Why Mood Is More Powerful Than Intellect

As human beings, we might pride ourselves on our intellect—we belong to the species Homo sapiens, which is Latin for “wise person.” But we are not that wise. We may have learned a lot, and we may know a lot, but we are still more heavily influenced by emotion than logic.

We are more influenced by emotion than by logic.

The most powerful emotion of all is fear, and that’s a good thing, generally, since fear is primarily responsible for keeping us alive, by seeking to avoid dangerous situations. But that fear also tends to smother our intellectual side and has been—and continues to be—the cause of a great many of our problems.

The debate over the use of masks and social distancing during the pandemic is a classic case of how these emotions can completely mess us up. The virus was an invisible threat, as compared to, say, a person holding a gun. As such it required intellect to understand the nature of its threat and especially the nature of its contagion potential, which epidemiologists call its r factor. Although scientists might have hoped that the instinctive fear of death would prevail, it was instead the fear of change, which led to acts of outright resistance and denial in many countries, furthering the spread of infection and death into the millions.

Since emotion is so powerful and has such a direct impact on the mood of a team, it must be tracked, using metrics in league with observation, insight, and intuition.

Some managers like to observe the mood in their teams by polling them: offering surveys, asking for continuous feedback, holding internal focus groups, town halls, and one-on-one discussions. These are all especially useful and are never a complete waste of time, but I will always lean toward interaction and the collection of unstructured information as better indicators of individual moods and group moods. To me, context is vital.

Reading the Mood

The most direct and seemingly obvious way to read someone’s mood, for example, as a company might do to determine customer satisfaction, is to send out a survey. But there are significant limitations to this approach. Firstly, if a survey is not mandatory, then you will only receive feedback from people whose personality is open to, or feels guilted into, responding to it. Whether you are polling users or a customer base, the data collected will be skewed to reflect the opinions of people who can be influenced to answer polls and will leave out a significantly sized group populated by those whose personality types will not answer a questionnaire request.

Secondly, every question in a questionnaire includes the writer’s own bias in the way it is framed and by the answer choices offered. Words like somewhat and strongly or almost never are way too subjective. Some respondents, looking at a scale of 1–10, with 1 being least satisfied and 10 being most satisfied, will automatically avoid the extremes of 1 and 10 out of a desire to not be considered an extreme person. They might get frustrated by the narrow scope of the questions or even the length of the questionnaire, meaning that anger or impatience might also skew the data.

The best way, in my opinion, to read the mood of a group is to interpret unstructured data. Unstructured data largely appears as paragraphs of words, either spoken or written. For example, if I absolutely had to use a questionnaire to get people’s opinions, rather than offer a scale of 1–10 or a yes-or-no answer, I would offer a space for the respondents to write out their thoughts. In a group setting, I would give people a chance to speak uninterrupted. This allows them to verbalize their thoughts in a way that best aligns with their thought processes and their emotions. Also, when someone talks, the act of “letting go” of one thought by sharing it with the interviewer often spurs additional thoughts that would never have come to the surface in a more restrictive, closed-ended questioning scenario.

Another unstructured way to read the mood of a team is through data delivered in the form of notes, essays, emails, or conversations and posts on social media. This is not about snooping; it’s about turning to places where people let their thoughts run free in a conversational style. When it comes to external customers, for example, you can learn much more from comments about you or your competitors on a social media platform than you can from a survey.

But the best feedback comes from conversation, and this is something that can be done just as easily through one-on-one video chat as it can in person. Again, this technique is not new. As I mentioned earlier, within the kaizen concept of continuous improvement, managers of Japanese factories were encouraged to perform gemba walks, which required them to leave their desks and walk around, visiting assembly line workers, talking to them, and even thanking them publicly for doing things that supported continuous improvement, like calling attention to a defect that would require a temporary stoppage of the manufacturing process.

Gemba is not just a demonstration of public respect, even though that would be a sufficient morale booster in itself, it’s also an opportunity for managers to hear directly from their frontline employees in their own words. In North America, the equivalent of the gemba walk is called MBWA—management by walking around . Perhaps it’s time for a new term to add to this collection: MBZA—management by zooming around .

The secret to gemba and MBWA is quite simply to listen more than you speak. When someone is allowed to speak, they will reveal far more than when they are simply allowed to answer a question.

Leaders should create a “psychologically safe” environment where people feel encouraged to share their mood. There is an expectation for things to get better or something new to happen when people share their thoughts. When no action is taken, that often causes frustration. The most important piece of the puzzle in terms of collecting data around people’s mood is to understand what has been collected and then take positive and noticeable action.

Reading Flags at Sea

Flags are vital in boating and shipping. They serve as visual, unambiguous messengers that do not rely on languages or radio communication. A red flag with a white diagonal stripe tells boaters that divers are working nearby. An orange flag with a black circle and a black square side by side is the international signal of distress. A flag with red and yellow diagonal triangles means person overboard. These are excellent examples of streamlined communication since every captain and crew member is required to know what to do when they see these flags.

Probably the most famous maritime flag of all is the Jolly Roger, the skull and crossbones on a black background. Well known for being flown by pirates, the legend says that the black background meant a ship would be given “quarter.” This told the crews of the ships being approached by the pirates that they would be spared if they let the pirates board and steal what they wanted. This bleak message was enough to elicit compliance even in situations where the pirates themselves would have been hopelessly outnumbered. Once again, fear led the way. The worse news for a crew would be a red pirate flag, which meant no quarter would be given regardless.

Pirates from the seventeenth and eighteenth century are interesting from a team management perspective. Yes, they can be accurately described as opportunistic thieves, but they were not the only ones. There were also privateers—private merchant ships that had a license to engage in plunder and war in support of commerce in the name of their king, queen, or president.

Many pirate ships ran democratically, with each crew member having a vote on the ship’s issues, fair distribution of the plunder, and a strong and respectful social culture, which made being part of a pirate crew one of the more attractive places to work at sea. As a consequence, it was common during a pirate raid for the crew members of victim ships to not only step aside but to also ask for a job on the pirate ship itself.

But what was clear was that the flag was an unambiguous and streamlined communication device for the maritime community of that era.

Reading Silence in the Workplace

In terms of team dynamics in the workplace, silence can be dangerous, and that is a warning flag in itself. Many people keep negative emotions including worries or animosity toward others bottled up inside where they fester and grow. But what must be remembered by team leaders is that bad feelings and grudges never go away.

The reason these negative sentiments never disappear is due to the same fear response I described earlier. Bad feeling or disappointment happens when something goes contrary to the way you would like it to go. Your instincts automatically equate that to something that might in itself represent danger. That’s one reason why disappointments always last longer and are stronger in memory than good events.

In the workplace, bad feelings and grudges live forever, and they tend to grow with every successive interaction with the person who caused them. This is where interpersonal conflicts arise, usually from long-standing, unrecognized slights. These can happen just as easily in distributed teams as with onsite groups. In both situations, the bad feelings might go undetected for months or years, especially if all communication is cursory and superficial.

As a manager, it is vital to get team members to talk, using the techniques I have already described: one-on-one meetings, gemba or MBWA walks, and MBZA. In the previous chapter, I mentioned how the commentaries that people used to describe their “best places to work” revealed how important it is to provide a supportive communication environment that involves unstructured conversation, active listening, and emotional intelligence and how this has such an enormous positive impact on collective mood. Such connection points are vital to the building and nurturing of a successful distributed team, and thankfully the technology exists to make this happen.

Balloons and Gravity

Hot air balloons are impressive devices, but there is one thing about them that must never be forgotten: in the contest between the hot air balloon and gravity, gravity always wins—eventually.

This is important when it comes to understanding mood, because the same applies here too. Collective moods can fall just as easily as they can rise, and the fall is much faster, and its effects are longer-lasting. Some individuals are upbeat and optimistic by nature, others less so, and still others struggle with depression and anxiety. Collectively a team or a crew is going to start out being a mosaic of these personality types, meaning each person in the group remains their own true self, separate and distinct, but over time and with great, proactive management, you can transform the mosaic into something of a gestalt, a melting and blending of individuals into a community with a shared mood and clear channels of communication and support. It’s genuinely great when this happens. It’s a particular synergy that creates an enviable, productive team—almost a family.

Gestalt: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

But collective moods, like hot air balloons, need additional energy and maintenance to stay up and to skirt turbulence.

I have seen some companies, who, sensing a dip in morale, send their teams out on one-day team-building exercises, like navigating rope bridges, engaging in trust activities, or spending the afternoon at a ball game. These can be nice, but if the return to work brings with it a corresponding drop in mood, then the “day out” provided nothing to keep the mood afloat for more than a few hours, and the corresponding return to Earth will feel even more profound and heavy. The same would apply to the crew of a ship: a day of shore leave is nice, but if the source of low morale is not addressed, the crew will simply descend back into it as soon as they step back on board.

It remains the duty of the manager or captain to stay aware of the mood of the team, to spot potential emotional storms on the horizon, and to remain aware also of the importance this all has to the mission. It’s an act of constant watching and measurement—part of Deming’s concept, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

How to Read and Balance Moods in a Distributed Teams Scenario

Understanding how to manage mood is on par with understanding the value of sleep in our lives. Can you imagine living without sleep? It’s impossible, and it can actually be fatal. Human beings basically spend one-third of their lives asleep. It would be nice, perhaps, to contemplate a life where it was not needed. Think how much more you would be able to do with all those extra hours and years of wakefulness! But it’s foolish to think that way. Healthy sleep is absolutely vital. Without it, you would not be able to function properly during your waking hours. So it’s a done deal: one-third of the project that you call your life must be given over to sleep.

At first glance sleep does not seem to achieve anything, but when you look at what it actually entails in terms of dreaming, physical and emotional repair, and rest, it contributes enormously. It’s actually quite fascinating.

Managing the morale of your teams has a parallel prerogative. Some managers might not see the value of emotional intelligence and morale management, but these actions deliver the same restorative health-giving benefits to teams as sleep does for the individual human. If proactive team management—including morale management and online gemba walks—takes up one-third of your management time, so be it. That’s the cost of developing high-performance distributed teams. The other two-thirds of your time will achieve far less without this.

The goal is to understand people’s thoughts, concerns, and ideas. Leaders have to be available to their people, and they have to make sure that each person in the team is connected to everything they need to give their best in their area of expertise. Never underestimate what a person with a purpose can achieve.

Never underestimate what a person with a purpose can achieve.

Remove the Formality

One of the best ways to manage mood and morale in a distributed teams scenario is to deformalize the communication technology. Many people turn to video chat apps just when there is a meeting to attend, which is basically a formalized activity. But these communication tools can do so much more. You can establish a dedicated chat channel, like in Slack or Microsoft Teams, to be used for spontaneous hallway chats, quick talks about the weekend, and anything else that you and your team members feel would contribute to a sense of togetherness and casual team building.

The nonformality component of work is vital. One of the key elements of traditional on-premises work is the use of casual space. This includes the cafeteria, lunchroom or food court, hallways, elevators, lobbies, basically anywhere that is related to the company but is not specific to a task or project. This is where people talk and socialize, but more importantly, it is where they reinforce their sense of community and social awareness.

The absence of this drop-in casual space is something that first-time work from home employees observed during the pandemic lockdown. Video chats were used for meetings, and self-directed work was done at home, but little attention was given to the midpoint—that awareness that you are with other people, that they are nearby. This absence is palpable and points to a significant must-have among distributed teams—the social aspect.

It also sets up a perfect triangle of its own that I feel is wholly supportive of any team scenario, whether traditional or distributed: formal work (team meetings and similar scheduled events), self-directed work (research, writing, coding, analysis—basically the tasks that reflect a person’s job title), and socialization.

Some might ask why email is not added to this triangle, which is a good question, given how much time email and other messaging techniques take up. But I consider these to be “support activities,” necessary, but not primary. It’s a sad reality that most people at work have lost control of their emails and are not truly aware of just how much time they must spend each day in managing them. But, as I mention in Chapter 8, this is what Catch-up Time is for. The hallmark of a truly successful team is one where the amount of Catch-up Time required is brought down to a minimum.

It is easy to set up social drop-in spaces using online breakout rooms in video chat apps or even using specialized apps dedicated to this type of casual, spontaneous interaction. The reason these software solutions have not been introduced to the workplace culture is, I believe, because more attention has been given over to the formalized, team-focused side of the triangle (e.g., online synchronous meetings) and because informal socialization in a team environment is much like air—people don’t notice it when they are surrounded by it, but they do once it starts to disappear. Socialization is a vital and highly constructive component of any distributed team architecture, and I think we will see a lot more development in this space in the immediate future.

Observing Observability

Take the concept of observability, for example, that I touched upon earlier. In the old, brick-and-mortar postindustrial mindset, the accountability for ensuring that a process ran smoothly and in the right direction would sit squarely on the shoulders of the CEO and a small team of senior managers. Although this seems to be the correct level of authority for oversight, it has the potential to become a classic command-and-control scenario. What is more, executive oversight does not always incorporate real observation. It’s more like monitoring—looking only at certain metrics.

These days it is becoming obvious that a better way to make sure the organization is not going on an emotional detour is to make it everyone’s responsibility to observe. Observing is a 360-degree activity and is also a team concept and should not belong only to the captain or CEO, and it is definitely not just about watching the numbers or metrics. Observing includes metrics, certainly, but it encompasses a great deal more peripheral vision, instinct, and insight.

It is everyone’s responsibility to observe.

Only with a much wider and more comprehensive perspective can things be corrected and improved both when things are going well and when they are not. It is about being able to take decisive actions to implement improvements, even when everything has seemingly reached a state of optimum efficiency.

The Company That Helps People Quit

If you read a headline like this, “the company that helps people quit,” the chances are that you will interpret that to mean it’s about severance pay, or for setting up golden parachutes for executives. But, no, that’s not what this is about. I want to tell you a story about a company that knows a thing or two about morale.

The company in question is called Jellyvision, a Chicago-based employee communication software company with about 400 employees. Although it works hard to create a positive community and a legitimately upbeat mood, on occasion, a person decides they no longer want to work there. Perhaps it’s a career trajectory thing or a lifestyle change or simply that the company and the industry just isn’t a fit for them. That happens sometimes. For whatever reason, they just want to get off this boat.

For most people in this situation, life now becomes a careful tightrope walk, trying to locate and apply to other companies, scheduling interviews in the middle of the workday, and generally trying to balance these new activities with the demands of the current job. It also becomes challenging, talking about upcoming plans and work assignments with the current boss, who at this moment is unaware of the impending departure. It can be a stressful time.

But Jellyvision’s management says, “Don’t worry. If you want to leave, we will make the process as comfortable for you as possible. We will give you great flexibility to schedule interviews, we will guarantee you excellent references, and your pay and benefits will stay intact until the time you officially leave.” In other words, there will be no punishment for wanting to jump ship. We will try to make things a better fit for you, but if you really want to leave, we will help take the stress out of it. They call it their “graceful exit” program.

So why do you think they would do something like this? Why would a company help someone out who is clearly demonstrating that they do not want to be there?

Well, for a start, it’s a nice way to behave. It’s a nice way to treat a person, and as we all know, much of business is about who we know, and much of life is about how we treat people and how we make them feel. A strong, diverse network of good people who hold you in good stead is always an asset.

But more importantly, perhaps, these actions aren’t just for the benefit of the person who is getting off the boat; they are for the longer-term benefit of the people who are staying on. It helps with the idea of building a connected culture, which we find at the core of One Team, One Heart. It shows we are together from start to finish. Kelly Dean, Jellyvision’s Vice President of People, puts it this way: “Fundamentally, what drives retention here more than anything, and it’s a very unconventional thing, is that we trust people and we treat them like adults. And we expect them to behave in the same way.”¹

These demonstrations of respect and cooperation will be observed and noted by the rest of the team and eventually by customers. So this offboarding process is about building and maintaining group morale through your actions, even toward a departing team member. The respect that you show to this departing individual will touch the hearts of the remaining team members much more profoundly than any motivational words ever could.

At the End of the Day, It’s Not Just About the Technology

When you pick up or download a book on high-performance distributed teams, it’s easy to think it’s all about clear communication and project management spread over large distances. And although those components must exist here, it’s also about the fact that the end points of a distributed team are all people, and they need the same types of attention and awareness as they would have if they all worked together in the same building. The good news is, despite their distance, it is easier than ever to deliver what they need.

Key Takeaways