Emotions

To communicate effectively, someone has to understand what you are trying to say, which in theory, only requires that you say the right words to trigger the right understanding in whomever you are speaking to. In practice, however, the emotional state of both the speaker and listener can have a massive impact on how what is said is both delivered and interpreted. This then leads to the conclusion that to be an effective communicator, we must be aware of both our emotional state, and the emotional state of the people around us.

Emotions can roughly be divided into two categories: positive emotions; and negative emotions. As a general rule, if you are feeling positive, and your colleagues are also feeling positive, these positive emotions will have little impact on the substance of what is being communicated.

For example, if you are giving a presentation, and you feel happy, joyful, and optimistic; and all of your colleagues listening to your presentation are also feeling happy, joyful, and optimistic, then generally everyone will take what is presented at face-value.

If you say, "We had the worst sales quarter in company history," a room full of happy, joyful, and optimistic people will tend to look at the data, try to understand the cause of the declining sales, and work together to come up with a strategy to increase sales.

However, if you are feeling sad, anxious, and depressed; and your colleagues are also feeling sad, anxious, and depressed, saying, "We had the worst sales quarter in company history," will be both delivered and interpreted completely differently than if the same thing were said if everyone was happy, joyful, and optimistic.

When we are feeling bad, we tend to convey bad news in a way that makes things seem much worse than they actually are; and when our colleagues are feeling bad, they tend to interpret what is being said in the worst possible light.

When a room full of happy, joyful, and optimistic colleagues heard they had a problem, they harnessed their collective positive energy to get to work solving it. When a room full of sad, anxious, and depressed colleagues heard the same problem, they might assume that all is lost, there's no point in trying, and that the end is near.

This example presents the two polar extremes of how emotions influence communication, and if these were the only two emotional states that existed - everyone feeling good or everyone feeling bad - then working around the resulting communication challenges would be easy: Only communicate with people when you are feeling happy, joyful, and optimistic; and when they are feeling happy, joyful, and optimistic. However, this is entirely unrealistic, as people are rarely at the polar extremes of human emotion.

In the real world, everyone experiences life differently, and much of what they experience in life is experienced outside of work. When people show up to work, those experiences outside of work are not forgotten, resulting in someone's emotional state outside of work being brought into work. Sometimes those emotions are on the positive end of the emotional spectrum, and sometimes they are on the negative end, but most often they are somewhere in-between. Generally, people are neither happy nor sad at work, but experience complex amalgamations of different types of emotions that intermix to create how they are feeling at a specific point in time.

If emotions can influence how we communicate, as well as how people interpret what we are communicating, this leads us to the conclusion that emotions cannot be ignored when striving to be an effective communicator. As all business professionals should strive to be effective communicators, this means that business professionals should be aware of both their emotions, as well as the emotions of their colleagues.

A word often used to describe being aware of the emotions of your colleagues is empathy, but this word is often conflated to mean many things, including caring, nurturing, and sympathy. For the sake of simplicity, it is easier to think of empathy as only the process of being aware of emotions, rather than what should be done once we become aware of those emotions. This is not to discount the importance of being caring, nurturing, and sympathetic, but is instead an attempt to simplify what is already an incredibly complex aspect of communication.

If being aware of the emotional state of your colleagues is necessary to be an effective communicator, and empathy is the word chosen to describe awareness of emotional state, then we should conclude that to be an effective communicator we should be empathetic toward our colleagues.

The goal of being empathetic toward our colleagues may seem to run counter to that of being a consummate professional, as the stereotype of the consummate professional is someone who conducts themselves professionally no matter how they are feeling, or how anyone else is feeling. However, this stereotype applies more to a machine than it does to a human.

We humans are not machines and should not aspire to act like machines. As automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence become the standard approach in conducting business, if an employee can only act like a machine, then in many instances they will be replaced by a machine.

For example, if a professional salesperson cannot sense the emotional state of a customer during a presentation, and they give their presentation the same way as they would for any other customer, then the presentation may as well be played from a recording. In this case there was no advantage to giving a live presentation, as there was no empathy for how the customer might be feeling, and therefore no on-the-spot adjustments made to tune the presentation specifically for the emotions of the customer. In the case of a happy customer, the presentation can focus on why they should buy more products, in the case of an unhappy customer, the focus should be on finding solutions to the problems the customer may be having.

Making these adaptations requires empathy, where communication is tuned to the feelings of others. This communication skill will be the hallmark of the modern professional, as it is the main differentiator between the job of communication being done by a human instead of a machine.