Courtesy of StockVault
According to a recent study from Marshall School of Business and USC faculty, an indifferent leadership attitude at work is not as effective as some bosses think.
It’s important to have control over your emotions in a professional setting. For the most part, we can all agree that temper tantrums hardly call for respect and admiration, but trying to control your emotions as a whole is also not very effective in receiving cooperation and understanding in the work place.
Peter Carnevale, professor of management and organization at USC’s Marshall School of Business suggests, “[one] should be careful about managing his or her emotions because the person across the table is making inferences based on facial expressions. For example, a smile at the wrong time can discourage cooperation.”
Medical Xpress reports on the study entitled “Reading People’s Minds from Emotion Expressions in Interdependent Decision Making,” which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The study illustrates the intricate role emotion plays in business interactions such as what you show on your face is as important as what you say in a negotiation and what you do with your negotiation offers.
Researchers paired individuals with computer-generated images of an opposing negotiator in five related experiments. Each featured a two-person task in which the payoffs for each player depended on the simultaneous choice of both players. If both players invested (i.e.cooperated) both earned money. If neither player invested, neither earned money. And, if one player invested and the other player did not, the non-investor outperformed the investor by taking advantage of the investment without putting in any effort or money. This task represents a classic problem in interdependence and economic decision-making.
In one experiment, the image of the other player either smiled, expressing pleasure after cooperation, or frowned, signaling regret after exploitation. In other cases, it expressed pleasure after exploitation and regret after cooperation.
“If you come to an agreement in a negotiation and you are really happy, it may not be a good idea to show how happy you are because it might lead the other person to think that you did better than they did,“ said Carnevale. “But in other circumstances, showing strong emotion may be the ticket to success.“
The study’s findings were that people cooperated significantly more with a computer counterpart that smiled when cooperating and expressing sorrow after exploiting the participant. In other words, the study results indicate that context can determine the meaning ascribed to a counterpart’s emotional expression and subsequent reactions.
Brian Ahearn, CMCT® Chief Influence Officer influencePEOPLE Helping You Learn to Hear “Yes”.You Think You Don’t Have Authority? You’re Wrong?Do you ever find yourself thinking you don’t have any authority because you’re not the boss, a C-suite executive, a celebrity or something else like that? I’m here to tell you that you do have some authority! 1. Let me ask you this question first. Do you have experiences? Of course you have experiences. If you have experiences then you must have some expertise. Seth Godin, one of the world’s most respected marketing experts said, “Everyone’s an expert (at something).”So ask yourself, in what area do you have better, deeper and more experience? One good way to find your expertise is to write an “experience resume.” A typical resume will show you where you worked, which school you attended and what jobs you’ve held. An experience resume lists experiences, maybe up to fifty, you’ve had during your lifetime. It could contain trips, work, cooking, art, baby-sitting, reading, etc. You will find your expertise from the list by looking for patterns in the experiences or through connecting the dots among experiences. Here is a personal example; I like to teach and I like communication consulting in business as opposed to working as a full time teacher in a school or university. By combining those two I became a business coach. Also, I enjoy workshop facilitation and I like LEGOs so I learned LEGO Serious Play, a method of using LEGOs for business strategy development. Now LEGOs are one of the major teaching methods I use during my workshops.2. Once you identify your expertise you need to consider what evidence or symbols give other people proof of your expertise. Without having some evidence your expertise will not be perceived as such by your customers. Questions to be asked include: a) What advanced education or certification have you earned in your area of expertise? b) What awards or recognition have you earned? c) Have you written articles, books or contributed to other publications in your area of expertise? Don’t worry if you do not have enough evidence to support your authority yet. That means it should be part of your plan to obtain that evidence moving forward. Someone might say, “I don’t need evidence!” Perhaps. After all, neither Steve Jobs nor Bill Gates graduated from college. However, most of us are not Steve Jobs or Bill Gates! They now have tremendous evidence based on their amazing business results and great product innovations. That is the evidence to support the fact that each is a respected authority. Each of us has to have some evidence if we want to be recognized as experts in certain areas.3. Lastly, to build your authority you need to have E3 = Experiences, Expertise and Evidences. If you’re a manager here is one more very important tip. One of the key roles for managers is to help build their team member’s authority. Ask the above questions to your members and help them to identify their personal authority. If they need more evidence to support their authority you can come up with a plan to help them, including training or a project assignment. If you’re good at this you will be a successful manager.Here’s the bottom line – Authority is waiting for you to use! It just needs to be discovered then developed.Today’s column is based on my recent webinar “The Cialdini’s Influence Series for Managers.” In that webinar I talked about the principle of authority and while preparing I received help from two people with many experiences – Bobette Gorden of Influence At Work and Brian Ahearn. Thanks!
Hoh Kim, CMCT® Founder, Head Coach & Lead Facilitator, THE LAB h