Expressing emotions in a team: it is particularly rare for us to express feelings that we perceive as negative. It is even rarer for managers and ultimately all members of the company to deal with them properly. This basic situation is all the more difficult in the context of change projects where the future of the company is at stake - because this aspect is still blatantly neglected in most cases. The following interview with the TCI editorial team sheds light on these relationships Dr. Martin Kupiek, TCI Partner and contributing author to the new anthology "Mastering transformation projects with the Enterprise Transformation Cycle"recently published by Peter Steinhoff and Mario Pfannstiel. It turns out that the challenges in companies are usually deeper and more comprehensive than the buzzword "emotions" suggests.

Preliminary note from the TCI editorial team: This is part one of the interview with Dr. Martin Kupiek. You are also welcome to read part two: Healthy organizational culture: Essential for transformations and teams in general.

Digital transformation: not all decisive factors are on the agenda

Beate Greisel: Hello Dr. Kupiek, thank you very much for taking the time for an interview. Your article in the second ETC volume deals with the interrelationships between organizational culture, change management and emotions in the digital transformation. In your experience, what is the mood in companies when it comes to finding the right path into the digital future?

Dr. Martin Kupiek: It is still very much about the technology, i.e. the implementation of new business models and the necessary software. The development process and team performance are well supported by agile frameworks such as SAFe^® but the pressure to perform is enormous. Of course, this always has an impact on employees' moods and often leads to underperformance.

BG: When it comes to the buzzword "digital change", the technical aspect is of course essential - and indeed takes up a lot of space in discussions. What about changes in management and organizational culture? Are these sufficiently addressed in advance?

MK: The biggest problem lies in the interfaces with other departments. This means that when a budget is drawn up, it is usually customary to talk about it with the finance department. However, the employees there work in a completely different culture or have completely different working methods. This leads to many conflicts, which often escalate and drag the mood down into the basement.

There are classic triggers for misunderstandings between teams

BG: What fundamental aspects need to be considered if companies also want to adapt their organizational culture accordingly?

MK: You should always keep an eye on the entire organization. Because working agilely only in the IT department leads to misunderstandings with adjacent organizational units. If this is not taken into account, different sub-cultures emerge, which then no longer find each other. The effort required for coordination becomes ever greater and for precisely these reasons, some companies have decided to cancel projects because the benefits were no longer apparent.

BG: When it comes to change in a company, both digital and general, emotions can be both positive and negative. Do employees also express their emotions - in both directions?

MK: Actually, there are no positive or negative emotions. They are just physical perceptions that are given mental models or cognitive constructs. These then feel pleasant or unpleasant and are labeled as positive or negative. In general, emotions are declared to be a private matter and, at best, are only expressed in pleasant cases - such as joy at achieving a goal. Fear, for example, is hardly ever expressed publicly. However, many organizations also lack the knowledge and tools to express emotions in a socially acceptable way in groups. The same applies to appropriate Strategies for dealing with it. There is a lot of catching up to do to improve the emotional situation in teams.

Companies lack knowledge, strategies and tools

BG: How do managers typically deal with this?

MK: Very different. There are many different ways of dealing with them - from keeping emotions completely silent to hour-long one-to-one "coaching" sessions. It always depends very much on whether and how the manager has learned to deal with their own feelings and how confident they feel about talking about them with others. What is definitely lacking, however, is knowledge of the tools for dealing with emotions in public as a manager. How to identify, present and talk about the emotional landscape of the team or department, so to speak.

BG: Dear Dr. Kupiek, thank you very much for these very interesting insights! We will continue the conversation in a second part of the article.

The interview with Dr. Martin Kupiek was conducted by Beate Greisel for the TCI editorial team.

Also read part two of the interview: Healthy organizational culture: Essential for transformations and teams in general!

"Mastering transformation projects with the Enterprise Transformation Cycle" - published August 2020

The Transformation Consulting International has been supporting national and international transformation projects in companies for many years. Based on this extensive wealth of experience in practical implementation, the second volume, entitled "The Enterprise Transformation Cycle", has been published after the first. "Mastering transformation projects with the Enterprise Transformation Cycle: successfully planning, implementing and completing projects" published by the renowned Springer-Verlag. As a continuation of the first volume, this one takes into account further wishes and suggestions from readers and presents concrete transformation projects and situations of action by TCI experts in their daily application of the ETC. This second volume was also edited by Mario A. Pfannstiel and Peter F.-J. Steinhoff and comprises a good 500 pages. In it you will find Numerous theoretical-conceptual contributions and case studies from practice on the "Enterprise Transformation Cycle".

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(Cover image: © deagreez | Adobe Stock)