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Why should you care about identifying emotions? Remember, when we say caring about
identifying emotions, the question really is, why should we focus on this? Why should we
spend some of our developmental time and effort looking at identifying emotions? I'm
going to make two arguments. The first is this is a core leadership skill. Identifying
emotions is a core leadership skill because it gives us access to a large amount of data
that we don't normally look at. Emotions communicate a large amount of data, a large
amount of information in an interaction, but emotional displays are very fast and subtle,
and we're trained to ignore them. We tend not to take into account, we tend not to spend
the time to take into account, all of the emotional data that is coming towards us. So the
first reason is it would give us access to data that we tend to ignore in our normal
interactions. The second reason is that there is a large halo effect around identifying
emotions. If you think about it, identifying emotions is a subcategory of nonverbal
behavior. Right? It's a subskill of nonverbal decoding. If you are very good at
that, people will attribute to you a range of positive skills. So, subordinates prefer to be
led by leaders who are good at identifying emotions. Nonverbal decoding is related to
higher relational quality. If you are good at identify emotions people think you are good
overall. If you are bad at identifying emotions, people attribute a range of negative
attributes to you. So, for example, people who are less adept at nonverbal decoding are
perceived as more rigid and lacking social skills. So we want to focus on this because it
gives us access to a larger quantity of data that we don't tend to look at. And also there's a
halo effect. If you're good at this small skill set, people will assume you're good at a lot
of things. And if you're bad at this small skill set, people also assume you're bad at a lot
of things. And so what we're going to do next is figure out roughly where you stand and
what we can do about it.