Of the six core managerial functions, planning is the most concrete and rational, and the least likely to require a high degree of emotional intelligence. Maybe. Planning is a logical activity, but effective planning requires you to stay open to many forms of information and data—data that are factual and that are sometimes emotional.
The manager who claims that “it doesn’t matter how they feel about it, they just have to do it” can get away with this approach, but not too many times. Reasonable and realistic goals and schedules can only be created if you are open to, accurately perceive, and then integrate how your team will feel about the goals and schedules. The planning and decision-making process itself benefits from emotionality to help generate possible alternative scenarios and what-if analyses.
Using an Emotional Blueprint
We’ve leveraged the power of the Emotional Blueprint a number of times in this article because it provides us with a structured way to approach a myriad of situations faced by all managers and leaders. The various examples and cases provided should make you feel more comfortable using the blueprint on your own, but this time, let’s create an informal blueprint for the core management function of planning. Consider a meeting where you need to make a decision about shedding a traditional line of business that your company has been involved in for decades. People are attached to the business, and it is part of your culture and identity. Although the business unit has not turned a profit in seven consecutive quarters, the losses are narrowing somewhat. This decision, like so many critical business decisions, is not being made in a data vacuum; you have tons of information about the business, the competition, and market trends. If you have all of the necessary data, just as many corporate managers do, then why are so many decisions bad decisions?
An Emotional Blueprint for effective decision-making hinges on your ability to stay open to uncomfortable facts and to the data that are at your fingertips. Staying open to information that makes us feel uncomfortable starts with accurate awareness of the emotions we are experiencing at the moment. Emotionally intelligent decisions made in a meeting or team setting must also identify the feelings of the others who are involved in the planning meeting.
Staying Open to Emotion
Anne Mulcahy, CEO of Xerox, illustrates the ability to listen to critical information and criticism in general. She may not agree with it, but she does seem to have the openness to consider the criticism. Discussing how decisions need to be made, Mulcahy noted, “People around you want to please. That’s where honest critics can play an important role. Encourage them to tell it like it is.” Not only do people have to feel empowered to provide their boss with honest feedback, but the boss, in this case the CEO, has to be able to handle the feedback—the core of managing emotions.
When experiencing the shock of unsettling news, many managers suppress or ignore the feeling. Not only does that mean they ignore the data of feelings but they must use cognitive resources to suppress feeling and therefore cannot pay as close attention to the problem as they need to. They are doubly handicapped.
You and your competitors are all smart, and you all have a lot of informative data. The key to effective decision making and planning is to use all the data you have available intelligently—the facts from competitive intelligence, the data of market plans, and the wisdom of feelings.