Welcome everyone, we're very excited to work with you. In this course., we are going to invite you to engage with us in addressing seven essential questions in this course. The first question will be, do emotions have a place at work? In any professional contexts, there are a lot of pressures to so-called act professional. Is it possible to be more emotionally attuned and professional at the same time? Can knowing more about ourselves really help us to be able to connect with others. Knowing a lot about me helps me work much better with you. Sometimes perhaps. We will also address the question, how can emotions help us become wiser? Is it possible to actually make more accurate forecast and better decisions when we harness emotions rather than try to suppress them. Can we really manage our social emotions to increase resiliency? And you know, we now need to bounce back faster. We'll also explore this question. What is lost when you rely on the spoken word? Is it possible to have efficient communication relying only on the spoken word? And of course, more interestingly, what does research say about the ways in which you can glean much more information from the social context and be that much more effective by being more emotionally intelligent. Related to this, we'll move beyond just thinking about you in front of one other person and reading their face, for example, but what it takes to work in a team or to be a leader and really understand the importance of seeing the forest, not just a tree. We'll talk about what can be gained from that and how much can be gained from that. Transformational mentors and coaches and the connection with our legacy, it is critically important for all of us to become much better at social aspiration. That's what makes us a little bit different than all of the other social emotional intelligence models. Wonderful. There's been a lot of good work on this. I know it to be great when you share this. Generally, our modus operandi here is to be very relevant and practical. I will rely on my corporate experience over decades of work to help make this very practical. Doing research over the last few decades on this topic and together working with many groups as we have around the world, we hope that in this course we're able to bring these insights, these gems and wisdom to you, and also bring in some people we've worked with and they can share their quotes and stories. If we're able to collaborate and work through people, we can enhance our performance even greater. We're really going to dive into that topic. Another topic is how that's true even when we're working remote. For some, this may seem like the normal and this is the way in which you connect with others whether that's a short-term or a long-term reality. We'll talk about what research says about ways to make better connections, higher-quality connections more quickly, even when you don't have the benefit of being face to face. Maybe that's because you're working across cultures. You've lived around the world. I have been very fortunate to live on three different continents, in four different countries and learned how important social emotional intelligence is in each of those different places. True? Even here in the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is of course culturally diverse as well. There's these moments that a lot of us encounter we wish we didn't the tense interactions and there's a lot of anecdotal approaches to this, but there's a lot of really good solid research about how we can make these more efficient and try to understand people's true interest and really be attuned to that social dynamic so we can get over those tents interactions. Because we don't like difficult conversations. No, me especially just remember. We hope to help you become a transformational leader through taking your social emotional intelligence up a little bit more here and there and you will see the legacy that you will leave in the world become much broader. It's wonderful because even if you don't have the official title of leader, you might be an individual contributor in the organization or might be a student, this idea of transformational leadership really goes to the heart of being able to connect with people and inspire them to help mobilize actions in the directions you need for the goals of your organization. But also very individual level. There is some really amazing work about how emotions is something that needs to be more infused in a situation and more powers allow us to sort of be a little bit more sophisticated about how we deal with it. My classic example here you'll see on the slide is the famous tennis player Arthur Ashe and his sports agent Donald Del. There was a moment in Arthur Ashe's career when one of the companies he was working with wanted the contract he had, which is going to get royalties for the design he had co-designed on this tennis racket. They wanted that to contract to expire, leaving him with nothing. Donald Del knew this and the way he accounts for this and one of his biographies is that there was a moment when it became so tense, everyone just gasped and the CEO was very angry. Now many of us might initially think, well, perhaps calm down is the right way, although this often doesn't work so much. Donald Del intuitively knew how to be emotionally intelligent. He knew that it wasn't the problem of having emotions in this situation. It was the wrong emotion. In that moment, he reportedly did a joke and the joke was at the time funny in the context. Everybody had an exhale and could change the whole conversation. The contract actually got renewed not for too much, but better than nothing and it was a lot in part from the explanation given from those around is this change in the emotional tenor and tempo of the moment. In some ways this makes sense. I mean, you've traveled around the world. There's this lingua franca, this common element of humanity we have, which is being able to convey things non-verbally and through emotion. We are going to hope to teach you a lingua franca, a connectivity, and a language of social emotional intelligence that can help you. One great example of this notion of this lingua franca is the creators behind the award-winning film Finding Nemo. I love this. You do? They consulted with emotions researchers and basically came to appreciate how certain muscles, for example, are needed to convey certain emotions and turns out sharks on average don't have eyebrows. But you see in the movie that the animators understood that if you add such features, you could make this more universally understood and of course, much more emotive and successful. Nemo too. Look at his eyebrows. That's right. My colleague German Van Kleef from the Netherlands puts it this way. Emotions are a defining feature of the human condition. They structure our social relationships and imbue our lives with meaning and purpose. Through this course, you will pick up a lot of very practical research driven ideas about how to enhance your collaborations. But also do so by reconnecting with what makes you immensely human. Together, maybe Sherry, we should introduce ourselves more formally. Would you like to go first? Okay. Well, my name is Sherry Alexander. I am part of the faculty of the Ross School of Business University of Michigan. The department that we work in, his Management and Organizations. I received my degrees from the University of Michigan as well as MIT and I worked in the corporate world starting in engineering and working in manufacturing and quality and a lot of human capital as well as negotiations. Then when I retired, I came to work with Jeffrey and teach with you and it's been a pleasure. I am Jeffrey Sanchez Burks, The William R. Kelly Professor of Business Administration at the Ross School of Business. I actually also did my PhD here in the late 1900s, born and raised in California, but had been at the University of Michigan for some time and I've really devoted a lot of my career to understanding these dynamics. I'll pull from that research as well as all of the lessons we've learned more broadly as a field and what we've learned, applying those in the field with executives around the world. We invite you to that. In this course, we have some key elements which we hope will keep you engaged, will allow you to continually learn, thrive, and apply these things, starting with making our brick videos very brief for you so that you don't have to go and double speed. You'll be able to get to the point very quickly. We also have created avatars for you in our animated case examples. Yes, you'll see really pointed stories you'll recognize in these cartoons, and you'll understand how Sherry sometimes has written that I'm the bad guy. I'm always the bad guy. You are not the bad guy always, just sometimes. Just sometimes, okay. We also provide you what we think are very compelling readings to help deepen and broaden lessons. There is a wealth of information on these topics that we're going to cover, and it can get a little bit too much. And so we've done what we think is a very helpful job in curating the key components of this, but allow you to dive a lot deeper if you'd like to. We'll have some exercises that you can apply what you're learning to your own life. Well, we're going to begin to try to focus on those things where there is research, there's evidence-based assessments that help you gain a better sense of where you are now, your abilities at understanding your emotions, how to manage them, how to read others. All of those things, there's wonderful assessments out there. Short, brief, and very easily accessible so you can share them with others. This will help enhance your learning. We really want you to learn how to reflect. Reflect always, because the more you reflect, the more you're going to remember for the future. So keeping those journals is going to be key, and Sherry will remind you as we go through this. All the time. Make sure you're journaling, make sure you keep those insights you can afford to forget in there. We really have the sincere focus. We've been working together for many years, and we really want to provide you this transformational learning experience. It'll also be a fun excuse for us to collaborate again, and hopefully you can just paid in that as well. Let's preview the road ahead. The four weeks that we have organized for you. In the first week, we're going to cover all of the different ways in which you can apply the material regardless of your stage of your career. We've worked from undergraduates all the way to senior seasoned executives and there's some core lessons that can help take you from wherever you're at, to make you that much more effective. We'll also focus on the self, right? Sherry? Absolutely. The self is first, once you know so much more about yourself. In Week 2, you can begin to self-manage yourself to be able to project you, the you, you want to project to the other, whether that's a group, a team, or another person. Now the image we have here, we took this little photo which really captures the difference between expertise and wisdom. This idea that wisdom is about curiosity. The more you can be humble, and put aside some of the expertise you have in this area, and be open to learning more, this is going to allow you to get more out of it. So once you have a sense of yourself, and how to use the emotions you're feeling, we're really going to turn the table in Week 3 to focus on how do you make sense of others. This slide makes me want to see those signs. As the late great Tom Petty said, "This is a very difficult task." We'll explain why it's very difficult to be empathetic to take others perspectives, even though now around the world, there's more and more emphasis on doing these things, there are some things that make it very difficult, but we'll explain them, and how to overcome them. Will you try to see it my way Jeffrey? Yes. The fourth week will be an intense, wonderful week where we build that social aspiration. Where we will connect you being a coach, mentor, and advocate for others, as well as building that legacy in somebody else's life, and thus building a huge legacy for you. Wonderful. I think it's a wonderful way to launch all of this as what is it that you're going to do to have a big impact on others in your career. So with that, we invite you to have fun with us, to go and experiment with the material and at the end of each week, Sherry and I will have a happy hour. We will reflect on the learning, and key insights from this ourselves, and it'll be a wonderful journey that we hope is very useful as well. I look forward to it. Good. All right, let's get started.
