The power play of emotions – Emotions in companies
Emotions are the decisive factor in the implementation concept and especially in the implementation of strategies, changes and projects.
Everyone knows that you can only really make progress with intrinsic motivation, passion and emotional conviction. And you are only motivated if you recognize a meaning in a project for yourself and see your personal goals and interests satisfied. And these demands are usually not of a monetary nature, but have something to do with personal development, fulfillment, the desire for recognition and status.
I experience this correlation on a daily basis, which implementation managers should recognize and make use of in order to achieve their corporate goals. Intrinsic motivation of those involved lends speed to implementation processes and protects against destructive emotions, which can have at least a blocking, if not destructive, effect. In order to get more momentum into the implementation process, it is therefore necessary to deal with the two dimensions of emotionalization and de-emotionalization (see Fig. 1).
In my experience, emotionalization is best applied to the two primary emotions of joy and curiosity, which must be identified in the key players and promoted and used to achieve the set goals. With de-emotionalization, you have to confront the primary emotions of fear, envy and frustration.
Emotionalization
§ Curiosity in companies
Make use of the curiosity of individual participants for your implementation: Who can’t wait to draw up a future picture of the new partner model? Who has the right attitude towards certain approaches (“I don’t know exactly how this works with the value driver and the reduction of complexity, but I’m interested!”). Go through your individual players and ask yourself who is curious about what and how. The fear of the new will be much less pronounced in people who are willing to change.
Take advantage of this curiosity by distributing corresponding orders or sub-projects with a high degree of freedom and you can be sure that something good will come of it.
§ Joy in companies
Look for the committed members of the team.
- In which areas is a pronounced passion paired with competence recognizable?
- Where and how can this passion be used for the implementation process?
This resource-oriented way of thinking is criminally neglected in many implementation projects. In one implementation project, for example, we had an IT group leader who had such a passion for sales that we assigned him to a sub-project in the sales area. Not only are such measures wonderful opportunities to develop dormant resources and skills in the organization, they also create real momentum. Take the time to think these things through and consider how you might implement them using these emotions and, if in doubt, against existing rules or expectations within an organization. It remains to be seen whether you then do it exactly the same way. It is always worth considering.
§ Fear
In practice, fear is generated in particular by the threat of a lack of recognition, insufficient opportunities to make a contribution or the threat of a loss of status and leads to tendencies to withdraw, defensive attitudes and stagnation. The paradox is that most fears are unfounded insofar as they are directed towards the unknown, which is perceived as negative and threatening.
A skilled implementation manager can transform fears, especially where they are justified, into positive implementation energy by taking away the power of this strong emotion.
An intervention that is easier than it sounds. However, many implementation managers seem – to put it bluntly – too cowardly to face up to it. With proper conceptual preparation, you will get a relatively quick overview of where things will change within the company and how they will change.
And of course there will also be losers in this game. To claim otherwise is pointless, although it is often done to apparently maintain motivation and calm emotions. However, this calculation never works, fears persist and continue to sap energy, as everyone knows that something will change.
Therefore, if you are 80 percent sure who the implementation will affect in a positive or negative way, say so, so that the person concerned has the opportunity to adjust – both positively and negatively. Avoidance strategies help neither the upcoming process nor the people negatively affected – on the contrary.
Of course, I am familiar with all the works council issues in this context and have encountered them several times. This is another reason why you should face up to these issues as early as possible, involve the works council at an early stage in the interests of the company and ensure a common culture of implementation.
§ Envy
On the one hand, envy can lead to hostile, destructive behavior and ensure negative, destructive politics in an implementation. On the other hand, it can be a driving force to achieve a certain goal and can greatly stimulate an implementation process. The same applies to envy: deal with it. Where positive envy potential exists, which is usually the case with younger managers (even among peers), establish appropriate mentoring partnerships so that these developments are encouraged. Where envy leads or can lead to negative politics, you are well advised to counteract it proactively and compensate for it with appropriate status recognition or endowments. If this does not succeed or is not possible, you have no choice but to resolve the situation. In one implementation, for example, we had a constant “war of envy” between Group Development and Group Controlling, which could not be resolved by any means, so that in the end a new Head of Controlling was deliberately appointed from the ranks of Group Development.
They cannot afford to give space to negative politics.
§ Frustration
Frustration always arises when energy is invested but nothing comes back. In an implementation project, this either means that you are not making progress and there is a lack of energy to continue. Or you are making progress, but nobody is interested.
If you proceed according to the principles described so far, the only reason for not making progress is excessive demands, which cannot always be avoided. It is wrong to build up even more pressure here. You need to think about how you can compensate for the frustration and eliminate it by changing the framework parameters.
The second aspect of implementation management is fundamentally avoidable: frustration arises because nobody is interested in the energy invested. Translated, this means a lack of recognition and reward for progress.
In German companies in particular, the principle is very often: “Not complaining is praise enough.” A fatal misjudgement. Every small step forward should be rewarded, not in monetary terms, but with recognition, genuine interest and involvement in topics that appeal to and interest the person emotionally or in terms of content.
It is helpful to visualize the five emotions in the form of an emotion map for the key people (usually no more than five to twenty for large implementation projects).
“What is the person in question afraid of, what are they jealous of, what frustrates them? What makes this person curious, what makes them happy?”
You will gain valuable insights from such considerations and be able to assess who you entrust with which things and in what way during implementation, or how you distribute roles and responsibilities. Depending on the context, there are various ways to either emotionalize or de-emotionalize. For example, you could achieve positive emotionalization with a team dinner with the board or a presentation of the project results that leads to an increase in the status of the project manager. You can have a de-emotionalizing effect by anticipating catastrophes and thus reducing existing fear. Fear, envy and frustration can also be redirected in such a way that they can be used as emotionalization factors.
Fear can give rise to incredible strength to do things that would otherwise not be possible.
Progress
