Emotional Intelligence Archives

The Time for Emotion and Meaning Is Now

Battling the arduous winds of COVID-19 will take more than a shift in your communications. It will require a real change in behavior. Right now, people are experiencing a whole slew of complex and contradictory emotions. Some of these feelings are ephemeral and are changing every day; others like uncertainty are staying around for the time being. So to truly connect with people where they are, you have to speak their emotional language. That’s why having your brand behave in a more emotionally charged way and putting the focus on building truly meaningful experiences is what really matters right now.

At Emotive Brand, we’ve built our methodology on our belief in the power of emotion. Our methodology has never proved more important or relevant than now. Emotive brands forge emotional and meaningful brand connections by caring deeply about people and aligning their actions and communications to the deep-rooted human needs, desires, and aspirations of all those important to the brand.

We see the keystones of such connections as empathy, compassion, and mindfulness. In our seminal white paper, “Transforming your brand,” we introduce these key drivers of thinking in this way:

“Emotive brand strategies use empathy to better understand and address the needs, values, interests and aspirations of people, both within and outside of your business. As such, we take your brand’s positive attributes and match them against what we know about the ideas and ideals that people care about, connect to, and that can change their behavior. We also encourage our clients to adopt new behaviors that are more empathetic toward both their employees and customers, and to use the insights they gain to identify ways to make their workplace and offerings more personally relevant and emotionally important in the moment.”

Why Empathy?

Empathy is being able to vicariously experience how another experiences something. It’s not actually having the same experience, but rather allowing yourself to see the world from another’s perspective. For example, you don’t have to be blind to understand what life is like without the key sense of sight. Empathy is an innate trait (children are naturally empathetic), and simply needs to be sourced from within. We take an empathetic view of your audiences and then assess how your brand addresses their deepest needs. The results are sometimes unexpected, but always gratifying to our clients, and cultivating empathy is especially essential in navigating uncertain times like these.

Why Compassion?

Compassion is putting the insights you gain through empathy into practice in a helpful way. This is the essence of problem-solving. You come to understand another’s needs and then redesign products, experiences, and communications accordingly. This means greater creativity, innovation, and a continually broadening perspective. We turn to our compassionate nature to translate the unique intersection between your brand and basic human needs into actionable practices that bring the resulting meaning to life.

Why Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the practice of being more aware of the surrounding world and more alive to its inherent possibilities. It is about having a broader perspective and a universal respect for others. It is recognizing that more unites us than separates us. It is about being humble, feeling connected, harnessing and using energy in new and more gratifying ways. When you employ a mindful attitude in everything you do, you enable a mutually-beneficial balance between your tangible business needs and the intangible meaning that will help your brand thrive in a COVID-19 world and beyond.

Every brand strategy we develop embraces the practices of empathy, compassion, and mindfulness. Through this we are better able to match your brand’s attributes with what truly matters to people today on deep and meaningful levels. At the same time, the brand behaviors we develop aim to promote these factors on both leadership and organizational levels.

Making Meaning A Way Of Doing Business

Organizations and leaders are often overwhelmed by circumstances and respond by turning inward both as individuals and on an organizational level. A state of mindfulness enables organizations and leaders to rise above the immediate situation and to turn outward to others on a deeper and more personal level.

Brand behavior that promotes an empathetic, compassionate, and mindful culture helps ensure that your brand will evolve into the most meaningful state possible. As a foundation for your brand culture, these vital traits also make sure that your brand’s meaningful way of being is sustainable and enduring.

As brands seek to confront the challenges of this new world, it’s only natural that they turn to meaning. But it is important to remember that it’s one thing to claim meaning, and quite another to continuously create meaning both within and outside your brand organization. When empathy, compassion, and mindfulness inform the organization, drive its decision-making, and shape its vision, meaning goes beyond being a buzzword and becomes a way of doing business.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

A recent New York Times Magazine article, “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” went viral and became one of the most emailed and widely shared stories for days – for good reason, in our opinion. Building a good team is a difficult task for most companies, organizations, agencies, classrooms, and families alike. And building the perfect team? That often feels impossible.

So why do some groups thrive? Why do others falter? Is there a key to team success? These were the questions Google set out to answer. Here’s our spin on what Google discovered.

Teams = Teams

The best teams are teams and not just collections of individuals. A team is bigger than the sum of its part – at least it should be.

Oftentimes, when people are placed in a team, they enter the group with already well-established boundaries and preconceived ideas about hierarchy, roles, and regulations. When this happens, the team focuses more on meeting deadlines and goals and their interactions become less collaborative. Of course, deadlines and goals are important for any organization, but the purpose of a team is much more significant. Teams should be focused on collaborating in pursuit of creativity and building new ideas. The best teams are the most collaborative ones.

So, try starting a team effort with a different mindset: collaborative, respectful, and honest. Think of your teammates as people who are on your side working towards a common good. Try to take advantage of their strengths, opinions, and experiences that each individual brings to the table, instead of trying to compete with one another, outperform another teammate, or simply please your co-workers or leader.

Empathy and Emotional Intelligence Matter

In their research, Google unearthed what separates good teams from dysfunctional ones, and the answer surprised them. It’s all about how teammates treat each other while working together.

When team members treat each other with respect and exhibit empathy and compassion, the overall intelligence of the team increases. When people are socially sensitive – for example, when they notice subtle signs of how others are feeling, such as tone of voice, facial cues, and body language – teams excel, producing better results.

In team situations, it’s important to take time to set aside your personal or professional motivations. Instead, notice the other people in the room. How are your co-workers feeling? How are you making them feel? How can you be more empathetic to their needs and desires? This kind of unselfish, empathetic mindset can help move your team and overall business forward as a whole.

Psychological Safety and Emotional Sharing

We’ve been saying this for years, but it was gratifying to read what Google wrote about this additional finding : feelings matter. A lot. Feeling safe, also known as psychological safety, matters more to building a successful team than any other factor – more than clear goals or establishing a culture of dependency. Feeling safe matters the most.

Which makes sense. You can’t be open, receptive, or even engaged if you’re fearful about your role in the team and/or how you’re being perceived.

The challenge is that psychological safety isn’t easily measured or implemented. There’s no simple formula for ensuring it, but communication, empathy, and connectedness definitely help to foster it.

Google discovered one easy and effective tactic for establishing and fostering psychological safety: emotional sharing. When people share something personal and human, they create authentic human bonds. In any human relationship, professional or personal, when emotional discussions become the norm (frequent, comfortable), the relationship becomes more successful.

So don’t just jump into the subject of the meeting. Start a meeting by asking how people are doing or feeling. Share something about yourself and show a little vulnerability. Be human. You are human. We all are. Why should that be different when you’re working with a team?

Experience > Optimization

Most business goals tend to focus on optimization. But Google’s research finds that team success actually hinges upon the experience of the team effort itself, not on optimizing team productivity.

How do people feel about the project? How do they feel about the future? Do clients trust their agencies? Do employees feel safe enough to share opinions and thoughts equally with peers? Lots of aspects of a business can be optimized, but a person’s feelings most definitely cannot. If you really want to succeed, don’t try to optimize teamwork; humanize it. By approaching team building in this way, you will create a naturally optimized environment.

All in all, it makes sense that an organization as performance-driven and innovative as Google would make such a strong effort to understand how teams work and how to make them work better. But the surprising takeaway is that the latest technology and careful planning don’t necessarily accelerate successful teamwork. The thing to do – and this fits in well with our experience at Emotive Brand – is to be human and emotive and learn to enjoy the experience.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

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Tag: Emotional Intelligence

Emotional and Meaningful Brand Connections Matter Right Now