During my years as a CHRO, informal meetings with different teams were a regular part of my job. On one occasion, the Trade Operations team asked for an off-the-books conversation. It did not take long to understand why.
They were deeply unhappy with their new manager. He was insensitive in dealing with people, showed little empathy, rarely appreciated good work and could be unnecessarily aggressive. The list was long. Yet the interesting part was that the manager was not doing a bad job in the conventional sense. He meant business. He was pushing process excellence, investing in technology and sharpening customer orientation. He had joined with a good track record and his references had been positive. But it was becoming equally clear that he had a strong minor in human relations.
This is not an unusual story. Organisations are generally quite rigorous when assessing experience, technical capability and professional achievement. The ability to understand and deal with the emotional side of work often receives less attention. Perhaps we assume that experienced managers will somehow pick it up along the way. Many do not.
Why Are Feelings So Uncomfortable?
Part of the problem lies in the way we have traditionally thought about management. Facts are objective, feelings are subjective. Leaders are expected to remain rational, make tough decisions and get on with the job. Emotions can appear messy and somehow less relevant to serious business.
That distinction begins to look less convincing when you spend enough time inside organisations. People do not experience organisational decisions only through logic. A senior executive who has been passed over for promotion may understand perfectly well why someone else was selected and still feel disappointed or overlooked. A team going through restructuring may accept the business rationale and still worry about what it means for them. Understanding the logic of a decision does not remove the feelings it creates.
Nor do those feelings simply disappear because nobody talks about them. They show up elsewhere, sometimes as withdrawal, resentment, resistance, loss of trust or a decision to leave. Ignoring emotions does not make an organisation more rational. It simply means that an important part of what is happening remains unspoken.
There is another reason this becomes harder as leaders become more senior. Results become more visible and pressures increase. Toughness can easily be mistaken for effectiveness. A demanding and decisive leader may be rewarded for delivering results, particularly when those results are measured every quarter. The human consequences of how those results are achieved often take longer to become visible.
This creates an interesting contradiction. The more senior a leader becomes, the greater the impact of his or her behaviour on other people. Yet seniority can also create distance from those very reactions. Fewer people speak candidly; uncomfortable feedback gets filtered and the leader may gradually lose sight of how it actually feels to work with them.
Empathy is Not About Being Nice
Perhaps this is where emotional intelligence gets misunderstood. Empathy does not mean avoiding difficult decisions, lowering standards or trying to keep everyone happy. Sometimes the most responsible leadership decision will disappoint people. The difference lies in whether the leader understands what that decision means to those affected by it.
You can close a business and still understand the anxiety it creates. You can give someone difficult feedback without diminishing the person. You can demand high standards while recognising effort. None of this makes a leader less demanding or less commercial. It simply recognises that business decisions are eventually experienced by human beings.
The manager I described at the beginning understood processes, technology and customers. All of those mattered. But his team was telling us something that would never appear on an operating dashboard. His results told one part of the story; the experience of the people working with him told another.
Perhaps that is the real problem with the world of feelings. It is harder to measure, less comfortable to discuss and easier to dismiss than most things that appear on a management dashboard. But that does not make it less real.
People do not leave their feelings at the office door simply because the organisation prefers facts. The world of feelings is not separate from organisational life. It is already part of it. The question is whether leaders are willing to pay attention to what it is telling them.
