The Cost of Emotions in the Workplace: The Bottom Line Value of Emotional Continuity Management - Softcover

Mitchell, Vali Hawkins

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1931332584 ISBN 13: 9781931332583

Publisher: Rothstein Associates, Incorporated, 2013

Synopsis

Finally – a people management guide that goes way beyond the typical "problem employee" books to help you understand and manage the entire emotional culture of your organization. Many of us have witnessed – sometimes in helpless horror – how a simple problem can spin into a corporate crisis as people take sides, outside professionals are brought in, and company reputations suffer, as this description illustrates: "Everything was exposed and raw as if a common energy had stripped away the veneer of civilized behaviors...People took sides, hid, ran, quit, overworked, underworked, ate too much, drank more, complained more, went silent, changed jobs, exited. They reacted as if all their system had been tossed into the air and was never going to land again." This wasn't the scene of a criminal act, earthquake, or terrorist attack. Rather, it was the disruptive and costly outcome of months of escalating workplace tension in the wake of changed management policies. Like a tornado, two violent co-workers had left 600 others in emotional rubble. That company could have been prepared with corporate policies and procedures to defuse such emotionally charged situations - long before alarming human and financial costs hit its bottom line. Managers could have learned to recognize and stop “emotional spinning” from gathering destructive force. The old paradigm of separating humans from humanity during work hours is not only antiquated thinking, it's high risk corporate behavior.
“Dr. Vali” calls her ground-breaking solution Emotional Continuity Management. She provides tools you can use right now to avoid costs in decreased productivity, injured goodwill, employee turnover, plummeting employee engagement, and severed business relationships.In this practical book, Dr. Vali gives you:
Real-life case studies that show you how to calculate bottom line, dollars and cents costs of disruptive employees and managers and emotionally charged incidents.
Proven techniques to help you identify variations in behavior that are early warning signs of trouble. She compares them to “tornado warnings” and provides a 5-point scale.
An understanding of the psychology driving “emotional terrorists,” who stage themselves as victims and gather an army of acolytes to assist in their campaigns of emotional disruption, and a game-plan for managing such attacks before, during and after an event.
Practical tools for managing workplace emotions before, during and after an emergency, based on the author’s extensive on-the-ground experience in counseling first responders and victims during major national and international disasters.
Policies and procedures for working with military veterans returning to the workplace - and the need to deal with PTSD.
Techniques for containing and mitigating the damage created by workplace bullies - and when to decide if an "amputation" is required or a less-extreme strategy is needed.
Sample policies and plans, and detailed instructions for company-wide training programs, up and down the organization.

About this title

About the Author

Vali Hawkins Mitchell, Ph.D., LMHC, jokes that she made a career choice at birth: she was born in the middle of an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale!
"Call it fate, call it divine intervention or simply the result of a very impressionistic and inquisitive mind," she says, "but I've made a career of studying how individuals, organizations, and communities deal with the emotional reactions that come during and following crises or catastrophic disasters."
"Call it fate, call it divine intervention or simply the result of a very impressionistic and inquisitive mind," she says, "but I've made a career of studying how individuals, organizations, and communities deal with the emotional reactions that come during and following crises or catastrophic disasters."
Dr. Vali holds a Doctorate in Health Education and Masters degrees in Applied Psychology and Expressive Arts Therapy. She is a highly regarded public speaker, trainer, author, consultant, and educator.
A valued mentor and keynote speaker, she offers critical insights on the real human factors of disaster and emergency planning based on her experiences with major events such as the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina, Samoan earthquakes, the Indonesian tsunami, and Pacific Northwest Wildfires. She is considered by many as the leading authority in the growing field of Emotional Continuity Management.
As a counselor, she has been trained by the American Red Cross as a Disaster Mental Health provider and National Diversity Instructor, and has been engaged by the US Department of Defense to consult directly with military families, veterans, and service members in all branches since 2009.
As a business consultant and educator, Dr. Vali travels extensively, providing custom-designed trainings for individuals and teams, private and government agencies and businesses from mom-and-pop companies to large corporations.
Dr. Vali is the author of Emotional Terrors in the Workplace Protecting Your Bottom Line; Dr. Vali's Survival Guide: Tips for the Journey; Preparing a Go-Bag; and a number of plays, musicals, and children's titles. She is a performance musician and award-winning artist. She is a Registered Expressive Arts Therapist (REAT) and is based in Seattle, Washington.

Review

At the Business Continuity Institute, we have always defined our mission in terms of promoting the art and science of Business Continuity Management (BCM), and I have often been challenged about what we precisely mean by that phrase. The science part is easy techniques and methods for ensuring operational continuity will suffice. However, the art side has been altogether more difficult to explain, but, now that we have this new book by Dr. Vali Hawkins Mitchell, I suspect that the art of BCM will no longer be hard to explain. I can now point questioners to The Cost of Emotions in the Workplace: The Bottom-Line Value of Emotional Continuity Management, confident that they will understand precisely what we mean.

I wonder how many BCM professionals have ever considered an emotional tornado or an emotional terrorist as a major risk to their organization? Do they know how to read the warning signs that human emotions could spin out of control to cause a catastrophe? Well, they should, and after reading what Dr. Vali says in this book, they certainly will in the future. Traditionally, in the world of BCM we talk about risks and threats to our organizations, such as computer failures, natural disasters, supply chain disruption, or a pandemic. This book examines the risk and threats that people can pose to a business, such as brand and reputational damage, litigation, employee turnover, and even criminal behavior.

Although people are always considered in BCM plans, they are often treated as a recoverable resource numbers to be counted and skills to be replaced. However, actual human behavior in BCM is rarely thought about in the planning, response, or recovery phases, and where it is mentioned it is usually at the bottom of the priority list. Maybe after reading this book, and learning more about the fiscal risk and hidden costs of emotions, organizations will be persuaded to look more closely at this commonly overlooked subject and begin to see the benefit of emotional continuity management.

Many organizations take a macho approach to management, and for those companies, the subject matter of this book might be regarded as irrelevant to the bottom line or getting the job done in an emergency. This book effectively debunks that point of view, systematically producing evidence and arguing a compelling case. Dr. Vali connects human emotions directly to cost and increased risk, which should definitely take human emotions much higher up the board agenda.

Emotional continuity is not a soft subject; rather, it is about emotional readiness and paying attention to the way business and humans interact. in this book, the chapter on Emotional Continuity Management for Disasters is particularly fascinating for BCM professionals, as it talks about how to plan for the emotional consequences of disasters. Clearly, direct comparisons can be drawn between good practice in traditional BCM and good practice in Emotional Business Continuity Management. Thus, emotional continuity management is definitely high on the list of new topics for BCM practitioners to master.

You will find Dr. Vali s book to be both an excellent read and a great catalyst for generating new ideas about how these concepts could be incorporated in your mission statement. If you are open-minded about BCM, I suggest you read this book now and start applying its principles well before the next major incident impacts your organization.
--Lyndon Bird FBCI, Technical Director, Business Continuity Institute

You'll look with new eyes at the enormous role played by human emotions in today's business. I endorse this new book as a guide for the 21st century global workforce.
--James J.Cappola, MD, Ph.D., Medical Director, Medical Affairs, Harvard Clinical Research Institute --Martin Greenwood, Former Executive Director, Verizon Communications

As an undergraduate, I majored in Business but my curiosity and desire to better understand the human condition led me to complete a degree in Psychology, as well. While I ultimately completed an MBA in Management Information Systems, I never lost my interest in Psychology and the human condition. Thus, as an IT leader, I can contrast the behavior of computers and the behaviors of people.

In The Cost of Emotions in the Workplace: The Bottom-Line Value of Emotional Continuity Management, Dr. Vali Hawkins Mitchell provides the concepts, theories, and real life examples that put much of the behavior I ve seen as a corporate leader into context. Her book compels us to accept that people have emotions and to consider that those emotions when out of control and unmanaged have real measurable impacts on an organization. While most people will accept these propositions in theory, but very few companies currently provide training for their managers in what Dr. Mitchell calls emotional continuity management.

Like myself, many readers of this book will inevitably bring to mind many real life examples corresponding to situations and characters Dr. Mitchell describes here. For example, in one company, I recall a manager who was smart and talented and whose team was well respected. From the outside, it looked like a well-functioning team and he appeared to be dedicated, hardworking, and demanding. What people didn t know was that when he was alone with his staff, he would ridicule and berate people in front of their peers. He was a perfect fit for what Dr. Mitchell describes as a workplace bully or even an emotional terrorist. Eventually, a member of his group brought his behavior to the attention of HR. Looking back at that situation, I can only speculate how months of that treatment impacted the morale and productivity of his group. After reading Dr. Mitchell s book, I wonder if only he, his people, and his superiors had been trained in emotional continuity management, would his behavior have been identified and addressed sooner and more effectively for his group and for the corporation?

Unfortunately, the behavior I just described is not limited to lower levels of management. I remember a Senior VP at one company, who was known for using well attended conference calls to loudly and aggressively attack individuals not only members of his own group but members of other groups. His behavior was completely destructive, but it was tolerated by the highest decision-makers due to this VP s level, his power, and his significant contributions to the company. Still, one can only imagine the direct and indirect costs, both in terms of productivity and the bottom line.

Dr. Mitchell explains the need to understand human emotions in the workplace, helping the reader to understand the difference between normal emotions and reactions and destructive behaviors, providing a context for identifying warning signs of problematic behaviors and situations. She approaches the subject not from a purely theoretical view but through a wealth of real life examples of organizations that ignored situations until they became toxic to the bottom line of the business. The Cost of Emotions in the Workplace: The Bottom-Line Value of Emotional Continuity Management will cause you to think about a subject that many in the world of business choose to ignore until they run smack into it. Dr. Mitchell makes a strong argument that everyone in an organization needs the tools and training to manage emotions, and that emotional continuity management will be effective only when there is buy-in from the most senior management.

--Martin Greenwood, Former Executive Director, Verizon Communications --___

Provides concepts, theories, and real life examples that put much of the behavior I ve seen as a corporate leader into context. Compels us to accept that people have emotions, and to consider that those emotions when out of control and unmanaged have real, measurable impacts on an organization. --Martin Greenwood, Former Executive Director, Verizon Communications

About this edition

• Publisher: Rothstein Associates, Incorporated
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1931332584
• ISBN 13: 9781931332583
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 298