How Emotions shape Team Culture
By: Pandi Ganapathy
Tags: Leadership, Team Culture, Self-awareness, Organizational Culture, Decision Making

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” said Peter Drucker. This is one of my favorite organization management quotes and this quote cannot be stressed enough. Our team’s culture thwarts or improves any strategy or process improvement we attempt to implement. But how do we improve this culture? Corporate culture is not just cognitive culture, but it is mainly the emotional culture. Have you ever yelled or been yelled at? Most of us have been in the place where we were not aware of our emotions or been a victim of someone who could not control his or her anger such as screamer or a table pounder. For instance, I came across a lady this morning when I dropped my son at school. She was shouting at the top of her voice making racist comment at a fellow parent when he did not follow the driving rules. So what makes a human lash out at fellow being without understanding what they are going through especially in front of their respective kids? When similar outbursts happen in the workplace, they may hijack our thought processes, limit innovation and the worst of all alter the culture of the team.

We underestimate the number of situations where emotions are involved:

We often think workplace is not the place for emotions or feelings. We assume there is going to be a professional upright setting all the time. Be it on road where we drive, or the workplace, wherever we have humans, there are emotions involved. Invalidating or ignoring the existence of emotions at these situations will drive the toxicity under the carpet. People will resort to passive aggressive behavior such as completely ignoring another person, refusing to answer any questions from the person, abruptly leaving the meeting, yelling, insulting, gossiping, stubbornness, refusing to do what they’re told to do etc.

Be aware of the feelings:

Not recognizing the emotional issues, will alter the impact of the feelings. When we don’t feel heard or articulate our feelings efficiently, the feelings get manifested in negative way.

Emotions and decision making:

We are emotional creatures composed of core emotions like Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Shame and Fear. Most likely when intensity of these emotions goes higher, then they will dictate your actions. As we are hardwired to emote first, we have no control over that process but we can control the thoughts that follow an emotion. Controlling those thoughts will determine how we react to an emotion. Those reactions will steer us towards better decision making. As our emotional skill matures, we will learn to practice productive ways of responding that will become habitual. Emotions and feelings impact our decisions. Being aware of the emotions helps the decision better.

Emotions and Team culture:

If we are leading a team, we should be ready to deal with complex emotions first. As a leader, building a right culture is utmost important. Strategy or any process improvements come next. Emotions drive culture, Culture drives innovation, productivity, efficiency and more importantly better life for employees.

Hence, we as individuals and leaders should aspire to spot our emotions, articulate them in constructive way and make the work a better place for us and for everyone around us.