Message from the Editor

To some of us the term "Emotional Intelligence" might seem an oxymoron as we were taught that emotions were anything but intelligent. Susan opens the conference by observing that "Emotional realities in the workplace have long been downplayed, even denied. It's considered "professional" to be matter-of-fact, dispassionate, left-brained, unsmiling. These are characteristics we encourage on the job. How people feel about work about co-workers, clients, goals, process, and all the rest, we don't examine very often, and when we do, it's usually to put them in their proper place: In the background."

That’s certainly a common and familiar recipe to most of us. If we ever found ourselves in some sort of conflict at work, management's advice (as Susan observes) was typically "’Get over it’ and ‘Don't go there,’ meaning ‘Whatever you do, stay out of the emotional fray.’"

It’s been part and parcel of a managers role to steer employees away from emotions simply because emotions are nearly impossible to control. Yet emotions have forever been part of the workplace landscape. As humans we are subject to emotions of varying degrees of magnitude pretty much on a daily basis – sometimes several powerful emotions in a single day.

In the past several years, however, new advances in neuroscience and psychology have resulted in new discoveries about the emotional functioning of the brain as different from its cognitive function.

What do these new discoveries mean for us? How will they impact our lives – especially in the workplace?

Richard Farson points out that how people interact is less dependent upon the people then it is on the situation in which they operate. He states it pretty clearly: "So we may be learning a lot about kinds of intelligence that we have ignored before, and it will surely make us wiser as we consider these new dimensions of ourselves and our human environment, but our rush to immediately translate it into training applications is the problem, not the solution. We need to fix situations, not people."

Douglass Carmichael brings to our attention that "The cognitive rational types in the academy have been operating with the following logic: humans are rational, rational is logical, logic is mathematical; math can be programmed hence the human machine interface problem is really a machine interface problem," and sees "The resurrection of the emotional life is a great project."

These 2 themes surface many times with minor variations throughout this conference – both of them denoting an urgent need for people to become more active in creating a workplace that is "better".

As the conference progresses it heats up a little and into the analytical conversation there is injected a bit of emotion which leads to a deeper probing into emotions themselves. Susan lists several of those emotions common to the workplace "I don’t think there is one readily shared meaning among us, just a shared sense that there are powerful feelings in the workplace, like competition, insecurity, compassion, impatience, worry, sincerity, unhappiness, fear, desire, ambition. And more.

She also notes the many ways they are acted out "They show up at work in conversation, in disagreements, in "one-upmanship," in correspondence, in meetings, in newsletters and in hallway conversations." And she notes that some of us simply prefer not to deal with them and just "…..change the subject."

This conference ranges very broadly in its examination of "emotional intelligence" as a concept and in the application of the practice in daily life. For all of you, our readers, it will prove a useful and personally engaging article.

Kip Winsett
Editor

The conference is available in it's entirety as a downloadable MS Word document.

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