Why Businesses Can’t Afford Emotional Math
Running a business is hard. Being a leader is hard. What complicates both of things, something smaller teams or small businesses are particularly at risk of, is relationship in the workplace. Most of us spend more time with the people we work with than we do our personal friends and even our families. Relationship is a natural byproduct of the environment, and friendship at work can at times be one of the only things that makes it bearable to get through a tough day. The smaller the team, the more difficult it is to avoid because anonymity is taken out of the equation. When the lines get blurred, our ability to make objective decisions is almost certainly compromised. That being said, being able to make objective business decisions is one of the strongest career-building assets a leader can possess.
The ability to remain objective (especially when ego, fear, or emotion are triggered) is one of the most critical skills in leadership and business because it protects decision-making, preserves trust, and keeps reality intact. For anyone who skipped English class, let’s define objectivity as well as its opposite.
Objective: not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts or unbiased.
Subjective: placing excessive emphasis on one’s own moods, attitudes, opinions, etc; unduly egocentric.
(Thanks dictionary.com)!
Objectivity asks for the evidence. It does not mean being cold, lacking empathy, suppressing emotion, or being robotic. Objectivity IS separating facts from interpretation, distinguishing data from narrative, seeing patterns without self-protection, and asking “what is true?” instead of “how do I feel”?
The average person would know that one of the best pieces of life advice that can be given is don’t make any major decisions while you’re upset, angry, hungry, or after experiencing trauma. The reason the average person would know this is because most of us have experienced the consequences of emotional decision-making. We’re not particularly likely to be fair, to consider multiple angles, or make sure we have all the information we need, but are very likely to end up making a decision we regret. Universal advice would be to eat something, take a hot shower, sleep on it, and see how you feel in the morning.
One other thing we unfortunately have to be careful of is that when you signal your emotions can influence your decisions, someone with no particular conscience for fairness to you or others can manipulate your view of the environment. We’d all like to believe that no one would take advantage of us in this way, but if you’re around long enough, someone will typically get the best of you for their own personal gain one way or another. Trust evaporates from the environment. The bottom line is that when feelings get in the way of necessary decision-making, you ultimately compromise your results.
Objectivity is critical for leaders because leadership magnifies bias. You set the tone for how honest your feedback is to your team. Your mood shapes the culture. Your interpretations become policy. Assuming a leader may be of average to poor emotional health, the team pays the price for that complexity. When a leader loses sight of the facts or is unwilling to consider proper context, critique can feel like betrayal, disagreement can feel like disloyalty, and data becomes optional – but data protects you from yourself.
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Here are a couple of real life examples that could get you into trouble if you don’t think all the way through them:
- Misrepresentation
A team member reporting to you is recapping a meeting you weren’t able to attend. They say:
“So in the meeting, he literally says: ‘I don’t care what you all think, we’re doing it my way.”
This makes you (understandably) angry. You can correct this right now! You can walk down that hallway and burst into this guy’s office and ask where he gets off thinking he can make takeover statements to the team. Totally unprofessional. It’s an explosive statement, and your team member has framed him as aggressive, dismissive, and authoritarian. Let’s take care of it.
or
Let’s ask more questions. Does the team member recapping this have a credible history in their stories? Can you ask someone else what their perspective was when they were present? Was the meeting recorded so you can roll it back?
Why yes, the meeting WAS recorded! And you find that when you play back the conversation, what was actually said was:
“We’ve debated this for two weeks and the deadline is this Friday. I’m going to make the final call so we can move forward.”
🙃 Storming into that office might have gotten you into a lot of trouble, huh? You would have been the instigator of an issue now compromising two team members’ employee experiences, stirring the pot from concerning but unconfirmed feedback, and creating a problem where there otherwise wasn’t one. Now the guy you had run the meeting feels like you don’t trust him and he also believes someone else is out to get him. Now he’s upset and confronts the other team member himself and all three of you are in a meeting with HR. HR asks you what actually happened and you have to say, “well I wasn’t there, but I was told…”. Whoopsy.
- Accountability Directives
You have a team member who’s been steadily declining in performance for several months. She’s been there since you were promoted, always supported you, you continued to hang out outside of work, and you regularly vent to each other. Recently, she’s been venting about what a garbage company you both work for and she doesn’t see why she’s constantly being prodded by upper leadership to be more productive. What was occasional venting has moved steadily into the realm of casual complaining, and now you’re caught in the crossfire. If she were someone else, you’d have already let them go due to performance. But you overlook that because of the friendship.
You also have a team member who produces great results but no one has any great feedback on working with them. No one can say anything specifically negative, but they appear more introverted, don’t necessarily participate in team-building activities, are reserved when they’re forced to participate, and haven’t gone out of their way to develop any generally helpful corporate relationships. You don’t have a reason to really let them go because their performance is stable, but people complain about what they perceive as unfriendliness. You’ve had a couple team members tell you they feel like the workplace would be a lighter, fluffier environment if this person wasn’t part of the team.
Then you have a meeting with your boss, who tells you that your department needs to downsize and you can decide on one person from your team to lay off.
Who do you let go?
Let’s not act like it wouldn’t be tempting to cut ties with old No-Friends Nelly. But you know the right answer is Can’t-Produce Casey (or won’t produce, but maybe we’re splitting hairs) – your business would grow without her and morale would improve. Doesn’t matter though, because your boss left it up to you. Either is fine.
Are you loyal to the business, or to your friend? Any company who finds out your answer is your friend is going to question their decision to put you in a position to drive the business forward. You should hope your boss isn’t engaged enough to question your answer.
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Running a business is massively driven by pattern recognition, and the job is largely to diagnose problems accurately, interpret signals correctly, and adjust quickly. Objectivity asks what actually happened, what variables changed, what’s the clean lesson here, and what evidence supports it? Emotion clouds patterns. Objectivity reveals them. You typically don’t lose business from lack of intelligence, but you can lose it from distorted perception.
A leader who can remain objective creates psychological safety without sacrificing standards. This is most true in the context of trust. Teams trust leaders who respond instead of react, seek clarity before assigning blame, and admit when data proves them wrong. Here are some practical ways to increase objectivity when you’re faced with a tough call:
- Insert a delay.
- Don’t decide at peak emotion. Pause before responding to criticism, surprises, or conflict.
- Separate facts from story.
- Find out what happened that’s observable, and determine what you’re telling yourself it means. If there isn’t a clear path forward, ask more questions.
- Track decisions against outcomes.
- Keep receipts on your own judgement. Patterns reveal bias.
- Practice ego detachment.
- Remind yourself, “This decision is not a referendum on my self-worth (or yours).
You cannot bypass emotion to become objective. You must be aware of it. The leader who understands their triggers has the advantage over the one who denies having any.
Self-awareness → Regulation → Clarity → Better judgement.
Objectivity isn’t natural, but it can be trained, though it’s usually uncomfortable. You don’t need to be emotionless. You just need to see clearly. The clearer you can see a situation for what it is, particularly when it’s inconvenient, results in stronger decisions, better culture, and an improved business outcome. Act from this place.
Head over to my Leadership Consulting page to learn more about working together!