Leaders cannot succeed on their own. They need a powerful team to support and advice them. Building and sustaining a powerful team is a challenging endeavor because it requires to delve beneath the surface and create a culture that has both a cognitive and an emotional dimension.
Cognitive culture is the shared intellectual values, norms, artifacts and assumptions that serve as guide for the team to thrive .
Emotional cultural is the shared affective values, norms, artifacts and assumptions that govern which emotion people have and express at work and which ones they are better of suppressing .
In my quest for leadership I have come to the conclusion that although everyone understands the importance of organizational culture, most leaders focus on the cognitive component.
Why? Simply because it easier to manage!
According to Sigal Barsade and Olivia A. O’Neill * “Cognitive culture sets the tone for how employees think and behave at work—for instance, how customer-focused, innovative, team-oriented, or competitive they are or should be”.
This part of the story is very attractive because leaders feel more comfortable managing the “Head” than the “Heart” of the organization. They prefer to rationalize the business so they can track accomplishment of goals. Easy to track = easy to manage.
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This explains why many organizations are lead by Scorekeepers who when they are challenged to manage emotions they force their employees to suppress them or hand them off to the HR.”
This leadership style is incomplete. It’s obsolete!It’s archaic!
“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion.” Dale Carnegie
Emotions express our intelligence and our capacity to trust and build relationships. Exemplary leaders understand this and they strive to cultivate a particular emotional culture within which people can feel that their emotions are valued by the organization or the team.
By doing so they set the the psychological boundaries that help people feel comfortable and secure. This fuels communication, collaboration and creates a sense of belonging, unlocking the potential of the organization or the team.
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Integrating both authentic emotional and cognitive cultures it what differentiates powerful and impactful organizations and teams from the successful ones.
It is the difference between Scorekeeping – the marginal accomplishment of a goals and Leadership– engaging the hearts and minds of team members to uncover innovative and game-changing solutions that exceed expectations.
Cover Photo by Lidya Nada on Unsplash
Further Reading:
Manage Your Emotional Culture by Sigal Barsade Olivia A. O’Neill From the January–February 2016 HBR Issue
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