Latest / The Human Factor: Exploring the Intersection of Humanity, Technology, and Transformation / S2 Episode 015: The Contagion Effect - How Emotions Spread Through Organizations During Change and Transformation

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S2 Episode 015: The Contagion Effect - How Emotions Spread Through Organizations During Change and Transformation · The Human Factor: Exploring the Intersection of Humanity, Technology, and Transformation

0:08
AVP of operations pulled me aside six weeks into a major
0:12
systems transformation, he said. Kevin, something strange is
0:16
happening. My team was fine three months
0:19
ago. They were engaged, they were
0:21
collaborative, they were willing to learn.
0:24
Now half of them are quietly updating their resumes and the
0:29
other half won't make eye contact in meetings.
0:32
Nothing happened to them directly.
0:35
The transformation hasn't even reached their department yet.
0:39
I asked him one question. How's your leadership team
0:42
handling the change? There was a really long pause.
0:46
Then he said, honestly, our CTO hasn't slept in weeks.
0:51
Our CFO keeps questioning the ROI in every meeting, and our
0:57
CEO smiles through every town hall, but everyone can tell is
1:02
performative. His team wasn't reacting to the
1:06
transformation, They were reacting to the anxiety that was
1:10
radiating from the people above them.
1:12
The emotions that travel 3 levels down to the org chart
1:16
before a single process achieves.
1:19
That's not a communication failure.
1:22
That's emotional contagion. And it's one of the most
1:25
powerful and least understood forces and organizational
1:30
transformation. I'm Kevin Novak, CEO of 2040,
1:34
Digital professor at the University of Maryland and
1:38
author of The Truth about Transformation, Leading in the
1:41
Age of AI, Uncertainty, and Human Complexity, along with the
1:46
Ideas and Innovations weekly newsletter.
1:49
Welcome to the Human Factor podcast, the show that explores
1:53
the intersection of humanity, technology, and transformation,
1:58
along with the psychology behind transformation success.
2:02
Today, Elizabeth Stewart and I are exploring the contagion
2:06
effect and how emotions spread through organizations during
2:11
change and transformation. In our last episode, we kicked
2:16
off Season 2 by exploring the identity crisis of expertise.
2:20
What happens psychologically when the very knowledge and
2:24
skills that made people successful become the barriers
2:28
that prevent them from adapting to change and transformation?
2:32
We walk through the five identity threads the
2:35
transformation creates for experienced professionals,
2:39
competence, threat, relevance thread, status thread, narrative
2:44
thread, and community thread. And we introduced the identity
2:48
transition framework for helping people navigate between who they
2:52
were and who they're becoming. Today we're asking a critical
2:57
follow up question. What happens to that identity
3:01
thread and the anxiety that accompanies it once it takes
3:05
home because it doesn't stay contained in the person
3:09
experiencing it? It moves.
3:11
It spreads through teams, across departments, and throughout
3:16
entire organizations in ways that it can accelerate adoption
3:20
or silently destroy initiatives before they gain traction.
3:26
Elizabeth Stewart is back with me today.
3:29
Elizabeth, for our listeners who may be joining us for the first
3:33
time, you've been a recurring voice on this show exploring the
3:37
human psychology of organizational change.
3:40
Welcome back. Thank you, Kevin.
3:43
It's great to be back. I think emotional contagion is a
3:47
topic that explains so many of the transformation failures that
3:51
organizations chalk up to other causes.
3:54
They blame the technology, the timeline, the budget, even the
3:58
vendor consultant. But what actually happened was
4:01
that fear travelled faster the information, and by the time the
4:05
initiative reached the front line, the emotional environment
4:09
had already turned against it. That's exactly right.
4:13
And and what makes this so dangerous is that most leaders
4:16
have no idea it's happening. They can see overt resistance.
4:21
They can measure engagement scores.
4:23
But emotional contagion operates beneath conscious awareness.
4:28
People absorb the emotions of those around them automatically
4:32
without recognizing they're doing it.
4:34
By the time you see the behavioral symptoms, the
4:37
emotional infection has already spread.
4:41
Today, we're going to cover the science behind how emotions
4:45
actually travel through organizations.
4:48
Why transformation creates perfect conditions for negative
4:53
emotional contagion. The specific patterns leaders
4:56
need to recognize and, and what you can do about it to manage
5:01
emotional contagion rather than by being destroyed by it.
5:06
So let's start with the science, Elizabeth.
5:09
Before we get into organizational dynamics, I think
5:13
it's important that we ground this in actual research.
5:16
Emotional contagion isn't a metaphor, it's a documented
5:21
psychological phenomenon with decades of research behind it.
5:25
Absolutely, Kevin. The foundational work here comes
5:28
from the psychologist Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo and
5:33
Richard Rapson. The research, published in the
5:37
1990s and validated and extended to this date, established that
5:42
human beings automatically and continuously mimic the facial
5:46
expressions, vocal patterns, postures, and movements of
5:50
people around them. This mimicry happens in
5:54
milliseconds, well below conscious awareness, and it
5:57
triggers corresponding emotional states in the person doing the
6:01
mimicking. So when you're sitting across
6:03
from someone who is anxious, your face begins with subtlety
6:07
to mirror their tension. Then your body shifts to match
6:11
their posture, and through the physical mimicry you begin to
6:15
actually feel the anxiety yourself.
6:17
And this isn't a choice. This is someone deciding to feel
6:21
anxious because their manager seems worried.
6:24
It's neurological. The brain's mirror neuron
6:27
system, which neuroscientists have studied extensively since
6:31
the mid 1990s, means we are literally wired to absorb the
6:35
emotional states of the people around us.
6:38
It served an evolutionary purpose.
6:40
If someone in your group sensed danger, you needed to feel that
6:44
danger too, without waiting for a verbal explanation.
6:47
So the speed of emotional transfer became a survival
6:51
advantage. The problem, Gavin, is that the
6:54
same mechanism that helped our ancestors survive predator
6:57
threats now operates in conference rooms and on video
7:01
calls. Siegel, Barsaid at the Wharton
7:04
School, conducted some of the most important research on this
7:08
in the organizational settings. Her 2000 study, which has been
7:13
cited extensively in organizational behaviour
7:16
literature, demonstrated that a single person's emotional state
7:20
could shift the mood of an entire group.
7:23
She found that positive emotional contagion improve
7:27
cooperation and decrease conflict, while negative
7:31
emotional contagion increase conflict and reduce cooperation,
7:36
and the group members were largely unaware that their
7:39
emotions had been influenced by others.
7:42
That that last point is crucial. People don't realize their
7:46
emotional estate has been shaped by someone else's emotions.
7:49
They attribute their feelings to their own assessment of the
7:52
situation. A-Team member who absorbs
7:55
anxiety from a leader doesn't think I'm feeling anxious
7:58
because my manager is anxious. They think I'm feeling anxious
8:02
because this transformation is going to be a disaster.
8:06
The emotion arise first, and the brain then constructs A rational
8:10
explanation after the fact. This is what makes emotional
8:14
contagion so powerful and so invisible in a transformational
8:19
context. The research from Nicholas
8:21
Christakis and James Fowler on social networks adds another
8:25
dimension. Their work demonstrated that
8:29
emotional states can spread across up to 3° of separation in
8:33
social networks. You don't have to be in direct
8:36
contact with the anxious leader. If your managers, manager,
8:40
manager is experiencing identity threat and the anxiety that
8:45
comes with it, that emotional state can reach you through the
8:48
chain of social connections even if you've never met the person
8:52
at the origin of that anxiety. 3° of separation and a typical
8:58
organizational hierarchy covers enormous ground.
9:02
Aceo, who is experiencing fear about a transformation.
9:05
Success can generate emotional contagion that reaches frontline
9:10
employees through multiple pathways, through direct
9:12
reports, through informal networks, and through meeting
9:15
dynamics through the way decisions are communicated or
9:19
delayed. And each person along the change
9:22
doesn't just pass the emotion forward, they amplify it, or
9:27
they transform it based on their own psychology.
9:31
That amplification effect is something the research is very
9:35
clear about. When someone absorbs anxiety
9:39
from a leader and then adds their own identity, threat or
9:43
competence concerns on top of it, the emotion they transmit to
9:47
the next person is often more intense than what they receive.
9:52
It's not a neutral relay, it's an escalation.
9:56
Organizational psychologist Daniel Goleman's work on
9:59
emotional intelligence has shown that negative emotions tend to
10:03
be more contagious than positive ones, and they spread faster.
10:08
This is consistent with what neuroscience tells us about the
10:11
brain's negativity bias, the tendency to give more weight and
10:15
attention to negative stimuli, which has been documented in
10:20
numerous studies over the past two decades.
10:23
So what we're dealing with in transformation is not just
10:26
people having individual emotional reactions that change.
10:30
We're dealing with a system level phenomenon where emotions
10:33
travel through the organizations separate social networks,
10:37
amplifying as they go, operating below conscious awareness and
10:42
shaping how people interpret or respond to the transformation
10:46
before they've had any direct experience with it.
10:49
Elizabeth, let's talk about why organizational transformation
10:54
creates ideal conditions for emotional contagion to operate
10:59
at its most destructive. There's several factors given
11:03
that converge during transformation that make
11:05
emotional contagion particularly powerful.
11:09
The first, of course, is uncertainty.
11:11
Research on stress and cognition consistently shows that
11:15
uncertainty heightens emotional sensitivity.
11:18
When people don't know what's coming, when roles are unclear,
11:23
when timelines shift, when the end state isn't well defined,
11:27
their brains become more vigilant about scanning the
11:30
environment for potential or imagined signs of threats.
11:34
And the primary source of those signs or cues isn't the official
11:37
communication. It's the emotional states of the
11:41
people around them, especially the people above them in the
11:45
hierarchy. And this connects directly to
11:48
what we discussed in our last episode about identity threat.
11:51
When leaders are processing their own anxiety about whether
11:55
their expertise, their role, their relevance will survive the
11:58
transformation, they're broadcasting that anxiety
12:02
through every interaction. Their tone in meetings shift
12:07
their response time and emails change.
12:09
Their body language during presentations tells a different
12:13
story than their words, and every person in the room is
12:16
unconsciously reading those signals and absorbing the
12:19
emotional content. The second factor is what
12:23
researchers call social referencing.
12:26
This is well documented in developmental psychology, where
12:30
infants look to their caregivers facial expressions to determine
12:34
whether a situation is safe or threatening, and also the same
12:38
thing in organizations, particularly during times of
12:41
uncertainty. They look to leaders, to
12:44
respected colleagues, to informal influencers to
12:48
determine how they should feel about what's happening.
12:51
If the people they're looking to offer emotional cues are
12:53
radiating fear, that fear becomes a shared emotional
12:57
baseline for the group. And here's where it gets really
13:01
interesting from a transformation perspective.
13:04
The people who are most likely to be experiencing intense
13:07
emotions during transformation, senior leaders, the technical
13:11
experts, the long tenured employees who identities are
13:15
most tied to the current state are also the people most others
13:19
are looking to for emotional guidance.
13:22
The research on emotional contagion show us the people
13:25
with more power and status have disproportionately more
13:29
influence on group emotional states.
13:32
A leader's anxiety is more contagious than a peers anxiety.
13:36
A respected experts fear about the transformation carries more
13:41
emotional weight than a junior employee's concerns.
13:45
Kevin The third factor is proximity and frequency of
13:48
contact. Emotional contagion requires
13:51
exposure. The more time you spend with
13:53
someone experiencing a strong emotion, the more likely you are
13:57
to absorb that emotion. During transformation,
14:01
organizations typically increase meeting frequency.
14:05
There are more town halls, more check insurance, more status
14:08
updates, more steering committee sessions.
14:11
Each of this is an exposure opportunity.
14:14
Organizations think they're improving communication and they
14:18
may be improving information transfer, but they're
14:21
simultaneously increasing the channels through which emotional
14:25
contagion operates. I've seen this pattern
14:28
repeatedly. An organization launches A
14:31
transformation, recognizes that communication is important,
14:36
dramatically increases the number of meetings and touch
14:39
points, and then watches engagement decline even as
14:42
communication increases. They're confused because they're
14:46
doing everything the change management playbooks recommend.
14:50
What they don't realize is that every meeting where leaders
14:54
unprocessed anxiety leaks through their carefully prepared
14:57
talking points is spreading negative emotion contagion
15:01
further and faster. So the 4th factor is the absence
15:06
of emotional processing. Time transformation typically
15:10
moves fast. Their deadlines, their
15:12
milestones, their deliverables. There's pressure to maintain
15:15
momentum. What gets sacrificed is the time
15:19
and space for people to process their emotional response to
15:22
change. And unprocessed emotions don't
15:26
disappear. They leak out in interactions.
15:29
It don't in micro expressions and in the way people respond or
15:33
don't respond to questions. They become the raw material for
15:37
emotional contagion. Yeah.
15:40
So if we put all this together, transformation creates high
15:44
uncertainty, which then increases emotional sensitivity,
15:48
it puts the most emotionally affected people in the most
15:52
visible and influential positions, it increases the
15:56
frequency of contact and exposure, and it eliminates the
16:00
time needed for emotional processing.
16:03
That's just not a contagion friendly environment.
16:07
That's a contagion optimized environment.
16:11
Let's get specific about what emotional contagion actually
16:15
looks like as it moves through an organization during
16:19
transformation. Elizabeth, in your experience,
16:23
what are the patterns that leaders need to recognize?
16:27
The 1st and most common pattern is what I'd call the anxiety
16:31
cascade. It starts at the top, often with
16:34
a single leader or a small leadership group or team
16:37
processing identity, threat, competence, anxiety, or
16:42
strategic uncertainty. That anxiety expresses itself
16:46
subtly to their behavior. Shorter responses in meetings.
16:50
More frequent requests for data and reassurance.
16:54
Decision delays disguised as prudent analysis.
16:57
A shifting tone from confident to cautious.
17:01
Their direct reports absorb the anxiety.
17:04
They add their own concerns and transmit an intensified version
17:07
to their teens. But that time it reaches the
17:10
front line. The original strategic
17:13
uncertainty has transformed into This whole thing is going to
17:17
fail and we're all going to lose our jobs.
17:21
And in that regard, I want to emphasize something about that
17:24
cascade. The message changes as the
17:27
emotion travels. The CEO might be experiencing
17:31
legitimate strategic concern about market timing.
17:34
That's a reasonable emotion for someone in that role, but by the
17:39
time it has travelled through 3 or 4 levels, it's no longer
17:43
strategic concern, it's an existential fear.
17:47
Each person in the chain interprets the emotion through
17:51
their own psychological lens in the enransmit, a version of that
17:56
reflecting their specific vulnerabilities.
17:59
The emotion is the carrier, but the narrative it attaches to
18:04
shifts at every level. The second pattern, Kevin, is
18:08
what researchers describe as emotional clustering for pockets
18:13
of shared emotional states form within teams or departments.
18:17
This happens when a particularly emotionally expressive
18:21
individual, often A-Team lead or informal influencer, sets the
18:26
emotional tone for the group. If that person is processing
18:30
change with anxiety and cynicism, the entire cluster
18:33
adapts at emotional stance. You end up with departments
18:37
where everyone knows this won't work, not because they've
18:41
independently evaluated the transformation, but because the
18:45
emotional environment has shaped a shared narrative.
18:50
Yeah, I've seen this organizations where two
18:52
departments sitting on the same floor doing the same work,
18:56
affected by the same transformation, have completely
19:00
opposite emotional orientations. 1 is cautiously optimistic, the
19:05
other is actively hostile. The difference isn't information
19:09
or even impact. The difference is the emotional
19:12
state of the person setting the tone for each group.
19:16
That's emotional contagion operating at the cluster level.
19:21
3rd pattern is what we call emotional suppression rebound.
19:25
This is particularly insidious, Gavin.
19:28
It happens when leaders are told, often by well meaning
19:31
change management consultants, that they need to project
19:34
confidence and positivity about the transformation regardless of
19:39
what they actually feel. The research on emotional
19:42
suppression, including work by James Gross at Stanford, is very
19:47
clear that suppressed emotions do not disappear.
19:50
They leak out through micro expressions, the tone of the
19:53
voice, the timing and the gap between words and non verbal
19:57
signals. What research describes as.
20:00
Behavioral leakage. Then here's the critical
20:04
finding. People are remarkably good at
20:08
detecting emotional and congruence.
20:10
When a leader says I'm excited about this transformation, but
20:15
their body language, their tone, their behavior between meetings
20:18
all signal anxiety, the recipients don't average those
20:23
signals. They weight the non verbal
20:26
signal more heavily because it feels more authentic.
20:30
Research and communication science has consistently shown
20:34
that when verbal and non verbal messages conflict, people
20:38
actually trust the non verbal message.
20:40
So the leader who suppresses their anxiety and projects false
20:44
confidence doesn't prevent emotional contagion.
20:48
They make it worse because they add distrust to the emotional
20:52
cocktail that's spreading throughout the organization.
20:56
Is exactly right. The emotion that spreads isn't
21:00
just anxiety anymore, it's anxiety.
21:02
Plus, leadership isn't being honest with us.
21:05
That combination is significantly more destructive
21:09
than authentic anxiety on its own.
21:11
At least authentic anxiety can be discussed, validated and
21:16
processed. Exactly.
21:19
The 4th pattern is what I call emotional echo chambers.
21:23
This builds on the clustering phenomenon, but it operates
21:26
through informal networks rather than formal teams.
21:29
During transformation, people naturally seek out others who
21:33
share their emotional state. Anxious people find other
21:37
anxious people. Cynical people find other
21:40
cynics. These informal groups reinforce
21:43
and amplify their shared emotional states through
21:46
repeated interaction. Social Media Research has
21:50
documented this dynamic extensively in online
21:53
environments, but it equally operates just as powerfully in
21:57
an organizational setting. And the echo chamber effect has
22:02
a specific consequence for transformation.
22:04
It creates A phenomenon organizational psychologist
22:07
called pluralistic ignorance, where each member of the group
22:11
believes the emotional state represents A majority view when
22:15
it may actually represent a minority position.
22:19
An echo Chamber of eight anxious people in a department of 50 can
22:23
convince itself and eventually convince the rest that everyone
22:27
thinks the transformation will fail.
22:30
The emotional reality that Co constructed through contagion
22:34
becomes a perceived organizational reality.
22:38
The 5th pattern, and perhaps the most damaging, is what I
22:41
described as learned helplessness contagion.
22:45
This occurs when people who've been through previous failed
22:48
transformations transmit not just anxiety, but a specific
22:53
belief the change efforts are futile.
22:56
Their emotional message isn't. I'm worried about this.
23:00
It's nothing we do matters. We've seen all this before.
23:03
It will fail like the last one. Martin Seligman's foundational
23:09
research established that learned helplessness develops
23:13
when individuals experience repeated, uncontrollable
23:16
negative outcomes. What organizational researchers
23:19
have since observed is that this helpless orientation doesn't
23:24
stay contained to those who experience the failures
23:27
directly. Through emotional contagion and
23:31
social modeling, people who've never experienced the original
23:34
failures can adopt the same passive, defeated stances simply
23:39
by working alongside those who did.
23:44
And the organizations with a history of failed
23:47
transformations, which is mostly among large organizations with a
23:51
documented 70% failure rate. These organizations have
23:54
embedded learn helplessness in their culture.
23:57
It has become part of the emotional infrastructure and new
24:01
employees absorb it from veterans.
24:04
New leaders encounter it in every room is the emotional
24:07
equivalent of organizational scar tissue.
24:11
It makes every subsequent transformation harder because
24:15
the negative emotional contagion has a head start.
24:19
So the natural question is, what do you actually do about this?
24:23
You can't eliminate emotional contagion.
24:26
It's a basic feature of human neurobiology.
24:30
You can't tell people to stop feeling anxious.
24:33
And as we just discussed, suppressing emotions makes the
24:38
contagion even worse. Elizabeth, what does the
24:42
research suggest about managing rather than trying to eliminate
24:46
emotional contagion? To the 1st and most important
24:50
intervention is leader emotional awareness and processing.
24:55
Before leaders can manage the emotional contagion they're
24:57
generating, they need to understand that they are the
25:00
ones generating it. Most leaders that I work with
25:04
are genuinely surprised when they learn that their
25:06
unprocessed anxiety is radiating outward through every
25:10
interaction. They think they're hiding it
25:13
well. They're not.
25:15
The research is very clear on this.
25:17
Yeah, this connects to something we've talked about throughout
25:20
this podcast series, the importance of leaders doing
25:23
their own psychological work before expecting their teams to
25:27
navigate change successfully. If a leader is experiencing
25:31
identity threat, competence, anxiety, or strategic
25:35
uncertainty about the transformation, that's
25:38
completely legitimate. But those emotions need to be
25:42
processed, ideally with a coach, a peer group, or even a trusted
25:47
advisor. It happened needs to happen
25:50
before the leader walks into a room full of people who will
25:53
unconsciously absorb whatever emotional state they bring with
25:57
them. Kevin, the second intervention
26:01
is what I'd call intentional emotional modeling.
26:05
Once leaders understand that they're emotional broadcasters,
26:09
they can begin to be more intentional about what they
26:11
broadcast. And I want to be very clear,
26:15
this is not the same as emotional suppression or
26:18
projecting false positivity. Intentional emotional modeling
26:23
means being authentic about the complexity of the emotional
26:26
landscape while deliberately choosing which aspects to lead
26:30
with. A leader might say, I want to be
26:33
honest that this transformation involves real uncertainty.
26:38
I have concerns too, and I'm also genuinely energized by the
26:42
problem we're solving, and we're confident in the team's ability
26:45
to work through the hard parts. That's not fake positivity.
26:49
That's an authentic emotional frame that acknowledges
26:53
difficulty while leading with agency and capability.
26:58
The research on what Amy Edmondson at Harvard has
27:01
documented about psychological safety is directly relevant
27:05
here. When leaders model emotional
27:08
honesty, not emotional dumping, but honest acknowledgement of
27:13
their own emotional experience, it creates conditions where
27:17
others feel safe to process their emotions openly rather
27:21
than through the underground channels of contagion.
27:24
The emotions don't disappear, but they move from unconscious
27:29
transmission to conscious conversation, and that's where
27:33
they can actually be managed. The third intervention targets
27:37
the structural conditions that amplify contagion.
27:41
Remember, transformation typically increases meeting
27:44
frequency, reduces processing time, and puts emotionally
27:48
affected leaders in front of large groups repeatedly.
27:53
Organizations can redesign these structures to reduce contagion
27:56
risk. This might mean, for instance,
27:59
reducing large group meetings where single leaders anxiety can
28:03
spread to hundreds of people simultaneously, and replacing
28:07
them with smaller group conversations where the
28:09
emotional dynamics are more manageable and reciprocal.
28:14
It might mean building processing time into the
28:17
transformation cadence, not more meetings to discuss a change,
28:21
but dedicated space for people to articulate and work to their
28:25
emotional responses to the change.
28:28
Yeah, I want to add something practical here.
28:31
One of the most effective interventions that I've used is
28:34
what I call emotional check insurance at the beginning of
28:37
meetings. Not how is everyone feeling,
28:41
which tends to generate performative responses, but
28:44
structured questions like what's one thing about this
28:48
transformation that concerns you that we haven't yet openly
28:52
discussed? Or where are you on a scale of 1
28:56
to 10 in terms of confidence that we'll get this right?
29:00
And what would move you one point higher?
29:03
These questions surface the emotional reality in a way that
29:08
makes it discussable, rather than letting it operate
29:11
underground through contagion. The 4th intervention focuses on
29:17
identifying and supporting emotional influences.
29:21
Every organization we know as informal emotional leaders,
29:25
people whose emotional states have disproportionate influence
29:28
on the groups around them. These aren't always a formal
29:32
leaders. They might be a long tenured
29:34
team lead, a respected technical expert, or the person everyone
29:38
goes to for the real story about what's happening.
29:42
If these emotional influencers are processing change with
29:45
anxiety and cynicism, they become super spreaders of
29:49
negative contagion. If they're processing change
29:53
with cautious optimism and genuine engagement, they become
29:57
accelerators of positive emotional momentum.
30:01
The identification piece here is critical.
30:04
Leaders need to map out not just the formal or chart, but the
30:08
emotional influence network. Who Who do people go to when
30:12
they want to know how to feel about something?
30:15
Who sets the tone in meetings? Whose reaction to a change
30:19
announcement do people watch before forming their own
30:23
response? Those are your emotional
30:25
influencers, and investing in their psychological readiness
30:29
for change is one of the highest return investments A
30:32
transformation leader can make. The 5th intervention, and this
30:37
one draws directly from the emotional contagion research, is
30:40
leveraging the fact that positive emotions are also
30:44
contagious. Barsad's research showed that
30:46
positive emotional contagion improve group cooperation,
30:51
reduce conflict, and enhance performance.
30:54
The mechanism works in both directions.
30:56
Organizations can intentionally create conditions for positive
31:00
emotional contagion by celebrating genuine small wins,
31:05
by making progress visible and concrete, by creating
31:09
opportunities for people who've successfully navigated the
31:12
change to share their experiences with those who
31:15
haven't yet experienced them. And I want to emphasize here the
31:19
word genuine manufactured enthusiasm, forced fun
31:24
activities, performative celebrations.
31:27
They're detected as inauthentic and trigger the same distrust
31:31
dynamic we discussed earlier. Positive emotional contagion
31:35
requires authentic positive emotional experiences.
31:39
That means the small wins need to be real.
31:43
The progress needs to be actual. The stories of successful
31:47
navigation need to come from people who genuinely experience
31:51
difficulty and work through it, not from hand picked success
31:55
stories designed to make the transformation look easier than
31:58
it is. OK, But one more point on this,
32:01
Gavin. The timing matters enormously.
32:04
Early in the transformation, when uncertainty is highest and
32:09
emotional sensitivity is most acute, leader should be
32:12
investing heavily in creating conditions for the positive
32:16
emotional contagion. This is when emotional direction
32:20
is being established. Once a negative emotional
32:23
trajectory is entrenched, reversing it requires
32:27
significantly more effort than setting a positive trajectory
32:31
from the beginning would have had.
32:33
For critical insight, emotional contagion is easier to shape at
32:38
the beginning of a change rather than reverse once it's
32:42
established. Organizations that or the
32:45
emotional dimensions during the early phases of transformation
32:49
and then try to address morale problems later, or fighting an
32:53
uphill battle against entrenched emotional patterns that have
32:57
already spread through the organization's social networks.
33:02
Elizabeth, as we wrap up, what's the one thing that you would
33:06
want transformation leaders to take away from this
33:08
conversation? Kevin, we need to remember and
33:12
be aware that emotions are data. They're not obstacles.
33:16
When you see anxiety spreading through your organization,
33:19
that's not a problem to suppress or a weakness in your people.
33:23
It's information about the psychological environment you
33:26
created. The question isn't how do I stop
33:30
people from being anxious? The question is, what is the
33:33
emotional environment I'm creating through my own
33:36
behavior, through the structures of design, to the way I'm
33:40
handing my own sychological response to this change?
33:44
If you change the emotional inputs, the contagion changes
33:47
direction. Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
33:51
And I'd add to this. The 70% transformation failure
33:54
rate that we reference frequently on the show doesn't
33:57
exist because organizations choose bad technology or write
34:02
poor strategies. It really exists because they
34:05
ignore the human factors, the emotional factors that determine
34:09
whether people actually embrace or quietly sabotage the change.
34:14
Emotional contingent is one of those factors, and it's
34:18
operating in your organization right now, whether you're
34:21
managing it or not. In our next episode, I'm going
34:26
to address something that connects directly to what we've
34:28
been discussing about emotional contagion, the middle management
34:33
trap. Why are your most critical
34:36
change agents set up to fail? Middle managers are the
34:41
organizational layer that receives the most pressure to
34:43
drive change while having the least psychological support to
34:47
manage it. They're translating strategic
34:50
vision downward while managing resistance upward.
34:54
And the research shows they experience significantly higher
34:58
stress during transformation than either senior leadership or
35:03
the front line employees. We're going to explore the five
35:07
distinct psychological burdens middle managers carry during
35:10
change and what senior leaders can do to stop burning out their
35:14
most important transformation allies.
35:17
It's essential listening for any executive who depends on middle
35:21
management to execute their transformation vision.
35:25
If you found today's episode valuable, visit 2014 digital.com
35:31
again, it's 2014 digitaloneword.com.
35:34
Or pick up a copy of Kevin's book, The Truth About
35:37
Transformation, Leading in the Age of AI, Uncertainty, and
35:42
Human Complexity and explore these concepts further.
35:46
Also, you can subscribe to the Human Factor Podcast wherever
35:50
you listen to podcasts. Leave a rating and a comment.
35:53
And please share this episode with your leadership team, your
35:56
colleagues, your peer network, because emotional contagion is a
36:00
shared challenge that requires shared understanding.
36:04
Until next time, remember every transformation has 2 tracks
36:08
running simultaneously. The visible track of technology,
36:12
process and structure, and the invisible track of emotions
36:17
traveling through your organization's human networks.
36:21
The organizations that manage both tracks succeed.
36:25
The ones that ignore the invisible track become part of
36:28
the 70% failure rate. This is the Human Factor
36:32
podcast. I'm Kevin Novak.
36:35
And I'm Elizabeth Stewart, thank you again for watching or
36:38
listening.