Welcome to the Emotional Economy : Part 1

Follow this Path: How the World's Greatest Organizations Drive Growth by Unleashing Human Potential
by Curt Coffman, Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina, Ph.D.

What do the world's greatest organizations have in common? They know that their most valuable resource is human-their employees and customers. And the best companies understand two important facts: people are emotional first and rational second, and because of that, employees and customers must be emotionally engaged in order for the organization to reach its full potential. Gallup research not only bears that out, but has uncovered the secrets of creating and managing an "emotional economy" that will provide boom possibilities for your company.

Follow This Path shows you how the traditional ways to engage people no longer apply in today's world. Instead, it offers a system it calls The Gallup Path, based on the proven, revolutionary strategies of the most successful businesses. You'll learn the prerequisites of an effective workplace, forge unbreakable bonds between employees and customers with the book's 34 Routes to Superior Performance, know the three crucial links that drive productivity and growth, discover the best employee and customer motivators, and much more.

Ignore the emotional economy - and miss out on financial performance. Helping you build relationships one customer and one employee at a time, this important book offers a unique new path for your organization to follow. All you have to do is value and develop human relationships all around you to transform your business - starting today.

Chapter 1

One day in 1609 Galileo stood on his balcony, peered at his world in a new way, and changed it. What he used to achieve this milestone was actually very simple. He took implements that were readily available to him - a piece of organ pipe fitted with a curved lens at either end - and gazed through it. Pointing his telescope toward the rippling ocean, he saw what no one else could. Two ships far off, their billowing sails driven by a steady wind, aimed their bows directly at him. A magnified world, he realized, had enormous practical possibilities. Enemies could be spotted before they readied for attack. Friendly vessels, long away from home and feared lost, would be "there" before they docked. This was an innovation that people could understand - and they embraced it.

Then he shifted his focus from the world he knew. Turning his implement to the vast seventeenth-century sky once again, he saw something that no one else could. Peering at the magnified heavens, Galileo discovered four small moons circling the huge mass of Jupiter. Dark spots on the sun's bright surface were suddenly visible, as was the now illuminated surface of the moon as the sun's rays reached it.

These celestial bodies, he realized, were moving. But why? The prevailing theory of Galileo's time held that the earth was the center of the universe. The spheres surrounding it were supposed to move as a group, not as independent entities. Galileo knew that his findings were consistent with a view radically different from the accepted wisdom. Copernicus had already put forth the radical idea that the earth actually revolved around the sun, and not the other way around.

Galileo also knew that expressing beliefs contrary to rock solid dogma could be deadly: In 1600 Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar, had been burned at the stake in Rome because he had insisted that the earth did not remain motionless at the center of the universe.

Obviously, a different perspective on the accepted world they inhabited terrified a lot of the good people of the time. Unlike the ocean view through the telescope, which brought the objects of their world "closer," this sky revelation created chaos. What did this information mean? How could they deal with it? Could it hurt them? Would they have to change the way they lived? The familiarity of their world was being questioned, and there didn't seem to be any ready answers. So instead of trying to understand the message of the spheres, they punished the messengers who delivered the "bad" news.

It took a long time, but eventually Galileo's keen observations changed our understanding of how natural forces operate in the universe. Back on earth, they altered how the planet itself was viewed and linked it into the bigger picture of space. Without this knowledge astronauts could not have traveled to the moon.

With a symbolic step into the unknown, Galileo helped create a path to a world he could not have imagined.

A New World's Old Way to Look at Business

Today's visible business world is not unlike the world in which Galileo lived. Many innovations - like technology - are embraced as long as they don't shake up long-established foundations. Machines are controllable and fixable. What they can and can't do is well understood, and how they affect business is usually highly appreciated.

But the other system that fuels business - human nature - is a whole other matter. Humans are emotion-driven entities, and emotions are messy. Little understood and less than predictable, emotions can disrupt, cause upheavals, and occasionally inspire fear. Certainly this ever-present human aspect is regarded as an annoying hindrance, something to be glossed over or avoided altogether. Think about it. Have you ever had to manage:

• Judy, "the thinker," who seems to spend hours staring into space?
• Ed, "the always excited," who can't restrain himself from leaping into every new project with gung-ho abandon?
• Raphael, "so quiet you don't know he's there," who turns in precision work?
• Stephanie, "the caretaker," who spends too much time remembering when people started work and commemorating the occasion with a cake?
• Ralph, "the boss-in-training," who wants to head every committee?

These kinds of employees (and there are lots more) get under your skin. You don't want to deal with their quirks and tics and habits because you believe they take precious time away from work.

Unfortunately, your view is upside down. All those personal "tics" are clues to who these people are - and, more important, to the innate talents they possess.

Just as the prevailing "wisdom" in Galileo's time forbade changes in what was accepted as true, businesses today tend to turn a blind eye to a force they don't want to understand because they don't know how to deal with it. Nor do they comprehend what it means to them.

The Anti-Emotional Belief System

It's time to toss aside the antiquated "rules" of management, and for a good reason: They don't work.

Consider the tenets of the accepted wisdom regarding employees:

• Everyone can excel at anything provided they try hard enough.
• People will work harder only if they get paid more and are given perks.
• The focus of employees' development should be on fixing their weaknesses.
• An organization's outcomes are dictated by the hard financial realities of better products and processes, not people.
• Treat every employee the same way.
• The key to growth is increasing demand.
• Superior performance is the result of improved technology.
• Competencies, skills, and knowledge are always more important than talent.
• Superior performance is the consequence of rational thinking, so emotions should not be allowed to affect reason.
• "People" are an organization's most valuable asset.

And where customers are concerned, the beliefs can be summarized like this:

• Customers "know" what they want: better products at reasonable prices that will keep them coming back for more.
• Customers are always right; just give them what they want.
• Treat every customer the same way.

Copyright © 2002 by The Gallup Organization

About the Author

Curt Coffman is the coauthor of the New York Times business bestseller First, Break All the Rules and The Gallup Organization's Global Practice Leader for Q12 Management Consulting.

Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina is Global Practice Leader -HumanSigma- at The Gallup Organization and co-author of Follow This Path: How the World's Greatest Organizations Drive Growth by Unleashing Human Potential. His Gallup discoveries help corporations significantly increase their revenue and profit growth rates by managing their emotional economies. This includes measuring, describing, understanding, and developing emotional engagement among employees and customers through HumanSigma™, Gallup's management breakthrough system for driving revenue and earnings growth in highly competitive environments.