Emotions matter for leaders, for teams, for organizations, they matter because emotional experiences create and indicate, how people are going to behave. Action tendencies, they provide these insights as to how people are going to behave. Because they provide clues about, how others are interpreting their environment, how they're focusing our attention on certain things and not others. All of this together helps us better understand, how people will move in a particular situation. The behaviors they're likely or unlikely to enact, but reading emotions from faces, from vocal intonations et cetera, can be challenging, especially at work. The challenge however, is something worthy to try to overcome, because of how part and parcel emotion recognition is to collaborations. Much is actually lost when we rely only on the spoken word, here we're going to focus more deeply on the bottom half of the model. And in particular social awareness, your ability to accurately read the dynamic reactions of both individuals and groups. In the words of my favorite Sufi poet Rumi, let's soul speak with the silent articulation of a face. He was capturing a deep insight about, how much we convey through nonverbal gestures, and in particular how much of that, comes through in our faces. A lot of research has been devoted since Darwin here pictured on the right, had proposed that there is a fundamental signaling function we have in our face. Whether we signal intentionally or unintentionally, these small cues allow us to coordinate action. Whether we're conveying frustration, fear, hope or surprise or other, more complex emotions, these things allow groups and humans to better coordinate their actions. There's fascinating research that's been done with the visually impaired and comparing, how their emotions are displayed in relation. Or in comparison to those who are sighted, what's fascinating about this work is that you see very similar emotional cues being displayed. When people are excited, disappointed, elated, sad, and what it tells us is that there is something fundamental about emotion expressions. That goes beyond something that we have just learned in our culture, or context when we feel a certain way. Our body actually provides certain signature cues that others can read. And so this research is very important in allowing us to see that, despite some cultural variation, some accents, and how people display emotions. There is a core humanity behind this, in a wonderful way and twist of this is that you can think of it as a. [FOREIGN] In that your ability to read another's emotions can transcend cultural differences. So, if you're in a context where you may not fully understand the language, or you're unfamiliar with norms and traditions. You'll still be able to glean certain aspects of, how people are thinking and feeling. And importantly, how they might be communicating explicitly with you, another example of, how important reading emotions and being socially aware is. Comes from the case of thinking about IPOs, so an IPO, an initial public offering, actually in particular IPO Roadshows. Is where the founders or leaders of a company, go on the road and actually have presentations and conversations. With institutional investors, folks, with the really big Bucks who could potentially invest a lot of money into these companies. Now, when you think about it here really on both sides of the table, you have people who are first and foremost focused on the Dollars. On the numbers, on all of the various metrics, these are not necessarily a professional psychologist or mind readers. Or people who would admit necessarily, that they very much are good at reading minds and reading emotions. And yet despite the fact that no new information can be shared during this roadshows, rendering them relatively useless in terms of gaining new insights. People feel that there is something you get by seeing the person, being able to size them up. So, here in a context where again you wouldn't think social awareness, would be part of the professional norms or even competencies. You find evidence by virtue of people really wanting to go to these roadshows, there is something, we really value in being attuned to another person. And seeing them in person, you're even remote, but preferably they see this desire to read people in the moment. So, it's just another case example of, how fundamental and how important this social awareness will be.
