Summary: <a href="https://www.complianceandethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/turteltaub-adam-200x200.jpg"></a>By Adam Turteltaub<br> <br> For decades, if not centuries, the idea of being professional tended to focus on a cold, cognitive approach to work. Emotions were supposed to be secondary to a much more rationale form of management and work environments.<br> <br> In this podcast, <a href="https://gaelobrien.com/">Gael O’Brien,</a> executive coach and columnist for Business Ethics Magazine and The Week in Ethics, shares the research of the late Wharton School Professor <a href="https://mgmt.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/barsade/">Sigal Barsade</a>, who examined the impact of emotions in the workplace.<br> <br> Her work focused on how leaders can get culture right. Emotions, in particular compassion, were found to be very important.<br> <br> She also found that employees who feel loved at work perform better. Kindness, caring and feeling connected have a strong impact on employee satisfaction and retention. In fact, she found that employees are 10.4 times more likely to leave because of a toxic culture than they are to depart because of compensation.<br> <br> To create the right environment she is an advocate for an “emotional culture”, which she defines as the emotions necessary for a group to meet its goals. This culture, Barsade found, is transmitted through subtle signals such as facial expression and body language, especially of leaders. That’s a challenge in these Zoom times when traditional queues may be missing.<br> <br> To get the right culture she advocates several steps including:<br> <br> * Executives verbalizing, modeling and rewarding the emotions they want to cultivate<br> * Mangers communicating that information to front-line employees<br> * Surveys and interviews that ask employees what emotions they see in colleagues around them<br> <br> It’s both an intuitive and counterintuitive approach.<br> <br> To learn more about Professor Barsade's work, read some of her articles in Harvard Business Review (<a href="https://hbr.org/2014/01/employees-who-feel-love-perform-better">article 1</a> and <a href="https://hbr.org/2016/01/manage-your-emotional-culture">article 2</a>). You can also see the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKNTyGW3o7E">video</a> of a talk she gave.<br> <br> And of course, click above to listen to our podcast with Gael O’Brien.
