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42 Power Up Your Mind

Hilary Cropper, chief executive of the FI Group, inclines more
toward the management of emotions:

I don’t think you should show emotions at work. Yet you must obviously be
emotional to make effective relationships. You have therefore, as a leader,
to create a synthetic emotion, but one that is based on your genuine beliefs.
Leadership is about deliberately creating a personality that is the right one
for your company, and as such must involve playing a role. You need to be
an actor, but it’s not an act.
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Joyce Taylor, managing director of Discovery Networks Europe, is
more upbeat: “It is the positive emotions that are really important,
elation, joy and optimism.”
By contrast, the experienced industrial leader Sir Bob Reid,
who has had to deliver some difficult news in his time, says:

It’s very important to show you are really upset by some of the situations I’ve
had to deal with in the oil and rail industries. Normally you must behave

with equanimity, but for real issues, for example involving death, you must
sometimes show your real emotions.

There would seem to be some negative emotions which are, by and
large, unhelpful. These would include anger, fear, distress, and envy.
By the same token, it would seem to be advantageous to show joy
and pleasure.

But where does this list begin and end? What is appropriate and what is not? What do you
think?

My one note of certainty is that we should all use what Stephen
Covey calls the “pause button” a little more often. This is the inter-
nal switch we all have like the one on our video recorders. It puts
us into a freeze-frame mode and gives us a few moments to calm
down and reflect before going on with the action.
If you want people to feel wanted, then one of the most
important things that any leader or manager in any organization
needs to have in their emotional toolkit is the ability to show their

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