Appreciation, apprehension, defensiveness, inadequacy, intimidation, resentment. Twenty midlevel executives at American Express Financial Advisors are gathered in a room at a conference center outside Minneapolis. Each has been asked to try to convey a specific emotion -- by reading a particular statement aloud. The challenge for listeners is to figure out which emotion each speaker is trying to evoke. It seems like a relatively straightforward exercise but only a fraction of the group comes anywhere close to correctly identifying speakers' emotions.

"I sometimes wish I had a corporate decoder for each relationship," one woman laments. "It's very hard to know what people are feeling in my office and how I should respond." Her comment prompts a discussion about the difficulty in the workplace of finding a balance between reasonable openness and respectful discretion.

"When one of my direct reports starts talking to me about her medical problems, I don't want to be unsympathetic, but it makes me very uncomfortable," says a male department head. "I find myself joking by saying to her, 'Too much information.' But I'm not really sure how to get the message across."

Conversations like that one, focusing on the importance of emotions in the workplace, are occurring with greater frequency in all kinds of American companies. Inside American Express, training sessions on emotional competence take place at the Minneapolis facility several dozen times a year. An unlikely pioneer in the field of emotional competence, AmEx launched its first experimental program in 1992. An eight-hour version of the course is now required of all of its new financial advisers, who help clients with money management. During a four-day workshop, 20 participants are introduced to a range of topics that comprise an emotional-competence curriculum, including such fundamental skills as self-awareness, self-control, reframing, and self-talk.

Much of that material represents new territory for these businesspeople. "The majority of those we work with are very cognitive and not very experienced with emotions," explains Darryl Grigg, a psychologist who practices in Vancouver, British Columbia and conducts about 20 workshops each year for AmEx and other organizations. "We're introducing people to a whole new language."

Most attendees of these emotional-competence workshops are compelled to learn a new language for one simple reason: They're visiting a foreign land. Over the past 50 years, large companies have embraced a business dictum that told workers to check their emotions at the door. A legacy from the days of "The Organization Man" and "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," this never-spoken but widely shared policy reflected the sensibility that frowned on employees who brought messy emotions and troubling personal issues to work.

Employees, for their part, complied with that prevailing mind-set. Until recently, the workplace was dominated by male employees -- and most of them were just as eager as their employers were to avoid the ambiguous complications and unexplored terrain of personal feelings.

One notable exception to that tacit pact occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the influence of the human-potential movement prompted a brief corporate romance with such experiential techniques as sensitivity training and encounter groups. But those approaches lacked the rigor to endure. Before long, business got back to business. A backlash set in, and the focus returned to no-nonsense training methods that were highly quantifiable, happily free of emotions, and demonstrably able to produce results that would show up on the bottom line.