Why Acknowledging Emotions Opens the Way to the Issue at Hand

I am currently working with a leader who is responsible for a demanding change process and is meeting resistance within their own team. In our coaching sessions we are working on perceiving and acknowledging what moves the people in the team emotionally, so that conversations about the issues can get moving again. When we work on this, I am reminded of an exercise that lies more than fifteen years back and shaped my own path.

Around 2010 I went through a development centre at Philips. One of the tasks sounded manageable. I was to present a new product to a customer and explain its benefits. The customer was played by an actress. I had prepared thoroughly and memorised every argument. Opposite me sat a woman with her arms crossed, visibly in a bad mood, and none of this was in the briefing. I presented my product point by point, just as I had practised. What I did not manage was to acknowledge what was obvious in the room. Something was bothering this customer, and at that moment she did not want to talk about the product at all.

The feedback afterwards named exactly this. Development centres are designed to make areas for development visible, and mine lay in emotional acknowledgement. The exercise burned itself into my memory. Since then I have engaged with emotional intelligence, attended training on it and later completed my coaching training. Looking back, this one moment was decisive for the path that led me to my work today. It also describes the topic I encounter most often in coaching sessions.

When professional strength leads into a new role

Most leaders take on their position because they are particularly good at something. The sales director had the best sales figures, the head of development brought a product to success, the division head reliably delivered complex projects. These strengths remain valuable. In a leadership role, however, other abilities come into play that were hardly needed in a specialist career: empathy, conflict resolution, guiding people through uncertainty.

At the start of all these abilities lies an inconspicuous step. Before a conflict can be resolved or a person persuaded, what is moving them right now has to be seen.

Why the issue waits for the feeling

Paul Watzlawick found a well-known formula for this. Every communication has a content aspect and a relationship aspect, and the relationship aspect determines how the content is received. Someone who feels unsettled, hurt or annoyed hears arguments through this filter. The better the arguments are, the stronger the impression of being overridden can become.

Brain research offers a revealing finding here. Matthew Lieberman and his team at UCLA showed participants images of emotionally charged faces. Those who named the emotion shown with a fitting word displayed measurably lower activity in the amygdala, a central region for alarm responses. Putting a feeling into words is therefore already calming. What is notable is where this effect was measured, namely in the person doing the naming. For leadership this offers a practical pointer. Things often move most when the other person is invited to put into words what they are experiencing right now. Such an invitation often creates more movement than the tenth factual argument.

What acknowledging means

Many leaders with a strong specialist background hesitate at this point. They fear that addressing feelings will be understood as agreement or will soften the decision. Acknowledging means perceiving and naming. It settles nothing about the issue itself. A leader can acknowledge that a restructuring is causing worry and still implement the restructuring. They will then do so with people who feel seen.

How this succeeds depends heavily on the wording. I avoid asking into a problem, for instance with a sentence like "I can tell you're not doing well, is that right?" Perhaps I am misreading the signals, and then I have unintentionally linked the other person to a negative feeling. When I sense that an emotion is present in the room, I therefore address the person with an open question: "How are you doing with this?" If I am fairly sure of my perception, I choose an I-statement, such as "I seem to sense a certain resistance here." A sentence like "You seem to be against it" would by contrast pass judgement on the person.

Both the question and the I-statement leave the other person in charge of interpreting their own experience. If my perception is off, they will correct it, and that too moves the conversation a step forward.

Acknowledgement in change processes

In change processes the same pattern appears on a larger scale. William Bridges described how every transition begins with an ending. Before people engage with something new, they take leave of something familiar, of routines, of responsibilities, sometimes of a piece of professional identity. Many change initiatives communicate the advantages of the new at length and pass over this farewell. The resistance that then arises is seldom aimed at the issue itself.

Leadership can name the loss explicitly before talking about the new. A sentence such as "With this decision, some of you are losing something that mattered to you" costs little and noticeably changes the atmosphere of a conversation. Those who begin this way gain the attention they need for their factual arguments. This is exactly where the work with the leader I described at the beginning also starts.

What can be practised

Emotional acknowledgement is a skill that can be developed, as my own story shows. It begins with attention to what happens alongside the content: posture, tone of voice, pauses, what remains conspicuously unsaid. It continues with the courage to voice what one perceives as an open question or an I-statement, and with the patience to let the answer stand before the conversation returns to the issue. This patience pays off, because decisions made with acknowledged feelings last longer.

The customer with the crossed arms would probably have needed just one sentence back then to turn towards me. Finding that sentence has become a core of my work. Perhaps this is exactly where what I mean by leading as a human begins.

Further reading

• Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin, Don Jackson: Pragmatics of Human Communication (1967) – The axioms on content and relationship.
• Matthew D. Lieberman et al.: "Putting Feelings Into Words" (Psychological Science, 2007) – Study on affect labeling.
• William Bridges: Managing Transitions (1991) – Transitions in change processes.
• Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence (1995) – Foundational work on emotional intelligence.
• How I see leadership – Twelve leadership principles I coach from.
• Nonviolent Communication: Triple Buffer – A tool for difficult conversations.
• The Peter Principle: Why nobody steps back – When professional strength leads into roles that demand something else.
• My book Als Mensch führen – Twelve leadership principles from more than twenty years of leadership responsibility (German).