Why the mood in a team travels faster than the message
On emotional contagion, the culture nobody writes about and what riders and elephants have to do with it.
Jonathan Haidt described the mind as a rider sitting on an elephant. The rider is our rational, planning self and the elephant everything emotional and instinctive. It’s the elephant that is stronger. Chip and Dan Heath later borrowed the image in Switch to explain why so much change struggles. You can give the rider a perfectly good map but if the elephant isn’t persuaded, nobody is going very far.
Our interest is in how much of the effort in most change programmes goes into briefing riders. We write the case for change, the timeline and the FAQs, which all matters but the elephant doesn’t take much notice of the documents. They take notice of other elephants and the mood that spreads through the team in the weeks after an announcement can have more to do with whether change sticks than anything that was formally said.
Mood travels sideways too
Earlier this year, in The Calm at the Top, we wrote about emotional contagion, the way moods pass between people before anyone names what’s happening, and about the influence a leader’s emotional state has on the people watching them. In our book, Your Team is Your Mirror, we go further into what Brené Brown calls the emotional weather leaders set in the rooms they walk into, including the story of a Finance Director whose single throwaway remark in a corridor undid three weeks of careful preparation and who was the last person in the building who would have wanted that to happen.
The longer we’ve thought about it, though, the more we’ve noticed that the leader is only one source of the weather. It might be the colleague who sighs at the start of every update, or the team member whose enthusiasm makes a dull project feel possible, or the person in a meeting who looks just worried enough that everyone else starts to wonder what they know. None of them would describe themselves as setting the emotional tone of the team but each of them is doing exactly that. And usually without meaning to.
This matters during change because uncertainty makes us all more attentive to each other. When we don’t know what’s happening, we look around to see how other people are reacting and use it as information about how worried we ought to be. It’s a sensible instinct and it means a team can talk itself into a mood well before the facts have caught up. It’s also part of why we’ve come to think of a team as a mirror, reflecting back the emotional weather everyone has been living in as much as anything the leader has said.
The culture that hasn’t been written down
Sigal Barsade and Olivia O’Neill made a distinction we’ve found really useful between an organisation’s cognitive culture and its emotional culture. Cognitive culture is the shared values, norms and assumptions that appear on the website and in the induction pack. Emotional culture is about which feelings people experience at work, which ones they feel able to show and which ones they learn to keep to themselves. The first is usually written down somewhere but the second rarely is even though it’s the one people pick up on first when they walk through the door.
In one of their studies, carried out in a long-term care setting, Barsade and O’Neill looked at what they called companionate love, the everyday affection, care and compassion between colleagues. Where it was strong, staff were more satisfied and less likely to be absent, and the residents themselves seemed to benefit too, in their mood and their quality of life. We find it a helpful reminder that emotional culture is woven through performance rather than sitting politely alongside it.
Choosing how we want people to feel
If an emotional culture exists, whether anyone pays attention to it or not, the more interesting question is whether a team can shape it on purpose. This is where we’ve been enjoying the work of Jeremy Dean and the team at Riders & Elephants, who have spent years turning this idea into something practical. Their Emotional Culture Deck invites a team to sort through cards naming feelings, the ones they’d like people to feel at work and the ones they’d rather people didn’t, and to narrow each set down to the handful that matter most.
What we like most is the result of this. For each feeling, the team talks through how they would recognise it, what helps it happen and what gets in the way. So instead of agreeing in the abstract that people should feel valued, a team finds itself talking about whether anyone says thank you when a deadline is met, or whether the person who raises a concern in a meeting is thanked for it or politely sidelined. That tends to be the moment a conversation about feelings becomes a conversation about behaviour, which most leadership teams find much easier to get hold of. It also gives teams who would normally go to some lengths to avoid the word feelings a way into the conversation that doesn’t make anyone want to leave the room.
What this looks like in the middle of change
In practice, we’ve found a few questions make a surprising difference when a team is in the thick of change.
How do we want people to feel by the end of this, and how are they feeling now?
Which feelings seem to be spreading fastest at the moment, and where are they coming from?
Which ones have people learned to keep to themselves, perhaps because the last person who admitted to being worried was encouraged to be more positive?
This doesn’t mean a team has to be cheerful about every change, or that worry is something to be stamped out. Some anxiety during change is entirely reasonable, and a team that pretends otherwise tends to push it underground, where it spreads more easily rather than less. There’s also a helpful difference between catching someone’s feeling and understanding it. A leader doesn’t need to absorb everyone’s anxiety in order to take it seriously, and nobody needs to carry the mood of the room home with them at the end of the day. Noticing what we’re catching and what we might be passing on is a good place to start.
Elephants, it turns out, are rather good at following each other. The encouraging part is that steadiness, curiosity and good humour spread through a team just as readily as worry does, once someone is willing to go first.
If you asked your team how they’d like to feel during the change you’re leading, how close would their answer be to how they feel right now?
If this has resonated, you’ll find much more on the emotional weather of teams in Your Team is Your Mirror by Mary Clarke and Fiona Cameron, published this Autumn. The Sticky Change Sense Check is also a free, ten-question tool designed to help senior leaders, HR and OD professionals see clearly where their change energy is well-channelled and where it needs attention.
References
Barsade, S. G. and O'Neill, O. A. (2014). What's love got to do with it? A longitudinal study of the culture of companionate love and employee and client outcomes in a long-term care setting. Administrative Science Quarterly, 59(4), 551-584.
Barsade, S. and O'Neill, O. A. (2016). Manage your emotional culture. Harvard Business Review, January-February 2016.
Brown, B. (2018). Dare to Lead. Vermilion.
Haidt, J. (2006). The Happiness Hypothesis. Basic Books.
Heath, C. and Heath, D. (2010). Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. Broadway Books.
Riders & Elephants. The Emotional Culture Deck. ridersandelephants.com
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