Ratio Analysis: A Relevant Tool for Emotional Fitness (Too!)

Ratio Analysis is known to students and practitioners of business, more particularly of finance, as a simple but insightful approach to measure and comparatively benchmark the state of business and operations of a firm. There are basically four ways of constructing ratios, classified as (i) coverage ratios, which are measures of a company’s ability to satisfy or meet particular obligations, (ii) return ratios, which are measures of the net benefit relative to the resources expended, (iii) turnover ratios, which are measures of the gross benefit, relative to the resources expended, and (iv) a component percentage, which is the ratio of a component of an item to the item. Wise leaders would never look at absolute numbers as indicative of performance, good or bad; ratios are vital ways to assess performance in relevant perspectives.

Specifically with reference to a company’s operating and financial performance, there are six types of ratios which constitute an essential analytical framework. These are (1) liquidity ratios, which provide information on a company’s ability to meet its short term or immediate obligations, (2) profitability ratios, which provide information on the amount of income from each rupee of sales, (3) activity ratios, which provide information on a company’s ability to manage its resources or assets efficiently, (4) leverage ratios, which provide information on the ability of a company to satisfy the fixed financing obligations, (5) investor ratios, which describe a company’s ability to satisfy shareholders investing in stock of the company, and (6) return on investment ratios, which provide information on the profits, relative to the assets deployed to produce the profits.

Universality

There is probably no analytical tool in business that is as universal as ratio analysis. Contrary to popular fixation that it is a finance oriented tool, it can be used to describe the state of affairs in respect of any type of functional performance (for example, number of exiting employees to total number of employees in an organization) or any type of physical performance (for example, units exported to total units sold). There can also be crossover ratios covering physical and financial numbers (for example, value added in rupees per employee). There are probably no absolute prescriptive levels for ratios, they being influenced by the age and market standing of the company, nature of industry, quality of management, nature of investors and the state of economy. They are, however, extremely useful as comparisons with other firms in same, similar or differentiated industries and as trends over time. Interestingly, ratio analysis can be applied to an individual’s operating and financial performance as well, equally effectively.

As an example of applicability to an individual, liquidity ratios are very insightful. Given the relatively non-liquid or volatile nature of investments that individuals tend to make, measures like quick ratios (current assets less money tied up in equities and bonds to current liabilities) are more helpful and cautionary. Similarly, those steeped in equity and investment culture must deploy profitability ratios consistently across their sectors of investment to judge their relative performance. They can utilize leverage ratios to assess their short term and long term financial viability. They can also follow a physical framework in terms of hours spent on social networking to hours spent on studies etc. The purpose of the blog post is, however, different; it seeks to adapt and apply the insightful framework of ratio analysis to analyse, judge and improve one’s emotional well-being.

Emotionalism

While emotions are a perfectly normal part of human life (even all life, considering how birds and animals are also emotive), emotionalism is an overwhelming and controlling state of mind and heart. Emotionalism may be defined as a strong or excessive appeal to emotions, either all by oneself or by one to another. It would include unwarranted expression or display of emotions in day to day settings. Emotions themselves are several but one can consider nine emotions (Nava Rasas as per Hindu fine art tradition) as core or root emotions. With certain liberty for the purposes of this post, these are tweaked and expanded as synonyms-like feelings as follows: love (also, affection or collaboration), happiness (also, optimism or energy), compassion (also, caring or pity), anger (excitement or revulsion), fear (also, anxiety or disquiet), disgust (also, revulsion or irritation), courage (also, adventurism or risk taking), wonder (also, surprise or fulfilment), serenity (also, equanimity and sobriety).

Positive leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela exemplified positive emotions such as love, happiness, compassion, courage, surprise and serenity while negative leaders like dictators feed on negative emotions like anger, fear, disgust and courage (of a different kind, though). The occurrence of emotions is not only related to personality types but the circumstances faced by the personalities. An emotionally driven person is not only overwhelmed by the above core emotions in varying degrees but also tries to dominate others through his dominant emotions. The way to avoid emotionalism is by seeking an emotional balance. This, of course, varies widely between individuals. That said, certain emotional ratios are relevant to understand one’s own emotional health better and work towards a healthy emotional balance. Six emotional ratios are presented below.

Emotional liquidity

Happiness is the most fulfilling emotion. Some people are spontaneously happy while some are happy only upon accomplishing their goals. A basal naturally spontaneous happiness level, superimposed by a variable happiness level related to goal accomplishment, is the best state. Alongside the asset of happiness, the liability of unhappiness or sadness also exists. Happiness tends to be short-lived while sadness tends to be long lasting. For example, a person who loses out on an exciting promotion is likely to be saddened (with respect to the specific promotion goal) till the next annual performance review cycle while he could still make continuous achievements, and hence derive continuous happiness, all though the year. An emotionally liquid individual has assets of happiness, optimism and energy that are several times over the sad liability of unfulfilled goals. An emotionally liquid person is one who is an energetic and optimistic seeker of happiness.

Emotional viability

Life is difficult and challenging, especially if one sets for himself or herself higher order goals that are not easily achievable. Usually, aspiration or goal motivates one to attempt achievement. Yet, one is beset by fear of failure or anxiety of slippage vis-à-vis the goals. The counteracting force for this fear is courage, peppered by a bit of adventurism and risk taking. The ratio of one’s courage to one’s fear has to be a significant number for one to be emotionally viable. Additionally, another ratio reinforces one’s emotional viability; it is the ratio of one’s affectionate emotions to one’s revulsion hot points. An ability to naturally be loving, affectionate and collaborative overcomes the tendency to be repelled by negatively surprising or irritatingly disgusting developments that one encounters. The former, if endowed in a person in a rich measure, helps him or her to achieve and sustain emotional viability. 

Emotional turnover

Everyday activities bring their own joys and disappointments even as most daily chores tend to be emotion-neutral. That said, just as one saves money for anticipated and unanticipated expenses, one must accumulate an inventory of happiness that can compensate for sharp spikes in unhappiness. Happiness needs to be viewed not as a momentary pleasure but an accumulation of good moments and memories that keeps one’s ship of life well protected when buffeted by sudden storms. Ideally, at any point of time one should be in a position to have happiness that outlasts disappointments of two quarters. It is more particularly true for corporate executives who battle the assessment rigour of corporate quarterly performance by the Street every quarter and also for the layman who is perplexed by loss of market capitalization or spike in inflation every quarter!   

Emotional leverage

Amongst all financial leverage ratios, debt-equity ratio is the most meaningful and popular indicator of financial health and stability of a firm. Investors and financial institutions provide capital to companies to develop as equity and debt respectively. The higher the proportion of debt the higher the leverage. Individuals have their own emotional debt-equity ratio as well. The broader society encourages individual development through two instruments - trust and goodwill. Trust is situational and contextual and, much like debt, needs periodic servicing, Defaults could lead to poor rating of individuals. In contrast, an individual in his or her lifetime can gain goodwill through successive positive actions. Much like equity or risk capital, goodwill remains undented despite occasional minor issues. Like debt-equity ratio being ideal at 1:1 for optimal leverage, an equal proportion of trust and goodwill bestows serenity on an individual.

Emotional return

Businesses cannot be expected to provide usurious returns continuously; eventually firms converge towards an industry average rate of return. The businesses are measured by earnings per share (EPS) and by return on total investment (ROI). In a loose sense, earnings are nothing but revenues less expenditure. The nine emotions comprise the positive emotions (PEs) of love, happiness, compassion and serenity, and non-positive or negative emotions of surprise, anger and disgust (NEs). The difference of PEs over NEs represents the net positive emotion (NPE) of an individual. This is modified with multiplication by the emotional viability index (EVI) of courage divided by fear (C/F). An EVI which is a natural number greater than 1 enhances the NPE of an individual. The net emotional return for an individual thus is a clear arithmetic of differently classified emotions as discussed herein.

Reservoir and dam

We have seen that emotions are complex feelings and spontaneous expressions at play but also have an intriguing and inspiring arithmetic. Emotional ratio analysis as outlined in this blog post is a tool for every individual to understand his or her own emotional profile and to achieve favourable emotional ratios. For that to happen, we need to understand two other characteristics of emotions as follows.

The first is that contrary to a common misunderstanding, emotions are not transient or fleeting feelings and expressions that are triggered by isolated events. Emotions tend to accumulate and are triggered into flow by individual triggers. Emotional reservoirs are a fact of life for every individual, however much one may deny. It is this characteristic that would enable one draw up emotional statements for a period and also as at the end of a period, much like income statement and balance sheet, respectively. While this being subjective, the analogy helps one semi-quantify one’s emotional income and expenditure as well as emotional assets and liabilities.

The second is that while all emotions are like rivers flowing into, and as, reservoirs of different capacities depending on one’s emotional propensities, there is one emotion - serenity - that would act as a dam to all the other eight emotions. With age, experience, maturity and wisdom, one is able to build higher heights of serenity that can check the inevitable build-up of emotional reservoirs that happens over time. Serenity discriminates in terms of moderating any overflow of emotions. Serenity is the master emotion that one needs to develop to be able to achieve an enhanced NPE. Serenity is also the quintessential ultimate emotion that arises from a healthy fusion of one’s body, mind, heart and soul.    

Posted by Dr CB Rao on April 25, 2015 

The Optimal Pain Signature: The Foil for a Pleasurable Life?

We are in a technology-driven world where nothing seems to be impossible.  If the decades of the 1950s to 2000s were focused on electro-mechanical and mechatronic developments to help human beings achieve the unthinkable, from intra-city bullet trains to inter-planetary spaceships, the technologies of the twenty first century are focused on understanding the human biology better and enabling superior diagnosis and therapeutics through molecular biology and genetic engineering. The merger of biomedical sciences and engineering are creating new vistas of healthcare. Today, there is hope, for example, that genetic markers could help forecast the probability of cancer or enable the right choice of oncology drugs. The same technological capability could extend in several related and unrelated disease areas, nay to life itself.

  

If the ultimate form of impossibility is creation of human life, even that could become possible one day. Only a few days ago, a laboratory has announced that it has been able to successfully grow certain human organs in a laboratory environment using stem cells. Possibly, a full human life may also be grown or cloned one day. In the meanwhile, several companies are racing to develop a new breed of health devices or a host of healthcare applications such as heart rate tracker, fitness tracker or blood pressure monitor. There is an expectation that sooner or later smart phones and a new breed of wearable computers would turn into techno-biological foils to human beings. Yet, technology may have its own limits. The reason is that technology can help only if any physiological parameters can be characterized or measured. Surely, more biological markers which are measurable and have predictive capability will be discovered but thoughts and experiences cannot be measured, at least as of now.

Physical pain, the first frontier

Temperature, pulse rate and heart rate are three of the fundamental physical measurements of human wellbeing or illness. There are several bio-chemical markers that can be cultured or isolated through blood tests. Imaging studies, for example X-rays, ultrasounds, scans and angiograms of different types, can help identify the irregularities in the body internals. However, no technology has emerged, nor will emerge, that can measure pain, which even prior to temperature is an indicator of something going wrong or gone wrong with the human body. If only there were to be an instrument that can measure pain as it emerge and calibrates different types of pain, potentially chronic diseases like migraines and acute diseases like heart attacks be diagnosed ahead, and patients relieved or saved as the case may be. Unfortunately, pain only can be experienced and expressed but cannot be measured real time (the so called pain scales are post-facto, self-reporting, and subjective).

If medical diagnostics has to conquer the ultimate frontier, the first frontier to conquer is pain. There is so much subjectivity in pain that people tend to either understate or overstate pain, and in some cases even be incapacitated in expression. Apart from pain as a precursor of the impending physiological problem, post-operative pain is also an important marker of the pace of recovery. Without knowledge of the true state of pain, doctors dispense pain killers on an empirical basis. Apart from causing their own infamous side effects, the pain killers also mask pain making the discovery of illness even more difficult. Neuroscientists from the University of Colorado Boulder, New York University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Michigan have identified functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) of the brain as an imaging technique to understand a pain level or pain signature of a person (see “An fMRI-Based Neurologic Signature of Physical Pain, The New England Journal of Medicine, 2013, 368: 1388-1397, April 11, 2013). Yet, fMRI is too sophisticated a hospital procedure to be of any use or relevance to day to day pain diagnosis and management.

Physical sensitivity

The rigors of life teach us that pain is an inescapable concomitant of human living. People experience physical pain from the early days and over years become capable of enduring pain. Sportsmen, among others, constitute a special category of people who test limits of endurance; they rebound from pain amazingly fast even as others recoil from pain involuntarily felt. To be sensitive to pain is probably not a bad thing even as an ability to endure pain is certainly a good thing. The ordeal of pain that is undergone by pregnant women prior to and during delivery is a classic instance of nature’s biology steeling the feminine gender to be sensitive and robust. Chronic diabetics, on the other hand, experience forced insensitivity with sugar levels leading neurological insensitivity to pain, and therefore resulting in ignorance of several pain markers of impending difficulties.

It is important, therefore, that a healthy human being is constantly aware of the pain frontiers one experiences. The simple tests that the earlier generation doctors employ in terms of scratch test or tongs test on parts which are served by peripheral nerves or distant blood vessels are some of the best indicators still. Barefoot walking on clean surfaces and being aware of the organic to organic and organic to inorganic touch are some of the ways in which a human being can continue to be in sensitivity to the subtle changes in body constitution. A spontaneous ability to feel and express pain is God’s gift and constitutes the body’s first defense against any harmful assault on the human body. The ability to distinguish between pain as a natural defense and pain as a route to endurance needs to be part of the pain DNA of an individual.

Emotional pain, the hidden frontier

While physical pain is easy to experience and express, emotional pain is much harder to understand and express. In today’s world where inequality is commonplace and where expectations race ahead of adequacies or endowments, it is easy to be vulnerable to emotional pain. Unseen and undiffused emotional pain leads to stress, which in turn leads to many psychosomatic and cardio-pulmonary diseases. Emotions such as anger, anxiety, worry, frustration, despondency, dejection, sorrow and sadness cause a person to experience emotional pain. While an ability to bear emotional pain is necessary, an inability to differentiate between natural emotional pain and impacted emotional pain is cause of much physical misery in individuals. High stress levels, for example, are known to cause severe migraine attacks in individuals.

Emotions are a function of attachment. Attachment is a function of biological (natural) or spontaneous (destined) chemistry. The more attached a person is (to something or someone) the more emotional he or she would tend to be. Anything that threatens or erodes the attachment would cause negative emotions and increase stress levels. Chronic stress levels cause a weakening of the immune system and cause a host of diseases. Attachments have a natural tendency of fading with time (like the attachment for schoolmates getting overshadowed by the attachment for college friends).  Attachments are a healthy part of human life but when the baggage of attachments constantly overflows (as it happens with highly social individuals) or if the baggage remains empty always bereft of attachments (as it happens with highly reclusive individuals) the emotional balance would be adversely impacted.

Sensible sensitivity

Emotional burden may seem to be lower in respect of individuals who think more through the head than through the heart, and who are impervious and insensitive. Apart from the fact that such non-emotional individuals tend to be in a minority, non-emotionalism tends to cause as grievous burden as emotionalism. The solution lies in individuals being sensitive sensibly. It is okay to cry in a movie theater watching a movie of pathos but it would not be sensible to bring the pathos into real life. It would but be natural and human to grieve over the loss of near and dear but it would not be sensible to stop enjoying anything and everything for years on in memory of the departed. The solution to coping with emotional burden lies in sensible sensitivity, which describes a holistic approach to understanding the root causes of emotional sensitivity and finding practical ways of coping with it, case by case. 

One important concept of sensible sensitivity relates to understanding the cause and response mechanism. Many times the anger that an individual has in response to criticism is not related to the criticism per se but more to the ego state of the individual. Understanding the self in terms of ego state and attachment profile is critical to minimization of adverse emotional burden. Another important concept is to apply oneself in areas where one has genuine interest. The level of interest in work facilitates a level of productivity and promotes a level of wellbeing. While it is not always possible to secure family and professional circumstances that are fully aligned with one’s interests, it is possible to choose a niche of interest that leads to a nucleus of satisfaction (like gardening in a family circumstance or mentoring in a professional circumstance). The third part of sensible sensitivity is an understanding and acceptance that, as with physical pain, a certain amount of emotional pain helps an individual operate within sensible limits of living. 

The pain signature

The foregoing leads us to consider a concept of individualized pain signature that expresses one’s threshold to pain, both physical and emotional. While at one level physical pain and emotional pain are correlated, particularly when they are chronic, they also can be viewed to occur independently. A person can have propensity to high and low levels of pain (recognition, absorption and tolerance), both physically and emotionally. A person who is low on both the counts could be insensitive to himself and his environment. A person who is high on both the counts could be a highly strung individual with significant and deleterious auto correlation between the two pains. A person who is low on physical and high on emotional could be execution-weak but intellect-secure. A person who is high on physical and low on emotional could be field-aggressive but people-insensitive. Unlike certain other grids, being stuck in the middle with an optimum balance could be the better option for a balanced life.

The pain signature is an important guidepost for any individual in the fast, technology-driven and stress-filled life of the times. While understanding one’s pain signature from biological and philosophical points of view is essential as discussed above, a day also may not be far off when there could be simpler and more accessible tools than fMRI to decode one’s pain signature. Wearable computers and services that track one’s thought and expression patterns as well as neurological electrical wave patterns could provide on-the-spot and on-the-dot guidance to individuals as well as their caretakers and mentors as the case may be.  Until then, and probably even after that, self-awareness on pain signature would be essential. The more aware and the more sensitive an individual is to his or her pain signature, the more he or she would be able to leverage it an aid to a well-balanced pleasurable life.

Posted by Dr CB Rao on April 26, 2014

   

           

Harnessing Emotions at Workplace: The Model of Intelligent Emotional Balance (IEB)

Emotions are strong feelings that people have.  Emotions can be positive as well as negative. Typical emotions, positive and negative, are happiness and sadness, liking and disliking, calmness and anger, politeness and bluntness, confidence and fear, friendship and enmity, trust and mistrust, kindness and jealousy, gentleness and aggression, so on. Given that organizations are nothing but groups of people, it is but natural that emotions are a part and parcel of a typical workplace. The emotional profile of a manager or a leader, in fact, gets identified as a dominant characteristic of a manager or a leader as his or her management and leadership style, and becomes a visible and consistently felt experience for the larger organization. There is often a misplaced view that in organizations negative emotions must necessarily be eliminated and positive emotions mandatorily embedded at the work place. This is a simplistic view of how business processes and organizational behaviors work.

There have been several theories of emotions from the centuries’ prior days of Aristotle to the contemporary days of Stephen Covey, highlighting the need to understand human emotions and for achieving mastery over emotions. In fact, the phrases “emotional balance”, “emotional quotient” and “emotional intelligence” have spawned several journal articles and management books on how executives could achieve mastery over their emotions to be effective at the workplace. Important as these are, there is a need to view emotional management at the workplace in terms of intelligent business process management rather than only as an introverted framework of behavioral correction. Fundamental to the concern on management of emotions is the fact that emotions could affect rational thinking and actions. The paradox of human emotions is rendered more complex when organizations are expected to be embodiments of logical and rational approaches in the conduct of their businesses on one hand, while being driven by hues of emotion such as aggression and passion in achieving superior performance on the other.

Contextual

For most part, emotions need contexts to express themselves. The contextual basis of emotions is that the gap between expectations and accomplishments sets the tone for emotions. If the leader is a stickler for perfection, a perfect process or a perfect outcome from his subordinate makes him or her happy while a shoddy process and outcome makes the leader angry. In the same interaction, if the subordinate knows what perfection is, he or she would display confidence or fear while presenting the process or product. From the simple example that has been considered, it is clear that emotions emerge from the gaps between that exist between expectations and outcomes. The other contextual part of emotions is that people come into organizations as bundles of emotions themselves. In addition, people tend to be of different personality types which will invariably influence how people emote at the workplace. Many employees also do not adequately understand the nexus between their individual roles and performance and corporate goals and outcomes, and anticipate rewards independent of performance. The alignment or gap between career objectives and career growth also leads to emotional dynamics.

Emotions are sharpened by the way they are expressed.  The culture of expression, if it is positive enhances the helpful impact of positive emotions and moderates the erosive impact of negative emotions. The culture of expression, if negative, achieves exactly the opposite. The expressions of verbal language, positive or negative, are further accentuated positively or attenuated negatively by the body language, positive or negative. The part that communication plays in moderating or amplifying emotions is not well understood. Effective and controlled communication is part of emotional balance in organizations. Emotions are not necessarily correlated to circumstances. Crisis situations, contrary to perceptions of chaos, helplessness and stress, may actually bring out positive emotions of sharing and caring, and of strength and stability amongst the team members. On the other hand, luxurious outcomes may bring out negative emotions of envy and jealousy, and of mistrust and aggression among them. The paradox of the contextual perspectives is that emotions are impacted by a number of internal and external contexts.

It is also incorrect to assume that positive emotions are always beneficial and negative ones detrimental. If team members are not mature enough and instead are subservient to emotions in appraising performance, performance management would be at a discount. In such cases, people may get formatted into emotional archetypes as they and their supervisors lack the ability to differentiate task delivery from emotional wrapping. Emotions, whether positive or negative, are likely to introduce skew, bias and halo effects in relationships if emotions are not objectively and discriminatingly expressed or understood. Emotional balancing may help the groups manage positive or negative performance in a stable manner only if emotional expression is indexed to the context of task delivery of individuals, teams and organizations. If managers and teams, as well as cross-functional peers ensure clear target setting with joint ownership, clarity and alignment on objectives and resources and evaluation criteria, the chances for emotional upheavals, positive or negative, would be minimized. 

Another hypothesis could be that industry context would determine the emotional texture of an organization. Market and customer facing organizations may be postulated to be more emotionally sensitive compared to manufacturing organizations. Domains like advertising and consumer research may be considered to be more emotionally interactive than others. In practice, however, emotional sensitivity and responsiveness is related more to expectations-accomplishments gap and expressions-communications competency levels, independent of any domain or industry. The organizations and team members of the movie industry which is dominated by emotive artistic elements in all its aspects, for example, has all the interpersonal emotional fallibilities as any other industrial organization; if at all, the movie industry seems to have an even greater level of emotional dynamics. 

Tolerances and controls

As in engineering design, the theory of tolerances plays a vital role in emotional management too. People, in the organizational context, must observe tolerances in mutual expression of emotions. While not all emotions may be appropriate in an organizational context, there are a few which have relevance. While a gentle, trusting, caring, sharing and joyous emotional outlook may enhance positive energy in a team, excessive levels of such positive emotions could be counter-productive. While fun at work is desirable, it cannot be only fun at work to the detriment of stretch and challenge at work. At the same time, an aggressive, evaluative, demanding, consolidating and somber emotional outlook may bring out the right amount of fear and adrenal rush in the face of adversity or complacence. While fear is the key to compliance and achievement, fearful authoritarianism cannot be endorsed to the detriment of creativity and innovation at work. Clearly, only if teams are able to play upon their positive and negative emotions within fine tolerances that are synergistic in organizational context, emotions can be helpful.    

At the core of intelligent emotional balance lies the ability to understand the emotional sensitivity of self and others, and develop the ability to control the emergence and expression of emotions in organizationally appropriate manner. This approach does not mean that people should or would lose their spontaneity. It merely recognizes that an organization has certain primary performance metrics to deliver on a day to day basis. A culture of emotional sensitivity, in fact, helps the team modulate performance expectations and delivery achievements. The model of intelligent emotional balance has three vital components; the first, understanding the importance of a person’s own and his team members’ emotional proclivities,  the second, an understanding of the tolerances within which mutual emotions become synergistic rather than antagonistic and the third, a competence to control emotions to be supportive of a virtuous organizational culture. An ability to retain rationality, objectivity and logic in the face of exciting opportunities and depressing setbacks alike with the just right touch of humanism helps spread the positive vibrations of energy across the organization.

IEB model in practice

An organization can achieve intelligent emotional balance when its leaders practice the optimal business processes that enable a sense of fulfillment in day to day work and thereby enabling appropriate emotional balance.  The optimum business process does not end merely with objective setting or questioning but incorporates problem solving where required.  A leader who sets a challenging technical task for his subordinate logically expects the subordinate to deliver, failing which finds it rational to take the subordinate to task. The IEB model, in this case, expects that the leader does not merely stop at expressing his unhappiness but also empathizes with the subordinate’s incapacity to deliver and sets about to work with the subordinate to develop a solution. Once the subordinate develops the solution to the leader’s satisfaction, the leader joyously celebrates with the subordinate, thus wiping clean the earlier unhappiness and opening a new chapter of collaboration.  In another case where the subordinate succeeds in terms of delivery, the leader celebrates with the subordinate first but goes on to prescribe a higher level of challenge for the subordinate that leads the organization onto a path of continuous achievement and fulfillment.

A purely emotional view of achievement leads to a sense of complacence and distances the participants from the competitive scenario that exists in the outside business world. Setting expectations appropriately, reinforcing competencies commensurately, providing resources adequately, evaluating results objectively, coaching for improved results empathetically, learning from failures confidently and celebrating successes with humility provides an optimal intelligent emotional balance in an organization. The leaders and managers can help facilitate institution of intelligent emotional balance by being themselves role models of the following: (i) equidistance from, or equal attachment to, functions and people, (ii) adaptive of rational and emotionally balanced objective business and communication processes, (iii) focused on competency development and task delivery, (iv) controlled and titrated in experiencing and expression of emotions, (v) learning openly from setbacks and failures, and (vi) optimally celebrating successes with humility. The foregoing leadership model would help institutionalize the broader Intelligent Emotional Balance (IEB) model on a sustainable basis in the organization.

Posted by Dr CB Rao on March 10, 2013