How to Succeed in Business, Despite Your Emotions

Have you ever started a business that felt great to your ego but just didn’t make sense?

This week, I was offered just such a business partnership. It would have been wonderful for my ego. It was a fantastic brand with which to collaborate and a high-profile venue, with worldwide recognition. All my family and friends were impressed. Yet, it made absolutely no business sense.
How often do we make business decisions based purely on our emotions rather than on logic, insight, and real business savvy? This was my prime example. Had I become involved in this enterprise, I would have done so for all the wrong reasons—all the emotional reasons. Though logic told me this wouldn’t be the best course of action, I could easily have let my emotions win the battle; but, thankfully, common sense won.

For me, this experience has highlighted the importance of a simple yet crucial principle: Emotions are the worst criteria on which to base our business decisions and also the worst indicators that those decisions have been wisely made. While we wouldn’t want to discount our intuition entirely when making business decisions, because that would rob us of a whole dimension of our humanity; it’s just as true that logic and clear thinking must predominate, keeping our emotions in check, when the time for a final decision arrives.

As we allow ourselves to weigh all sides of the matter objectively, without feeling bound by what others think or expect of us or the prestige a particular business decision might bring us, we enjoy greater freedom to make the choice that would benefit us most in the long run.

In a small business, we often treat our employees as if they were family. When those employees disappoint us, as so often happens, we feel hurt. We think, “How could s/he do this to me? I treated her/him like family.” While these experiences can be painful, they do teach us an important lesson: Though it’s always right to treat others well, in a business environment we mustn’t allow ourselves to take everything personally.

The challenge in this arena is to remain human while still stepping back just far enough to see the situation objectively—at least from a business standpoint. Though we may still feel personally hurt by an employee’s failure to live up to our expectations, we must nevertheless subordinate those negative emotions to our better business judgment. This will free us from being ruled by our emotions and responding in an emotional manner and will allow us to draw instead on our powers of logic to separate those personal feelings from the requirements of running our businesses effectively. It will also make dealing with our employees on a professional, employer-to-employee level, far easier.

One way to remain more objective in a business environment is to discuss issues rather than actions or people’s specific involvement in them. Rather than stating that an employee has done something wrong, try discussing the problem itself in a less-personal way. Make up your mind to be failure-tolerant, knowing that every failure presents an opportunity for learning and growth. This will make your employees far more likely to recognize their own errors, without feelings of defensiveness and without feeling as if they’ve been attacked, criticized, or put down.

Approaching problems as shared challenges to be collaboratively overcome for your mutual benefit—and that of the company for which you both work—will give your employees greater buy-in where your company’s vision and objectives are concerned, which can help build greater loyalty. In this way, they will begin to see that failure isn’t necessarily the end, but can instead be the beginning of greater success in the future. This will not only empower your employees to seek new ways of improving their own performance but will also give them an incentive for doing so.

Failure tolerance will also help you as a business leader by taking your dealings with your employees out of the emotional realm and placing them squarely into the realm of reason, thereby creating a less emotionally charged, more balanced and business-like atmosphere at work.

Dealing with emotions can be tricky in business, whether those emotions are our own or others’. That’s why it’s helpful to realize that, though we may experience an emotion—and even recognize and accept its validity—we aren’t required to allow that emotion to control us or dictate our reactions to others. Despite that emotion, we are still completely free to use our better judgment to determine the most appropriate response in any given circumstance. Keeping our heads when emotions threaten to overwhelm us will provide the mental space we need to deliberately choose to do the things that will be most beneficial to our businesses—and at the same time, to ourselves.