STOP Managing Your Emotions!
Have you provided your leaders with Emotional Intelligence training or a Mindfulness App in hopes that this would lower their stress, reduce conflict, and increase accountability?
If yes, you've likely seen that these techniques HAVE reduced stress and conflict BUT have also LOWERED accountability and performance:
Cognitive reappraisal reduces employees’ responsiveness to threats and setbacks. Rethinking reappraisal: The double-edged sword of regulating negative emotions in the workplace
Mindfully breathing through negative emotions reduces employees’ motivation to address their concerns. Mindfulness meditation reduces guilt and prosocial reparation
But do you know why?
A breakthrough discovery about the relationship between emotions, needs, and behavior explains it.
95% of an employee’s daily decisions are driven by subconscious needs—such as:
the need to achieve goals,
the need to mitigate risks,
the need to assert rights,
the need to uphold ethics.
When the employee is not on track to meet a need, the subconscious generates a negative emotion to alert the conscious mind—just like a dashboard warning light.
Frustration signals: “I need to achieve a goal.”
Anger signals: “I need to assert a right.”
Anxiety signals: “I need to mitigate a risk.”
Guilt signals: “I need to uphold an ethic.”
Interpreted correctly, these emotions improve performance. Frustration fuels innovation. Anxiety enhances risk awareness. Guilt drives accountability.
Unfortunately, most employees make two costly mistakes:
They misattribute emotions to events and circumstances (“He made me angry”), which locks them into a victim mindset.
They try to regulate their emotions instead of decoding them—suppressing the very signals designed to improve performance.
The truth is simple:
Regulating emotions reduces stress and conflict - but LOWERS performance and accountability.
Decoding emotions transforms stress into creativity, conflict into collaboration, and blame into accountability - while RAISING performance.
Want to learn how leading organizations are applying this breakthrough?
Download our white paper: How Emotion-Decoding Drives Peak Performance or email me at terry@terryhildebrandt.com