‘Dear, now this is business, numbers, not emotions; ok, somebody died; but we are here to talk about business’.
This is the way a discussion I have had ended recently – which left me speechless. A few years ago, I would have slapped that person. Now he only made me mad, but I did not hit him. I realized that it was not the case to go into further discussions or analyses with him; it did not make sense, we would not have come to a consensus. We were on different tracks, in different trains. However, this conversation was an opportunity to reflect upon other situations.
Many times, we hear in business comments such as ‘women are too emotional’, ‘we are at the office, we need to be rational’, ‘let’s leave emotions at the door’, etc. Beyond the misogynistic aspects, this clear separation between the rational and the emotional, between the business person and the private one is quite forced. A human being is a whole that contains the subjective and the objective, reason and emotion, sensitivity and harshness, happiness and sadness, madness and calm, wickedness and kindness.
I read a comment made by Arianna Huffington: maybe if the Lehman Brothers had been the Lehman Brothers and Sisters, things might not have been so bad. I flew from Istanbul on a Tarom aircraft piloted by a woman. The flight was really smooth (Tarom pilots in general have a soft style of piloting but in this case, it was smoother that usual) in spite of some malicious comments on the plane.
I wonder if people who make comments like these from the beginning are not primitives in suits; some individuals who, in addition, teach others about leadership.