It's when I've done something good and want to tell others arrogance is emotion, when I want to tell others how much I know and then I'm superior. That is very different, right? Yes, yes. Well, hang on to that one, Tim, because our listeners are gathering around the table already.
Welcome to Management Cafe. We are following on with our season on management emotions, so we're going to be here for about 20 to 30 minutes, and we'd love you to hang around. We are going to talk about pride, the emotion of pride today, and we, well, we, it's myself, Pilar Orti, and Tim Burgess. That is a really nice, can you share that again with our listeners?
Because I think this thing with pride is that it's got two sides to it, in a way. Or we might see two different sides from it. Yeah, there were two things. One was that pride can sort of blend or be confused with arrogance.
The definition I have here is that pride is emotion when I've done something good and I want to tell others and get recognition, whereas arrogance is emotion when I want to tell others how much I know and I'm superior. And so they're saying that as an emotion that allows us to share or encourages us to share, pride is a helpful emotion, but if it spills over into wanting to dominate or allowing us to dominate, it's not a helpful emotion. Oh, I love that. The difference between wanting to share and wanting to dominate.
I really like that. Because you always hear this thing of, oh, I don't want to blow my own trumpet. And actually, the answer would probably be, well, it depends why you're blowing your own trumpet. Do you want to fill us with beautiful music or do you want to blast your horn in our ears?
This is very different. In my mind, it's when there's a but. I really don't want to blow my own trumpet. But.
And that's when you know what's coming. It's probably more arrogance than pride. But I think that there is a, you know, humility is valued and is something that's held in steam. So we do have to be careful with pride, how we experience it and certainly how we display it.
Because arrogance is a very polarizing emotion. I wonder if, let me just go back to the, just in case it gives us something, the definition that I grabbed, I'll keep it to the first paragraph. So, and actually follows on quite nicely from your point, which pride is a complex emotion that can be defined as a feeling of deep pleasure, satisfaction or self-respect, derived from one's own achievements, qualities or possessions, or those of someone with whom one is closely associated. Pride is often accompanied by a sense of accomplishment, confidence and self-worth.
This is interesting because if pride is often accompanied by a sense of confidence, how people perceive confidence and arrogance is very personal. How others perceive that. I think that, I mean, very much a work in progress on this, but I understand that it can be a healthy and connecting emotion. You know, something that I used to do a lot is when people would say something nice, I would downplay it.
About you. Yeah, nice about me. Yeah, I would downplay it. I still do quite a lot.
But, you know, at some point I started practicing just saying, oh, thank you, you know, it's very nice to hear, or that feels good to hear. And you know what? It did feel good. You know, like, even when I was downplaying it, sometimes I would, you know, like, secretly I'd be saying, that's so nice that they said that, but I'd be pretending it wasn't nice, you know, because I didn't want to be seen to be, I guess, arrogant.
Or, you know, it felt uncomfortable to be accepting and showing pride. But I think that healthy articulation, that healthy expression of it can be super motivating. You know, it makes you happy. It reminds you what's important.
It points you in the right direction. And I think going back to it being a sharing emotion, in a way, it also gives a clue. If we want to be practical about it, it also gives a clue to others about what we value. Because if I'm proud about having done something or an achievement or whatever, it signals a lot what I value.
Because we're not proud of the things that we don't value that we've done. Well, mostly. I don't know there will be exceptions. But it signals a lot to say, if you say to someone, I'm so proud that I did this, or look at this wonderful thing that I've done.
And it does, it signals what you're valuing. It signals where you are as a person at the moment. Yeah. But it is interesting, isn't it, that it's something that has to be displayed sparingly, right?
Like, it's not, you know, if I'm proud of how I got up this morning, I'm proud of how I brush my teeth, I'm proud of how I made my breakfast. Well, it depends. If it's been really hard for you to do those things, you could be proud of that. Because that's a lot of things.
Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's true. But it also could be, yeah, I guess it's contextual. You're right.
And you can be proud of it and not share it. You can feel also pride and not share it. Yes. Which is, I think, what, maybe you're...
So one thing is the feeling of it, the other is the expression. It's interesting that, like, with all emotions, one thing is what we feel, and the other one is how much we let it affect our communication into our relationships with it. And I think that's a really important point when we look at feeling pride as an individual, like always, as an individual or as a manager, when are the times when it's worth expressing it and when are the times that actually we don't want to express it and whom we express it to as well. I think it's part of our working relationships and our part of working with the team.
That's a great, great point. Because I think in that manager relationship, if you express pride in your team's accomplishments or some of your managers, someone who you're managing, their accomplishments or achievements, that could be a very safe way to do it. And for them, it's not something like they don't have to blow their own trumpet. They don't have to go seeking affirmation.
You are giving it to them. All they have to do is accept it. That's a really lovely dynamic, I think, when it happens. When you are proud of someone else.
Yeah. Well, I think it's like one thing, like as a manager, when you've seen someone do something difficult or do something that you know is meaningful to them and you say, look, I understand how you got through that result you got and you should be really proud of yourself. I'm proud of you. For the person, it's a very safe way for them to experience pride because you're saying, you know, I'm proud of you.
And so they can be like, well, I'm proud of myself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they don't have to bring that in. You know what I mean?
Like you're introducing it. So they don't have to say it or show it, you're saying. In fact, no, you're giving them license to show it and feel it in a presence of others. Yeah, you trust it.
Much better. How funny how when I ask you about how we bring it to the team, you immediately put it on, well, about the team member feeling pride. What about when we feel pride and those moments where we choose to share it or not? I mean, a lot of the time, hopefully, we do feel proud of what the team or the individuals in the team have done.
That is like, that is nirvana really for a manager. But sometimes we might feel pride in what we have done. And that is when I think, what? I think directionally, like I think that's something that for me, I feel comfortable expressing it to peers.
Possibly up, but not down. Interesting. I don't want to go to the people I manage and be like, oh, did you see the way I ran that? I mean, that was too rich.
I'm really happy with myself. I mean, I guess, I guess. I don't know. The power dynamic.
The power dynamic makes it a bit awkward. Yeah, I think the power dynamic is important. But you can also say, well, I'm really proud of how I do that. I found that really hard.
But I think I did it quite well and I'm quite proud of that. I mean. You could. Yeah.
I mean, you'd have to say, hey, look at what I did. Because, you know, going back. So it is very complicated. And I think I'm completely with you.
And I'm sure lots of people are about the power dynamics. It's almost you don't want to. You can show pride to someone. And if you're articulating it like this as well, you're pushing it almost down their throat.
This is how I'm feeling. And they can only react. Well, I don't know. When the relationship is not fantastic, they can only react in one way, which is nod and smile.
But at the same time, going back to your way of giving our team members license to feel pride and to not be afraid of showing it all the time. Role modeling, I think, is also important. We do this. I take cues from my friends, for example.
Sometimes I know it's not just how they feed me with, you know, trying to tell me how proud they are of me, but also how they express their own pride. They're on pride, and so that gives me cues on how to talk to them. Oh, for sure. I don't know.
I'm thinking out loud. But that's peer-to-peer. Yeah, it is peer-to-peer, but it's the role modeling that I'm talking about, the role modeling. Absolutely.
But the issue, I think, with pride in the manager, displaying pride in yourself as a manager to the people that you manage is that feedback loop. Those people basically require to give you positive feedback in that scenario. So you don't have a good barometer on, have I excessively displayed pride here? Because every time I say I'm proud of myself, they nod their heads and say, oh, yeah, because that's terrific.
You did do a great job. And so I think it's dangerous. There's a risk of overexpressing it and then getting into arrogance. And I think, socially, humility is much more socially acceptable and safer.
Yeah, but... That's part of the social condition. For me, I feel like humility is much safer. I can be humble, and I can have my own confidence that I did better than I said, but humility is very safe to express.
Okay, yeah. Because I could also say that if you're proud and are acting humble, then, of course, we'll manage how we communicate with others, but then there's a disconnect there. So, I mean, I'm not talking about coming every day and saying we are wonderful. I'm not talking about coming and telling a team with whom we've just had a horrible, difficult conversation coming in and saying we're really proud of what we're doing.
I mean, I'm assuming that we don't do this every day. It is very tricky. It is very tricky to think how much pride in ourselves can we express to our team. And I also think that it's not, we never do it.
But I think it's a question of knowing that, depending on the relationship with our team members, sometimes it's just going to land uncomfortably because they're not going to know how to react because maybe they're not proud. So then I think it becomes about, I mean, we're overanalyzing, and it's because we do a podcast on this, but it also becomes about knowing what kind of relationship. Like, if some of your team members do say to you every now and then, but I really like how you did that, then that is already a sign that actually if we come and say in another day, I'm really proud of how I did that, that might land well with a person with whom we have that relationship. But if we never hear anything like that from our team members, then maybe they're not the right person to be able to open up about this kind of feeling.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that makes sense. I think. You're not confused.
Oh, no, I just find it risky because I've had the experience of, I'm looking out the back of my house and I laid the lawn out there. I did it myself. And I was so proud of myself. Like, this is something I never thought I'd be able to do.
Somebody came to do it, but then I made it all level and I put all the grass out there and it didn't die. It didn't die. And I showed it to somebody. And I was like, look at that.
I did it. And I was proud of myself. I was very proud of myself. And I showed them my work.
And their reaction was like, oh, it's not very flat. And I was like, I should not have been, I should not have displayed pride in my work because I just got flattened, you know. That is a new dimension. It's the risk.
The risk. Carry on. No, but that's, like, this is the thing is if you are expressing pride and it's not shared by the person you're expressing, if they don't think that what you did is worthy of that expression of pride, like. Yeah.
So for me, that's a separate issue than the team. And if they're linked, everything is linked. But that's another dimension I hadn't thought of, which is the danger of feeling pride. One is, okay, it might come across as arrogance, which we don't want.
But two is the risk of showing your pride and it being squashed because someone else is actually, you shouldn't feel proud around that. I hadn't thought of that, actually. But what about if, you know, the scenario where you go to your team and you say, oh, I'm so proud of how that presentation went. And the person sitting there thinking, that's the most boring thing I've done.
You know what I mean? On the other hand, if you have a good relationship with your team and you say, I thought that went really well. And someone says, I've watched you other times and that was not one of your best. If you have that relationship, then it's really good because then it's a kind of barometer.
So let me ask you something. I'm going to flip this. What do we do when we see our team members proud of something they've done, but we're not sure they should be as proud as they are? Ooh.
That is pretty. You know, the sandwich, the feedback sandwich. Oh, God. No, but you have to, I think that you have to affirm the positive emotion that they experience.
You can't just straight reject it. You have to, at some, find what it is that they feel good about and in some way connect or, like, validate the fact that, you know, they feel good about something that they've done. Even if it could be better or whatever else. Like, to my point, if you just, like, stop on it straight away.
No, of course not. We're not condoning that in a management cafe, please. We're all about you talking to you. And, yeah, but also, again, you have to start with the positive, right?
Because you start with the negative, like, you've flattened the positive straight away. And so, you know, like, that sandwich approach, I understand it's not, like, you know, it's got a bad reputation, but I think there are times where it can be helpful to balance the feedback so that, you know, there is a mix of positive and critical. I think the understanding in it comes in, just like when we were talking about hopelessness, is understanding what aspect of what they did they're proud of. Because it could well be that, actually, once, I mean, sticking to the presentation, for example, because it's very easy, it could be that someone does a presentation and you notice, I don't know, that they were not answering the questions at the end properly or whatever.
And, actually, they saw that went really well, and then you ask them, oh, why was that? And they could say, oh, because I spent all night working on the content, and I changed it at the last minute, and I didn't think I was going to get through it, and I did. And I'm proud of that. It's the first time I've done that.
It's something that really you can hang on to and go, okay, that's great. And it could be that you will go, actually, yeah, they did do that very well. And you can actually reaffirm that, and then break down and go, okay, well, I saw this, and then can I give you some feedback or shall we talk later? Because I think that's another thing, that the same thing as you're saying, acknowledge the pride, and, you know, this is all contextual, but let's say that it's okay to acknowledge the pride, to welcome the pride, and it might be that the time to adjust, to give the feedback is not right now.
I think that's also one, because if you give it right now, you might squash the feeling, but if you give it maybe later or when the person is ready, then it might just help. So I think that's another thing. Yeah, because it might be that, you know, they're proud of what they did, but the standard, they're not aware that the standard, the expectation is actually higher. When someone is coming to you with pride, there is that vulnerability there, because they're showing you what they care about.
They're sharing something that's important to them, and they're sharing it because they want validation. You know, they want to say, I feel good about this, and I want that feeling good reflected back to me. So I think it is important to treat that carefully, you know, tenderly. to respect the fact that they think that you're an appropriate person, that they can be vulnerable and proud with, and that you're going to give them the reaction that they're looking for.
It doesn't mean that you have to give it without thought, but I think, as you're saying, maybe be careful how you respond, and if you do think that they need corrective feedback on it, then just spread it out a bit. Good. So that takes us back right to how we started. It was about the sharing of pride, what that communicates to others.
And like you're saying, it's something we care about, et cetera, and it's really important. I hadn't thought of that. So, Tim, anything else? I think my coffee is...
Yeah, I'm almost done with my coffee. Is there anything else you want to say or ask our listeners? I'm always interested in stories. I'd be curious about how people have navigated that when they see people being proud of things that they think they shouldn't be proud of.
How do you see if we handle that? Well, if you have a story or an anecdote or a thought to answer, Tim, email us over at managementcafepodcast.gmail.com or we have our contact form over at managementcafepodcast.com. Well, listeners, coffee's over from us. Now it's over to you.
Thank you for joining us at the Management Cafe. Remember, you can subscribe to the show on whatever podcast app you use to make sure you get a weekly dose of reflection. Our website is management.caf, and on Twitter we are at Management Cafe. That's all for this episode from myself, Pilar Orti, and our fellow co-host, Dave Verges.
Thank you for listening.