When Heart and Head Collide: Why Emotion Belongs in Better Business Decisions

The first time I watched a CFO abandon a perfectly modelled recommendation because a junior manager was in tears, I thought we were witnessing poor governance. Then I watched the outcomes six months later. The team was engaged, turnover dropped, and the implementation actually stuck. That moment taught me something stubborn: emotions are not a glitch in decision making, they're information.

Too often in corporate Australia we treat emotion like static noise: something to be filtered out or suppressed. As someone who has spent long weeks in boardrooms from Parramatta to Perth, I'll say this plainly: that approach is lazy and costly. Emotion doesn't replace logic. It complements it. And when you learn to read and use emotional data, your decisions become truer to the reality of people who must carry them out.

A quick, inconvenient opinion to start with: I think we overvalue spreadsheets and undervalue stories. Another one: leadership selection panels should include an EI (emotional intelligence) assessment more often, yes, even when the finance team shudders at the thought. Some will disagree. Let them.

Why emotion matters, and why that's uncomfortable

If You are responsible for people, line managers, HR leads, executives, you already know the practical truth: decisions land in a human context. That context is noisy, messy and driven by feelings. A restructure that "makes financial sense" will fail if it ruptures trust. A product decision that looks rational on projected NPV will still collapse if the marketing team doesn't believe in it. Emotion is the grease and the grit in Organisational machinery.

Neuroscience gives us clearer language for this. The amygdala flags significance, good or bad, fast. The prefrontal cortex helps us regulate and reflect. These systems are not antagonists; they are collaborators. Emotion provides immediacy and relevance; cognition provides analysis and horizon. Ignoring one reduces your decision making to half a toolset.

The brain's architecture explains why snap decisions can be right. In a crisis, on a flight deck, in an emergency room, speed trumps a full cost benefit analysis. That's evolution. In business, many problems are not life or death but they are time sensitive and relational. Emotion helps prioritise what matters now.

But let's be clear: emotion alone can lead us astray. We've all seen decisions driven by fear, ego or short term gratification. The investor who chases hot tips because FOMO is louder than analysis. The manager who clings to status quo because change feels unsafe. The trick is not to exile emotion but to harness it.

Appraisal: the thinking behind feeling

One of the most useful frameworks I've adopted in workshops around Sydney and Melbourne is cognitive appraisal, basically, how people interpret events before feeling them. You don't just "feel"; you evaluate, often unconsciously: Is this event relevant to my goals? Is it a threat or an opportunity? Do I have the resources to cope?

That evaluation is where intervention works. Coaching someone to reframe an event, "this is a challenge, not a catastrophe", changes the emotional output and, often, the behaviour. Leaders who can coach appraisal are worth their weight in more than just dollars; they stabilise teams under pressure.

Emotional intelligence: the practical lever

Emotional intelligence skill (EI) is the skill set that turns emotional signals into constructive action. High EQ leaders notice their own reactions, read others, and adjust their decisions accordingly. They do not ignore data, they interrogate it alongside sentiment.

Some will argue EI is soft nonsense. I disagree. In workplaces where collaboration is the currency, project teams, client services, healthcare, EI is predictive of sustained outcomes. People with good EI make business decisions that consider both the metrics and the human costs; they anticipate resistance and design for adoption. That alone saves projects.

A hard statistic to sit with: the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report (2020) flagged social and emotional skills as among the fastest growing skill sets employers will need by 2025. Call me old fashioned, but if global employers are saying soft skills will be critical, we should probably listen.

When emotion becomes bias

Emotion doesn't only provide data; it distorts. Heuristics and biases, mental shortcuts, are often emotionally coloured. Availability bias makes us over weigh vivid, recent experiences. Confirmation bias lets feelings determine which facts we accept. Loss aversion makes the short term pain loom larger than long term gain.

Stress and anxiety exacerbate these distortions. Under pressure, the brain seeks immediate relief. Leaders revert to tried tactics, or worse, snap decisions. This is why governance and process matter. Formal checks, red team reviews, devil's advocate sessions, staged approvals, are not bureaucratic luxuries; they're safeguards against the emotion driven misfires that destroy reputations and fortunes.

But process without emotion is equally dangerous. Overly rigid decision frameworks ignore the subtle signals that predict whether a decision will stick. The ideal system allows emotion to surface, then subjects it to scrutiny.

Practical tools for balanced decisions

If You are a leader running a team in Brisbane or a CEO in Adelaide, here are tactical steps that work:

• Pause and name it. In meetings, normalise a five minute check in: "What's the feeling in the room?" Naming anxiety or excitement reduces its power and brings it into the decision frame.

• Use pre mortems. Before implementation, imagine failure and ask why it happened. Emotional reactions to imagined scenarios reveal hidden assumptions.

• Run a stakeholder empathy map. Who benefits? Who loses? What will people feel? Map these as rigorously as you map financials.

• Introduce structured dissent. Invite a colleague to present the countercase. Make this role rotate. Counterarguments reduce the influence of group emotion.

• Measure the human impact. Track metrics beyond profit: employee engagement, net promoter scores, adoption rates. Emotional fallout shows up here.

A caveat: measurement risks turning emotion into a KPI and flattening it. Use metrics to inform, not dictate.

Culture shapes appraisal

Culture matters. In some Organisations, vulnerability is punished; in others, it is rewarded. Where vulnerability is punished, emotion goes underground, resentment grows and decisions degrade. Where it's safe to surface feelings, teams solve problems before they metastasise.

Australian workplaces vary: I've seen parochial, masculine cultures that cleanly suppress emotion and create brittle decision chains. I've also seen progressive firms in Melbourne that explicitly train managers in EI and reap the benefits. Neither approach is universally right. Context matters. But deliberate culture design, setting norms for professional behaviour, changes the quality of decisions.

The dark side: emotion as short term seduction

There's no ignoring the downsides. Emotion often favours short term gratification. A CEO making a bold acquisition to signal growth, driven by pride or fear of being seen as stagnant, may be seduced by emotion at the expense of long term value. Or a sales director tempted by a quick win may prioritise commission over brand.

Emotional decision making without reflection is impulsive. When decisions are irreversible or high stakes, insist on cognitive padding: data checks, scenario planning, and cooling off periods. That's not cowardice; it's prudence.

An opinion few will like: measure EI in recruitment

I'll put this bluntly: if You are hiring for roles that require influence, client managers, team leaders, stop relying solely on technical assessments. Build EI into selection. Use behavioural interviews, reference checks focussed on emotional responses, and situational judgement tests. Yes, it adds complexity. Yes, it challenges traditional HR metrics. But the evidence, anecdotal, practical and increasingly academic, shows it reduces turnover and lifts performance.

Implementation matters. Don't weaponise EI as a gatekeeping tool. Use it to find people who can navigate complexity, not just survive it.

Designing decisions that people will live with

Here's a practical rubric I use in workshops:

• Map the objective: define the decision and the outcomes you care about.

• Gather the data: financials, market research, operational metrics.

• Read the room: capture emotions, surveys, interviews, focus groups.

• Test for dissonance: where do data and emotion diverge?

• Iterate: adjust the decision to reduce unnecessary emotional friction.

• Commit: once the decision is made, communicate with empathy and clarity.

This is not a perfect formula. It's deliberately human: messy, iterative, unpredictable. But it produces outcomes people will implement.

Training and organisational capability

If you run learning and development in an Australian Organisation, invest in training that combines situational judgement, roleplay and reflective practice. Classroom theory alone doesn't change behaviour. We've seen in client work, public sector agencies and private firms, that scenario based training moved the needle. People learn to recognise the physiological signs of emotion, practise appraisal, and rehearse responses in a low risk environment.

A pragmatic opinion: professional development budgets are often too timid when it comes to EI. Stretch them. Long workshops, coaching, and on the job follow through work better than one off webinars.

Final, slightly uncomfortable thought

Logic and emotion are not enemies; they are partners in a painful, beautiful dance. The modern executive needs both the analytical rigour to interrogate assumptions and the emotional literacy to understand context, consequences and human cost. If you privilege one to the exclusion of the other, you'll get technical correctness or social legitimacy, but rarely both.

So what's the ask? Nothing dramatic. Start small: a pre mortem, a five minute emotional check at the top of key decision meetings, EI calibration in recruitment. That's it. Build habits. Measure outcomes. Adjust.

End of sermon. For now.on. For now.