Feelings Set the Direction

The most important thing a manager does is exercise judgment: making the right call. Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis, who spent a career studying why leaders succeed and fail, put it plainly: “the essence of leadership is judgment.”

The brain scientist Antonio Damasio worked out what good judgment runs on by studying a patient he calls Elliot, in his 1994 book Descartes’ Error. A tumor pressing on Elliot’s frontal lobes was removed, and afterward his emotions were blunted. His intelligence was intact: he still scored at or above normal on every test of memory, attention, and reasoning, the abilities that usually fail with frontal damage. Yet his life fell apart. He was fired and fired again, lost his savings in a bankrupt venture, and divorced twice; he could no longer plan even the hours ahead. Damasio concluded that the missing ingredient was feeling: with nothing to make one option matter more than another, Elliot could weigh his choices endlessly and never settle on one. Elliot was not a one-off: Damasio’s team later found the same pattern across a group of patients with comparable frontal damage, and emotion’s place in sound decision-making has been central to the field since (Bechara and colleagues, 1994; Lerner and colleagues, 2015).

This cuts against the usual advice to keep a cool head and decide on logic alone. That advice is half right. A feeling that has nothing to do with the decision really can wreck it: choosing while you are still angry about the morning traffic is a bad idea, and researchers have mapped how stray moods like that tilt our choices (Lerner and colleagues, 2015). Some jobs even depend on planting those stray feelings in you on purpose. It is why a good salesperson brings you coffee, remembers your kids’ names, and laughs at your jokes: none of it is about the product, all of it is to warm you up until you stop doing the cold math and say yes.

So a decision really involves two kinds of feeling, and the cool-head advice only catches one. The first, incidental emotion, is the stray kind, carried in from your mood, your morning, the salesperson’s coffee; it has nothing to do with the choice, and distrusting it is wise. The second, integral emotion, comes from the decision itself, the real unease about a shaky deal or the genuine pull toward a good one, and it is the signal worth keeping: the thing that makes one option matter more than another. The goal is not to feel nothing, but to quiet the incidental kind and trust the integral kind.

It also explains the cold dealmaker who seems to decide well with no feeling at all. He has plenty of feeling; it just points only at himself, sharp about his own stakes and blind to everyone else’s. The feeling still sets his direction. It only ever points back at him.