressed themselves cleanly and technically impeccably?
This is the power of motivation.
Companies hire for competence, but then risk firing for behaviour. Knowing how to identify in the language of the other person his or her deepest motivations and interests helps to create rapport, to bring results in sales, and also helps to know how to properly incentivise people with respect to what they really need.
An employee may be attracted by the economic side of the offer, but quit because he or she is forced into an unharmonised and conflictual corporate environment, or is too competitive. Or he may prefer upgrading and the chance to improve himself, rather than working in a team and getting a high salary.
People communicate their motivations. Knowing how to grasp people’s motivational hierarchies is an essential factor in being able to manage any kind of relationship effectively.
But in order to grasp motivations, it is necessary to be able to formulate the right questions.
What makes a question a right question?.
The question is very important and would require much more space, but in summary we can say that: timing is a key factor for a question to be considered right, or more precisely ‘powerful’.
However, we often use questions at the right time, but phrased incorrectly.
We must indeed take into account the tone of voice, but also the words used and their quantity. The words used should then be in tune with the value and motivational pattern of our interlocutor, all of which helps us to make the question more comprehensible and personalised.
The method guides the person, and in the context of relationships this background creates a substantial difference in the ability to listen and the strategic use of questions.
Do you share these values and skills in your company?
I think that in any business the difference is made by those who have passion and believe in what they propose. We believe in training and update ourselves both internally and externally on an ongoing basis, to transform skills into concrete experience and then transfer it into methodologies for our customers.
Each of our team members is assessed and certified with respect to his or her preparation and emotional intelligence skills. We only deliver what we experience directly; this genuineness and transparency, even in seeking only scientifically validated methodologies, is our added value.
Companies choose us and choose to stay with us for a long time, precisely because of this imprinting: ‘tailoring’ our consultancy and training courses to the client’s real needs. Consistent with this vision, we always involve our clients in the co-construction of their future skills.
I like to sum up what I have said so far using this concept: train people so well that they can leave you, take care of the relationship with them and they will not leave you.
Our commitment is to take care of EMOTIONS by developing relationships. I think it is precisely these ideas and values that have led us to become a benchmark in Italy for these methodologies.
