The quarterly reports of large public companies are rarely moments of great emotional expression. The warnings of reduced profits or future headwinds are delivered in language cold enough to freeze stock prices. But when Mark Zuckerberg delivered Facebook’s fourth quarterly report in October 2021, what struck Mark Isaac, the New York Times’ technology reporter, most was the emotion the company’s CEO displayed.
Facebook had recently suffered a series of embarrassing leaks, accusing the firm of putting profits ahead of people. Frances Haugen, a whistle-blower, had just released thousands of pages of internal documents to the press which suggested, among issues, that Facebook knew Instagram generated problems with body image among teenagers but chose to ignore the harm the photo app was causing.
Reading the quarterly report, Zuckerberg described the release as a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to create a false picture about the company.
“He sounds pretty mad,” reported Mike Isaac. “This is probably the most emotional I’ve ever heard him use in a public address aside from his Harvard honorary graduation speech.”
That kind of emotional display is rare from a business leader. Even when times are difficult, executives are expected to show that all will be well and any problems can be resolved with longer hours and a small amount of cost-cutting. Executives are meant to be calm, collected and always optimistic. Expressions of despair, fear or concern could lower morale and deepen the problem they hope to resolve.
But that lack of emotion might be the wrong approach. A boss who shows they genuinely care, who feels the worry and pain of their employees and is prepared to put their heart on their sleeve could connect to a workforce more deeply and more effectively.
To find out whether emotional reticence beats honest emotional displays, Lynn Shmodde and Marius Claus Wehner of the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf conducted a study.
They looked at three different ways in which a business leader can present themselves. Deep acting is an effort to “really engage in a certain emotion and modify felt emotions.” It happens when a leader understands that they’re expected to show anger or fear or contrition and they’re able to conjure that emotion in order to display those feelings accurately. It’s the method acting approach to business communication.
Surface acting is “the superficial adjustment of emotions—meaning that displayed emotions are not really felt.” This is the kind of communication that displays the emotion that audiences expect but which both sides know isn’t entirely sincere.
And leaders can also express their genuine emotions. Mark Zuckerberg’s anger and pain at the leaks from his company weren’t expected, and judging by Mark Isaac’s reaction appeared to be genuine expressions of the pain he felt at a deliberate attempt to malign the company he’d built.
When CEOs Wear Their Hearts on Their Suit Sleeves
But which of those approaches works best for a leader facing a moment of crisis? Should they attempt to feel an emotion they think would have the best effect? Should they fake a response they hope will provide motivation and reassurance? Or should they risk looking panic-stricken, frightened, angry and too emotional to make good decisions in an attempt to appear authentic?
The researchers conducted a survey of 159 employees and asked them to imagine they were working in a new company as one of 40 employees. At a meeting, the CEO of the company announces that reduced business levels during Covid 19 have seriously strained the company’s liquidity.
The description of the meeting included an account of the CEO’s facial expression and behavior. Some of the respondents read a description of the CEO’s genuine fear for the future of the company. A second group read an account that described the CEO’s deep acting while a third group read an account of surface acting, an attempt to display an emotion the CEO clearly didn’t feel.
The respondents were then asked how they felt about the company. The questions measured positive and negative affect, the degree to which they felt determined, attentive, inspired, and active or afraid, nervous, upset, and hostile. They were also asked about their levels of job engagement, whether they would continue to work enthusiastically and energetically, and about their affective commitment, the degree to which they felt emotionally attached to their employer.
The researchers noted that previous studies had recommended that leaders should remain positive and upbeat even when they were concerned or worried. “A leader’s display of negative emotions has detrimental effects on employees,” they warned, “because they potentially adopt these emotions, which may limit their personal resources and their performance.”
They therefore expected that a business leader’s deep acting during a crisis would increase positive aspect, while insincere surface acting and a genuine display of fear would do the opposite. That insincerity would strike fear and hostility into the workforce, feelings which can only be avoided by a leader’s genuine attempt to feel the emotion they want to inspire.
What they found though was that neither deep acting nor a leader’s surface acting showed any significant differences in positive aspect compared with a leader’s genuine display of fear. Pretending not to be afraid during a crisis didn’t make people feel better. On the other hand, a genuine display of fear did make employees feel worse. Deep acting, though, did reduce fear while surface acting only increased hostility.
And that fear had an effect. One interesting finding was that fear reduced employees’ job engagement but increased their affective commitment. Workers frightened for their jobs became less enthusiastic about their work but felt closer to the company.
Because employee engagement and commitment are crucial for the performance and survival of a company, the researchers conclude, the emotions that leaders display and the reactions of those employees to those emotions play an important role during crises. “Leaders should not shy away from showing their fear as an embodiment of genuine emotions, as the engagement in deep and surface acting does not have exclusively positive effects on employees’ reactions.”
Or to put it another way, when a chief executive looks at the quarterly returns and sees a large amount of red ink, they shouldn’t try to hide their terror and pretend everything’s okay. If workers can see the panic in their eyes when they ring the alarm bell, they’ll be more inclined to knuckle down and try to raise productivity before the company goes under.
Showing and Changing Emotions
It’s an idea that might help to explain Elon Musk’s messaging after his purchase of Twitter. In addition to talking about how great the platform would become, he also compared his new multi-billion dollar purchase to “a plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work.” The fear in his voice went some way toward explaining the degree to which he slashed the workforce and the speed with which he tried to introduce new subscription plans.
But there may be a more sophisticated approach toward the emotional difficulties of leadership.
Writing for Deloitte in 2020, Benjamin Finzi, Mark Lipton, Kathy Lu and Vicnent Firth of the Deloitte’s Chief Executive Program discussed the benefits of emotional fortitude, the ability to stay clear-headed while exploring the emotional reactions to sources of tension. The characteristic, they argued, “can improve a CEO’s resilience to the stressors of decision-making and lead to better decision outcomes.”
Even the most level-headed CEO, they explain, will suffer doubts and sleepless nights as they wrestle with decisions they have to make with inadequate information, weak data and the clock ticking. Emotional fortitude enables them to make those difficult decisions in uncertain conditions by treating their feelings as inputs to the decision-making process.
“While the natural temptation may be to suppress the discomfort one feels under such circumstances, those with emotional fortitude not only allow themselves to feel that discomfort, but methodically assess and analyze their distress to see what they can learn from it. They consciously inventory their thoughts and feelings while in the throes of the decision-making process.”
So a chief executive who feels fear when called upon to make a complex decision should avoid burying that fear or hiding it. Instead, they should hold their emotions at arms-length and examine them. They might realize, for example, that their fear stems from a feeling that there were options they hadn’t dared to consider or exploit their fear of the current options to drive themselves towards more creative thinking and open new opportunities.
The consultants offer a five-step process for developing emotional fortitude which runs from creating an inventory of feelings, desires and knowledge; talking about them; writing them down; and reviewing the decisions taken.
The result should be the ability to make smart, rational decisions even in stressful, frightening times. But it might have another effect. Once you can see the way out of trouble, there’s no more reason to fear. So you won’t have to grapple with showing your fear or pretending everything will be okay.
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