Business

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ASP at Work                           a brief look at ASP in Business

Getting Emotional at Work    a Blog by Daven Morrison, MD

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Applications in Business

Here at The Tomkins Institute we are curious about emotions. Because people spend a great deal of their lives working, and people will “get emotional”, it makes sense to explore the role of emotions in the workplace.

Yet although we find emotions fascinating, this is not true for everyone. In fact, as most people don’t like snakes but herpetologists do, most people at work don’t want to deal with emotions. We at the institute do. Very much so, in fact. We find feelings, emotions, affects (a term clinicians and behavioral scientists call our biologically wired emotions) delightfully fascinating. In general the work place respect emotions but those who go to work (including many executives I work with) find feelings confusing at best, or worthless at the worst.

At work the ultimate goal is task completion, and emotions for many trained in accounting, law, engineering, and even unfortunately, medicine, too, are seen as “soft stuff”. Being soft means that our emotions are not rational, and therefore unimportant derailers that waste time and interfere with task completion. So, emotions are generally unwelcome in any workplace.

But. Emotions come to the workplace anyway.