Worked in Large International Companies

¶ … worked in large international companies before, and small firms as well. The phenomena described here hold true. Emotions are very important. I had worked in the banking industry out of high school, during holidays, and the work was fairly demoralizing. There was a huge gap between managers and employees. Communication was generally terrible, but especially on the emotional level. The signals management sent were almost always negative. People were worried about yet another round of job cuts, and about subjective performance reviews.

Nobody really knew where they stood, and that included people who had been with the bank for thirty years. I did not have access to the quantitative data, but it is reasonable to suggest that revenue suffered -- even the customers were dour and looked like they did not want to be there. When I moved to a logistics company, it was different from the outset. The managers were positive about the impact I could have -- as a low-level employee in banking I had honestly never seen that before.

This immediately made me want to do my best. The emotional cues had already rubbed off on most of the other employees, and this became a self-reinforcing part of the corporate culture. One of the big differences between the two organizations was that at the logistics company, customer service was considered to be a key driver of profit. At the bank, the profit focus was always on internal drivers. So at the bank, employees were oriented to look around the room for problems, and naturally this crept into the culture.

At the logistics company, everybody wanted to be as positive and upbeat as possible, knowing that the emotions cues would carry over to the customers. They would want to do business with us because it was always a good experience. When something went wrong, the company was forgiven. At the bank, if we raised fees or made a mistake of any kind, the customers just got angry. There is a lot of competition, so they sometimes left. Defections from the logistics company were extremely rare. Goleman also discusses influence.

In normal circumstances, influence might not be that important. But the more difficult the times -- a busy stretch, a merger, or a time of slumping demand, I think influence can be the difference between success and failure. In the bank, after layoffs the remaining employees saw themselves as "survivors," rather than high achievers who remained because of their abilities. The managers had little influence, and seemed to only understand punishment as a form of influence.

The result of this is that employees were unwilling to raise their level of performance. There was no quid pro quo from the bank -- if profits were up the employees were not going to benefit. At the logistics firm, managerial influence was strong because the managers cultivated it. A lot of this came from Goleman's first characteristic -- people skilled at winning over others. Communication was clear, and most importantly the level of conflict management was very high. I do not remember any.