Great People = Great Results!  I read it on the banner of the company I work for everyday as I proceed down the walkway into the building.  People are the most important ingredient in the recipe for your organization’s success and people are emotional beings.

If your company is on its Agile transformation journey, there will inevitably be change and change evokes emotion.  Among the possible emotional catalysts are adopting new processes, taking on new roles, reorganizing, forming new teams and the list goes on.  With this change will come many emotions and related actions.

A frustrated person might constantly get angry and fly off the handle at their colleagues.  Their manager may then tell them, “You really have to suppress your frustration”.  The person then concentrates on suppressing their frustration.  They tell themselves, “Calm down – you’re making too much of this – don’t become frustrated”.

Studies have proven that suppressing thoughts only results in amplifying the thought.  Remember the exercise “whatever you do – do not think of a pink elephant”.  The more you try not to think of the pink elephant, the more you do.  So if we ask someone to suppress their frustration then they will most likely become even more frustrated or even angry.

Instead, Harvard scholars say we need to recognize our emotions, but don’t let them hook us.  We should recognize the emotion as a thought and then zoom up above it, analyze it from this high level and ask ourselves why we feel that way.  By taking the time to identify that our frustration may be signaling an important needed action we can then take that action based on our values and not based on our emotion.

If your boss provides you with negative feedback, this will most likely evoke emotion.  If you get hooked by your emotion then you may jump to the conclusion “My boss has no faith in me”.  Instead, it is better to zoom up above the emotion and ask ourselves which of our values will we use to deal with the trying situation. We can speak to our boss with our values of truth, honesty and transparency to better understand their viewpoint and discuss it.

Again, we should listen to our emotions, but base action on our values.  Our emotions change like the wind, but our values are steady and can be leveraged all the time.