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| Volume 12 Issue 2 Winter 2005 |
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Emotional Field Management
When the quantum revolution bumped the mechanical model of the world off the cutting edge of modern science, the news of its displacement traveled uphill, and very slowly. Some of the last places its radical influence reached were in education and business management.
In truth it took people in all disciplines a long time to begin to realize the implications of the mystery we had uncovered. Then when we finally did begin to understand, it turned out to be much easier to apply the findings of physical science, to manufacture spaceships and lasers and other cool things, than to decipher what quantum theory revealed about human relations. Our habits of perception and behavior transform very slowly, but fasten your seat belt, the revolution has arrived!
The long delay in the world of commerce was not due to a lack of information. The business schools were flooded with models from cybernetics, complexity, and chaos theory, but the vast visions that these brought could do little to effectively change the practice of business as long as the leaders and managers still saw themselves and their employees in only two dimensions. That famous puzzle with the nine dots illustrated a crucial point that everyone desperately wanted and needed to grasp, but unfortunately the metaphor was over interpreted. Instead of showing people how to think outside the box, it really only showed them how to think outside a simple square, and you can easily do that without leaving the mechanical plane in which we lived so long as flatlanders.
To truly think outside the box you have to abandon your familiar point of view and let your vision blur and wobble a bit until it refocuses with new perspective. Then you can see that the real events in our lives and in commerce are initiated and guided by energy fields. It is this level which quantum theory suggests to be causative. Given that this is still somewhat metaphorical, in business these fields take one of two main forms – the first is thoughts and the other is feelings. These thoughts are not the common kind of like, "How long until lunch?", they are the inspired and inspiring kind that we tend to see in Mission, and Vision, and Values statements. These are the kind of thoughts that focus our attention with precision on the specific goals we seek, but the way we feel about those goals, and how we feel about what we will have to do, and who we will have to do it with in order to achieve them – these are the feelings that form the emotional fields that govern the effectiveness of our behavior and determine our failure or success. Like Archimedes, many managers are still hounding HR and Training for a "lever long enough" to move their people and thus the world, and quite frankly, that just ain’t gonna happen.
If you want to sink the eight ball in the corner pocket, you just smack it with another ball at the right angle, and bingo "there she goes". But moving people is just not that simple, in fact it works far better when you can motivate them to move themselves. They don't like getting pried with the lever of the month or getting smacked around by people wielding policies, intimidating e-mails, or directives from on high.
Dig it: The people who are left in the workforce today are already doing so much more with so much less that they make Penn and Teller’s magic look like child's play.
But no worries, there's good news! The quantum revolution has finally reached the realm of business management and instead of trying to manage teams of personally independent but operationally interdependent players with strategies left over from the days of top-down hierarchies, there is now a way to inspire innovation and commitment in the organization from the causative level rather than simply controlling behavior at the level of effects.
Enter emotional intelligence! By the second half of the last century we finally had scientists who were sharp enough, to recognize the critical importance of our feelings in motivation and job performance. They were able to describe their complex inter-relationships, how they effect behavior, and devise a way to measure them. We know from research that these invisible fields of energy have far more influence on our success than cognitive intelligence, which only accounts for about 1% of our success. Emotional intelligence accounts for upwards of 27%, and we have scientifically valid methods for helping people increase their competency at managing these emotional fields.
Did you ever see an anger?... or a disappointment, or a hope? Did you ever see an inspiration, a trust, or a respect. Of course not, it's even awkward to talk about these emotional states in that way, because they're invisible, they're not things. You not only can't load them on a palette and ship them to New York, you can't attach them to an e-mail, or trade them on the stock exchange because they are not information either -- at least not at this level of the game.
But with a little training, and consistent practice over time, anyone can improve their assertiveness, increase their optimism, strengthen their impulse control, build their self regard, or expand their empathy. So, if it would serve your bottom line for the energy fields where you work to be in harmony, to have more camaraderie and less jealousy; greater cooperation and fewer turf wars; more synergy and less conflict, please contact us to learn more about the concrete strategies you can use to manage the emotional climate of your organization and develop a low conflict, high productivity workplace.
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