Don't get mad - collaborate

Source: Anger and its Impact on IQ

I’ve often been heard to note that marketing is a collaborative sport. Recently, I was consulting to a company where members of the executive team resorted – more often than not – to yelling at each other. This seemed like disfunctional behavior so being a behaviorist, I decided to investigate. Sure enough I found this book – recommended by friend and colleague Mary Doan – called Radical Collaboration that notes a 20 point drop in IQ when people are angry.

The implications of this are striking – at least for me.

If you want to encourage collaboration – check your anger at the door. Collaboration yields better solutions to problems precisely because your best people bring their best thinking to bear on the hard problems in your business. Most marketing problems are – by their nature – hard. How to drive demand, generate qualified leads, create positive brand impressions and intent to purchase and repurchase at every customer touch point–all within the context of the contraints of time, budget, and quality. Which means that you need to get your best minds working together. In marketing, it really is true that your best ideas really can come from anywhere – your customers, your sales people, your engineers, your marketing team. But rarely will these ideas surface if you are busy yelling at each other – for the simple reason that “best thinking” goes out the window while your body goes into fight or flight mode, defensive reactions kick in, and your IQ drops by as much as 20%. Yikes. Who knew?