Welcome to the Emotional Economy : Part 4

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

(Page 4 of 4)

Recent discoveries in neuroscience and psychology bear this out. Neuroscience shows that emotional processes are integral to learning, reasoning, and decision making. It is now well accepted that much of what a person learns happens outside of conscious awareness.

And finally, it is clear that there is nothing vague, elusive, or mystical about emotions. Thanks to research discoveries and technological advances, emotions can now be observed and defined objectively as specific and consistent collections of physiological responses.

The process is immediate and direct. When a person receives a signal - for instance, she sees or hears something - a signal travels from her senses to her brain's emotional systems, which trigger a chemical reaction that in turn produces a feeling. It might be pleasant, such as happiness, surprise, pride, or excitement; or unpleasant, such as fear, sadness, anger, disgust, embarrassment, or guilt. Feelings are triggered by mechanisms that cannot be controlled. All this happens without any conscious or rational intervention.

Moreover, psychology has begun to show that emotions are required for superior performance in any occupation. Neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio, in his book The Feeling of What Happens, shows that emotions point us to the sector of the decision-making space where our reason can operate most efficiently. His discoveries have led him to believe that "well-tuned and deployed emotion is necessary for the edifice of reason to operate properly."

Discoveries in neuroscience strongly suggest that emotions triumph over reason. Although thoughts can trigger emotions, our human mind is not very effective at willfully turning off emotions. Neural pathways from the brain structures that command our emotional responses (that is, the amygdala) to the brain systems that control our thoughts are wider and stronger than the pathways the other way around.

So three central questions emerge: What are the right emotions that great organizations promote in every employee and every customer - the ones that systematically lead to engagement and growth? What are the mechanisms that these organizations employ to generate these emotional responses? And finally, how do they systematize these practices to make them universal within the organization as a whole?

A response to these three questions is what The Gallup Path leads to, again and again. Emotional engagement is the fuel that drives the most productive employees and the most profitable customers. As you travel along The Gallup Path with us, you will be amazed at just how powerful emotional fuel is. The most amazing thing about it is that it never runs out.

Emotions Are a Terrific Thing to Value

Here's what the world's most successful organizations don't do. They don't suppose that either superior college grades or comprehensive training is the only accurate or dependable indicator of the right person for the right job. Neither do they expect that employee incentives will guarantee consistently better job performance.

Instead they depend on the reliable source that other businesses disdain: human nature. They know that the emotions of both employees and customers create feelings, which drive their behavior. Great organizations are aware of the power of emotions and therefore set up the conditions that generate and cultivate emotional mechanisms among employees and customers. The only way to achieve this is through human interaction, the fastest and most powerful trigger of emotional states.

By recognizing and unleashing the innate abilities of employees and matching their gifts to the positions that will best take advantage of them, thus making them even stronger, great organizations look inward in order to move forward.

They cherish the fluctuations in human behavior because they understand that these create a pathway as electric as any inside a brain:

• Employees who use their natural talents in their jobs produce significantly more than average workers.

• Emotionally committed employees form teams that deliver exceptional outcomes.

• Customers recognize the passion and commitment employees feel toward them and cannot help but respond in an emotional way.

• This emotionally driven reaction builds a bridge between employees and customers that creates engagement.

• This engagement becomes the key factor that drives sustainable growth.

• Sustainable growth is the route to profits and, ultimately, higher stock value.

In the end great organizations know that a reason-driven economy can travel only so far. The missing link is the engagement of deep-seated emotions as the driver of growth and profits. These - and only these - feelings are the fuel that propel talented individuals to do more, and inspire customers to return. And while reason influences both employees and customers, emotions are indispensable because they drive the best in both of them. Finally, a chemical reaction inside the brain can be converted into a business model that works.

Emotions Drive Business Outcomes

If you want to open the gate to the pathways that lead to greater profits and growth, you must change the way you view emotions in terms of your employees and your customers. These people are a lot more complicated than you think. If you want to understand what makes them tick, those forces that drive their actions and reactions, you must understand the role that emotions play in their behavior.

The implications of the effects of emotions both inside and outside the workplace are incredibly powerful and far reaching. Emotions:

• Set the highest-level goals, including how hard a person works and how attached a person will stay to a brand or to an organization.

• Take place outside the rational, willful awareness and constitute emotional memory.

• Drive decision making, the emotional state of conscious awareness.

By acknowledging the role emotions play in driving business outcomes, you have taken the first step on The Gallup Path.

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.