How Do You Feel?

Using a technique called "emotional resonance," the team identified the underlying feelings that were driving client decisions. "Negative emotions were barriers," explains Kate Cannon, 51, formerly an AmEx executive who eventually headed the team and whose interest in the role of emotions in the workplace was in part sparked by her background in mental-health administration. "People reported all kinds of emotional issues -- fear, suspicion, powerlessness, and distrust -- involved in buying life insurance."

But the team's second finding proved the clincher: The company's financial advisers were experiencing their own emotional issues. "All kinds of stuff going was holding them back -- feelings of incompetence, dread, untruthfulness, shame, and even humiliation," explains Cannon. The result was a vicious cycle. When clients expressed negative feelings, advisers had been trained to press harder. But this hard-sell approach only exacerbated clients' emotional conflicts, increasing their discomfort and distrust. In turn, advisers experienced more distress, stemming from their mandate to apply high-pressure tactics, which made them feel unethical. Ultimately, they became reluctant to try to sell life insurance at all.

At the same time, interviews with AmEx's most-successful advisers revealed that they took a very different approach to their jobs. They tended to take the perspective of their clients, which enabled them to forge trusting relationships. They were also more connected to their own core values and motivations for selling insurance in the first place. Perhaps most important, they were more aware of their own feelings, better able to manage those feelings, and more resilient in the face of disappointment.

"We were sitting around a conference table one day," Cannon recalls, "when it dawned on us that someone with all of these positive qualities is emotionally competent." Eager to test the hypothesis that specific nontechnical skills can influence performance, Cannon's team devised a study: One group of financial advisers received 12 hours of training to help them understand their emotions better, while the other group received no training and served as the control.

The training, called Focus on Coping Under Stress, was relatively brief -- only 12 hours -- and relatively narrow in design. It used techniques to increase AmEx salespeople's awareness of their emotions, gave them tools to change negative emotions into positive ones, offered ways to rehearse mentally before stressful events, and provided a way to identify deeper personal values that motivated them at work.

At the end of the study, Cannon's team compared the sales results of the two groups: Nearly 90% of those who took the training reported significant improvements in their sales performance. In addition, the trained group, in contrast to the control group, showed significant improvement in coping capacity, as measured on standardized psychological tests. Advisers, in short, had become more emotionally competent.

After Cannon's team made adjustments to the program, including recasting it as emotional-competence training, a second, more-detailed project was launched to assess sales results. The group that participated in the more-detailed study improved its sales by 18.1%, compared to 16.1% for the control group. That 2% difference may seem insignificant -- but it apparently added tens of millions of dollars in revenues. While Cannon's group quickly acknowledged that the sample was too small to be statistically significant, the results did suggest that even a modest, short-term program aimed at teaching "soft skills" could have a noticeable impact on the bottom line.

AmEx disbanded its skunk-works team in 1994, but Cannon, convinced that the group was on to something important, found a new source of support in Doug Lennick, 47, now an executive vice president of American Express Financial Advisors. With the clean-cut, boyish looks of a high-school class president, Lennick had built his reputation at AmEx as a superstar salesman. Long before he learned about Cannon's program, Lennick had become something of a Stephen Covey-type figure in his own organization, spreading the word about self-improvement techniques and eventually writing up his ideas in two, short, folksy books published locally in Minneapolis: "The Simple Genius (You)" and "How to Get What You Want and Remain True to Yourself."

For all of his salesman's pithy aphorisms and upbeat exhortations, Lennick was also interested in people's interior lives -- and specifically in the role that emotions play. "Emotional competence is the single most important personal quality that each of us must develop and access to experience a breakthrough," he says emphatically. "Only through managing our emotions can we access our intellect and our technical competence. An emotionally competent person performs better under pressure."