Showing emotion at work can help improve connections with staff and customers.Jacob Wackerhausen
KARL MOORE – This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, with Talking Management for The Globe and Mail. Today I am delighted to speak to Julian Birkinshaw from the London Business School.
Julian, do you think emotions are more important today than they were in the past in business?
JULIAN BIRKINSHAW – Yes, so as you say, emotion is one of those sort of dirty words in a lot of organizations – a lot of Germanic organizations, for example, would prefer the rational view always to work it's way through. But if you think about it, we are missing out on a whole chunk of our capacity as humans.
If we focus on rational decision making, based on the right information, that is an an important part of the story, but we are missing, if you like, the whole right hand-side of our brain and ultimately the best decisions are the ones that blend the rational with the emotional. So, a company that actually runs a decision-making process where we are encouraging people to bring emotions to bear is ultimately going to make better decisions than ones that are completely cold hearted.
Of course, emotion is not just about making good decisions – it is also about the relationships we have with out customers. So there are organizations out there, which put a lot of effort into creating emotional resonance with their customers. Apple is a great example – people buy Apple products because they just love those products and they don't know why.
An interesting and strange example is Tupperware – we all know Tupperware. You don't think of that as a product in the same way as you think of your iPad but Tupperware is one of these so-called direct selling organizations where Tupperware's ability to sell its products around the world rests on persuading half a million people around the world, who are their salesforce or their part-time sales force, to be sufficiently and emotionally engaged in the product they are selling, that they will go out and tell their friends and their colleagues to buy Tupperware.
So, the entire business model of Tupperware is actually built on an emotional connection. And as a result the person who runs Tupperware, his name is Rick Goings, he spends a lot of his time on the road running to these big rallies, where it is all about trying to get people excited about his product. So this is not a model which is going to work for everybody, but I think that every company can say to itself, 'Are we deliberately suppressing emotion?' Because the risk of suppressing emotion is that it actually comes out in a negative way, it comes out as cynicism, as skepticism and backbiting.
I want us to find a way of enabling us to channel emotion into more positive stuff that helps us to connect with our customers better and to make ultimately better decisions.