THOUGHTS ON LOVE
14 February 2018
Emotional agility
1 March 2018
Man still holds a competitive advantage over artificial intelligence and algorithms. One potential that is not yet fully understood, especially within organisations, is the ability to feel and manage one’s emotions. In a context where research reveals the widespread inability of leaders to feel empathy towards their employees, it is a priority to transform the organisational culture, to return to valuing the humanity of the person, encapsulated in their emotions.
Monday 5 February 2018 was a very black day for the Wall Street Stock Exchange, the worst session since 2011.
The Dow Jones index went on to lose 6% and then stopped at -4.6%: a similar drop involved all the Asian stock exchanges, the European stock exchanges reacted more evenly, however, reporting considerable losses.
What happened?
According to analysts, the news of the historic trade union agreement in the Baden-Württemberg region of Germany, which provides for wage increases of 4.3% for 900,000 workers and which could soon be extended to the entire 3.9 million German metalworkers, together with similar news from the United States, triggered a series of automatic triggers controlled by algorithms instructed to react when certain parameters linked to the volatility index change, causing a cascade of selling on the markets.
Does this make sense? Certainly not.
The news of large-scale wage increases is good for the real economy, as well as contributing to the welfare of many households, it produces an increase in consumption over time and therefore benefits the markets.
Why then could this happen?
Let us set aside considerations that might lead us to reflect on how distant the mechanisms of the stock exchanges are from the real economy, which is unrelated to the subject of this article, and focus instead on a real fact: 66% of the billions of exchanges that take place every day on the world’s stock exchanges are governed by algorithms, machines that make their own decisions.
Any level of human-led control would never have made this happen: there is still plenty of room for human intelligence!
But how aware are we of this?
When intelligence is computing power, there is no match between machine and human intelligence: it is well known that Deep Blue, an IBM computer, managed to beat Garry Kasparov in a game of chess in 1997.
But the machine is not aware of what it does, it has no consciousness, no emotions: there is something about human intelligence that cannot be reduced to an algorithm.
To know emotions in order to manage them better
To contextualise the elements of meaning in a decision; to ensure emotional balance and reasonableness in the decision-making process; to responsibly understand the consequences of a given choice; to be able to provide answers even in the face of ambiguous situations, to tolerate uncertainty; to act anyway, if necessary, even in the absence of a procedure or a programme: these are characteristics peculiar to human intelligence.
But studies dedicated to understanding this intelligence have a short history.
You do not have to be many years old -and perhaps things are not very different even today- to remember that during the school years, the intelligence that counted was the logic-mathematical type.
To then enter the working world and be taught to ‘leave emotions out of it’: a rational, lucid and detached mind provides the best performance.
We must not forget, therefore, that the path that led to the recognition of emotions as an essential component of our intelligence was – at least within our civilisation – long and difficult, and although it is possible to identify extremely important contributions in the work of some great philosophers, starting with Aristotle and ending with Charles Darwin’s fundamental essay The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, it is only since the work of Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer (1990) that the subject of emotional intelligence has imposed itself on the scientific debate.
For a long time, therefore, the only intelligence recognised as such was that attributable to logical and rational thought.
Still today, tests based on intelligence quotient (IQ) are widely present in the admission tests to many university faculties, just as there is an exclusive club (Mensa) whose membership is linked to exceeding a certain ‘quantitative’ IQ threshold.
However, our intuition alone could have indicated to us that such an approach is reductive, as all our decisions are influenced by our emotions and only later do we tend to explain our choices through rational thought. We owe it to the studies of Paul Ekman, the foremost expert on the physiology of emotions, to prove that Darwin was right about the biological and adaptive origin of emotions, because some of them manifest themselves on the faces of human beings in the same way in all cultures of the world.
Discovering this universal matrix and the innate nature of the seven primary emotions (fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, surprise, contempt) has helped us to understand more deeply the nature of emotions and their importance, not only during the evolution of our species, but in our everyday lives. “Emotions happen,” says Ekman: we cannot choose them, emotions accompany us throughout our lives, they mix with our thoughts to generate memories, they colour our experiences and when we are dissatisfied with the emotional intensity we are exposed to, we watch movies, go to the theatre, read books, hang out with people who arouse emotions in us… But as important as they are, Ekman reminds us, we still know very little about them.
Emotional intelligence is still undervalued in the workplace
As we have seen, it is since the work of Salovey and Mayer in 1990 that the scientific debate around emotional intelligence has been animated, but it is really only through the popularisation work of Daniel Goleman, which began with the text Emotional Intelligence in 1995 (translated into Italy in 1997), that this subject began to attract interest outside the academic environment.
Those who follow the world of training can probably date this interest back to the beginning of the 1990s, when within organisations that were becoming increasingly articulated and complex, the need began to be felt for tools that could understand work performance beyond its technical-specialist component, and models based on the concept of competence and soft skills were adopted, derived from the studies of David Mc- Clelland and brought to Italy by Piero Quaglino.
But the merit of the studies dedicated to emotional intelligence is that they have created a construct that effectively synthesises a set of qualities (knowing one’s own and others’ emotions; knowing how to manage them; motivating oneself; knowing how to use these skills in relationships with others), which can be easily linked to effective behaviour.
Goleman gives numerous examples of success by emotionally intelligent people in his books and argues that those with these characteristics stand out in the world of work because they are able to perform better.
Based on our experience, we can confirm these observations: people who are able to recognise, accept and consciously manage their emotions are able to establish positive relationships and are better able to cope with difficult situations.
But our experience has also shown us successful managers at the top of their organisations who are characterised by a very low emotional intelligence. Little attentive to what is happening around them on a relational level and solely focused on business objectives.
Faced with these situations, it is fair to ask: is emotional intelligence really indispensable?
To answer this question we need to open a brief reflection on organisational culture and leadership models.
Cultural models change, but they generally change very slowly. Today, fewer and fewer people are willing to accept being led by authoritarian methods: society has changed, educational models within families have changed, we have spent a lot of words trying to make people understand the difference between authoritarianism and authoritativeness, and we can say that this is largely understood and shared.
But how many people still love the strong man in charge?
The so-called ‘strong man’ (he may not even belong to the male gender) is not authoritarian by definition, but he is decisive, confident, determined, charismatic.
We are dealing with a stereotype that is little in tune with the acceptance of one’s emotions, culturally still seen as a sign of weakness. But when one tries to erase this component, which cannot be erased due to its biological nature, one is merely triggering a process that is slowly destined to erupt.
Internal competition increases, as does the level of individual and collective stress, conflicts arise that one tries to quell without trying to understand, others react by assuming a resigned and submissive attitude.
In the end, within a climate that has become alien to personal recognition and gratification, those who can leave leave.
It is then necessary to promote a change in organisational culture. If we want to imagine emotionally intelligent work groups – and to do this we must be able to generate more open and flexible models of confrontation and communication – we must give up easy shortcuts and be willing to accept greater complexity: nurturing listening, mutual trust and a climate of cooperation.
The need for a new, more open and flexible working environment is also evident in the fact that the workforce is not only a group of people, but also a group of people who are willing to work together.
Emotional agility and new managerial skills
Recent studies seem to confirm the research conducted at Berkeley by psychologist Dacher Keltner who coined the term ‘power paradox’.
Keltner had noted how over time the exercise of power tends to cause people to lose some of the qualities that enabled them to obtain it.
In particular, he had found a limited ability to empathise with the people they were in relationship with and to be able to understand what they were feeling.
These insights were confirmed by Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University in Ontario, who conducted a series of experiments using the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) technique, through which he was able to ascertain that exposure to power impairs the functioning of certain brain structures, the mirror neurons, which are known to underlie our empathic capacity.
These brief insights into the culture of leadership also help us to understand from a broader perspective the challenge that reflection on the subject of emotional intelligence has initiated within the world of work. As we have seen, cultural models in organisations change very slowly, resistance to change is a well-known phenomenon, people need time to adapt. All around us, however, there is a world that is changing at an impressive speed: technological innovation, the effects of globalisation, immigration, an increasingly complex and multi-ethnic society, the enormous amount of information to be managed, frantic communications that are increasingly inattentive to the emotional-relational component.
We certainly cannot turn into Third Millennium Luddites, not least because it is now all immaterial what we should be destroying.
“Emotional agility”, as Susan David called it in a recent book, is a quality of emotional intelligence that can help us relieve stress and find new resources by coordinating with our ’emotional brain’ just when our cognitive rigidity threatens to trap us.
“The heart has reasons that reason does not know” is a famous aphorism by Blaise Pascal that admirably sums up the role and importance of emotional intelligence three centuries ahead of the work of Salovey and Mayer.
The most important contribution of studies on emotional intelligence is perhaps precisely this: to remind us that in this synthesis of heart and reason, which is increasingly confirmed by recent findings in modern neuroscience, lies the deepest value of human intelligence.
