Performers call it “reading the crowd” or “sizing up the audience.”
However you put it, new research from University of Michigan professor Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks shows this skill, which he calls emotional aperture, isn’t just important for performers. It can define your success as a business leader.
He and a team of colleagues built on longstanding work in emotional intelligence research — the ability to read and react to people’s emotions — and applied it to the collective setting relevant to business leaders.
“Leaders don’t have the luxury of one-on-one meetings with all members of their organization, and we’ve overlooked the unique challenges and potential benefits of reading the emotional distribution of a team, unit, or a division,” said Sanchez-Burks, professor of management and organizations at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business.
In three studies, Sanchez-Burks and his colleagues show that business leaders better able to read the nonverbal emotional cues of a group are more successful in the eyes of their subordinates. They also showed that one’s skill in reading individual emotional cues doesn’t carry over to reading a crowd’s.
The results will be published in an upcoming special edition of the journal Cognition and Emotion. Sanchez-Burks’ co-authors are Laura Rees of Vanderbilt University, Caroline Bartel of the University of Texas and Quy Huy of INSEAD Singapore.
To perform the studies, the team developed a test — the emotional aperture measure — that rates your ability to read collective emotions and allows you to learn how to adjust. The test is based on changes in facial expressions among groups of people.
It’s a technique used in leadership training for Ross MBAs and in executive education.
“Many times, reasonable people in business try to hide their authentic emotional reactions to organizational events and a leader’s message,” Sanchez-Burks said. “But our research shows that good leaders are able to decode these fleeting micro facial expressions people are not good at controlling and adjust accordingly.”
