WHAT IS EMOTIONAL SPINNING?

You have started thinking about emotions, yours and others, at the worksite, and understand that managers are in the midst of the complicated energy of human emotions. You have started to think that emotions may indeed be a professional management issue. You have made your professional decision to include Emotional Continuity Management in your work and at your workplace. You are ready. You are emotional-inspired. Then you are faced with an emotional incident that is beyond the scope of your regular management skills. You see the emotion and know it is your job to manage it, but you don't have any tools yet.

Then you see something that is bigger. You see a subset of emotions that seem to have another dimension. You see an emotional content that contains or represents something other than the regular daily grind feelings of people who have to work with people. You aren't just seeing the emotions; you are seeing something that seems to be attached to the feelings. This "something" seems to have a life of its own. What you may be seeing is emotional spinning .

Emotional spinning is what happens when an employee or a group of employees experience what could be seen as normal emotions that, for some reason, escalate and continue to develop an additional energy beyond the emotions of the original event. Emotional spinning occurs when one or more employees join forces with someone else to form a mutual or collective energy spin. The emotions are present, but the spin itself begins to take form and shape. A spin may start as a simple feeling state, then escalate to interfere with work functions.

Emotional spinning can center on one person or can consume entire systems and whole industries. Emotional spinning can feel like a mob mentality but is significantly subtler. Remember the old horror movies where someone in the village stirs up everyone to go kill the monster? Emotional spinning doesn't have to evolve into such dramatic scenes of angry villagers with torches in order to be disruptive. In fact, a subtle, scornful expression or undertone of disgust can initiate emotional havoc in a workplace quite effectively and surprisingly extensively. A well-placed rumor can create cascading turmoil and emotional spin-offs that lead to deep emotional distresses, leading to extraordinary fiscal carnage. A "soft" incident like a broken promise can turn into "hard" date of lost revenue. An angry facial expression can have more influence on feelings than words, as emotions fill in the gaps of meaning that lead people to make wild, emotional assumptions. Emotional spinning can take a regular workday and turn it into your worst management disaster nightmare!

As stated previously, creating anti-spinning policy or being the first one in your company to take a position of advocacy for Emotional Continuity Management is not yet an easy task. Business Continuity and Disaster Planners are making brave efforts to have "feelings" included in any body of contingency planning work. But even if your company is not ready to establish formalized policies and procedures, emotional management of human beings remains necessary for companies to survive. Perhaps your company is not ready to take good care of itself. Maybe your only interest in this information is that you want to provide yourself the best in professional self-care within a chaotic worksite. In either case, understanding the causes, attributes and variations of emotional spinning, as well as the prevention, recognition and management of human emotions in the workplace is time well spent. Brave managers are suiting up and showing up to inform and educate employees and bosses about the compassionate and fiscal issues of unmanaged spinning at the workplace. Some CEOs, business leaders , administrators, managers and owners are slowly but surely learning how emotions at the workplace is one discussion, and that spinning at the workplace is another discussion. Some emotions are well managed by HR and EAP representative. Spinning is a management issue.

Definitions:

• Emotional : all human feelings, those defined as positive and negative

• Spinning : normal emotions that, for some reason, escalate and continue to develop an additional energy beyond the emotions of the original event. Emotional spinning occurs when one or more person joins forces with someone else to form a mutual or collective energy spin. The increasing collective emotional dynamic created by rampant, unmanaged, or poorly managed feelings

• Unintentional Spinning : Being unconsciously caught in someone else's strong emotional process and temporary emotional repercussions or consequences associated with the effects of an emotionally charged event

• Intentional Spinning : The intentional use and action of displaying and using emotions of self or others to control a situation or to accumulate territory, either literal or figurative, using force through physical, mental, emotional or psychological mechanisms of fear, intimidation , implied threats, or outright control

• Emotional Terrorism : The use of emotional mechanisms and behaviors to force or coerce an emotional agenda on someone else with the intention or action of controlling a situation, or accumulating territory; either real, perceived, or symbolic:

  1. When normal daily emotional levels of healthy /stable employees are used by someone or a group to escalate emotions to levels which interfere with production and/or well being;

  2. When dysfunctional , impaired or pathologically disturbed, non-healthy, unstable employees begin to influence healthy and stable workers to experience diminished feelings of work satisfaction levels, production, or general well-being;

  3. When covert (hidden) emotional agendas begin surfacing to overt (visible) levels causing small but perceivable effects in structure or infrastructure which result in tension, conflict, and/or other forms of disruption;

  4. When the primary, first signs of chaos which can lead to decay, destruction, damage, immobilization or death of an organism/system cause effect; and/or

  5. When severe levels of emotions based destruction or damage take place with terminal (end of operations) results