There are those who think 'emotion management' is learning how to ignore your emotions, so that you can do unpleasant things or ride roughshod over the emotions of others. That's one way of looking at it, I suppose, but I suspect that such management of emotion will end up contributing more to hypertension and stroke than to sound business strategy.

In other words, emotion management isn't about stifling our emotions or those of the people who work for us; it's about synchronizing emotion and reason so that both work for us rather than against us.

Repression of emotion isn't the goal, management is. It's far better to put emotion to good use, to affirm and empower people to work.

We have a built-in radar to detect emotional manipulation, and we also can spot emotional dishonesty fairly easily. We want to avoid the appearance of those things

"This isn't therapy for people whose emotions are out of control."

when dealing with subordinates, and the surest way to accomplish that is by being honest, emotionally and in other ways.

This isn't therapy for people whose emotions are out of control. This is a significant social and business management skill that people can learn and practice.

Emotion is a reality of life, and as I've said elsewhere, it's at the core of our decision-making process as humans, even when we think we're being coldly rational. When I use the phrase 'emotion management,' I intend it to describe a multi-faceted understanding of how to acknowledge emotion, how to be emotionally honest with ourselves, how to satisfy the emotional voice in our heads and how to be considerate of the emotions of others without abdicating our authority as leaders.

"Leading From Inside" provides a perspective on emotion management that involves something that skills and techniques can't provide: an understanding of emotional systems, how they work, how they get stuck, and how to move them onto the right path.