Now that authentic leadership is in vogue, vulnerability and sensitivity are touted management ... [+]
Want to cry at work? Go for it, say some experts. Compassionate leadership is in vogue. An EY Consulting survey found that 90% of U.S. workers believe empathetic leadership leads to higher job satisfaction, and 79% said it decreases employee turnover. Business leaders say they’re pressured to care more, show more empathy and compassion and be kinder. While those soft skills are essential, many leaders—especially men—often look with a blank stare, clueless on how to apply those skills.
What does this mean for leaders who are not in touch with their feelings and don’t know how to express the essential soft skills? Do they sit and cry with employees as they sob about their work struggles? Do they try to counsel them when they don’t have either the credentials or expertise? Do they try to be vulnerable with their own feelings when they don’t know how? Maybe it’s time to explicate exactly how leaders who have been trained only in hard skills can learn ways to show emotional intelligence.
Embracing Versus Expressing Our Emotions At Work
Through an email, I asked psychiatrist Dr. Alex Wills about these questions. He says we should embrace all of our emotions at work and not be embarrassed by a few fleeting tears. Wills, author of Give a F*ck, Actually, insists that working with emotions, rather than against them, allows us to connect with coworkers on a deeper level and build trust. “Company culture can vary widely with unwritten rules and expectations,” Wills points out. “During my med school surgery rotations, we were expected to operate as emotionless robots with nerves (and bladders) of steel. Usually work is a lot less extreme than that, but we can still worry about coming off as ‘too emotional’ to co-workers or a boss. Consequences for how we display our emotions may be real, for example if they cause disruptions.”
When asked if we should show emotions at work, Wills distinguished between having emotions, expressing emotions and displaying reactive behaviors influenced by emotions. In his practice, the psychiatrist told me he uses radical emotional acceptance with folks to validate all of their emotions by being aware of them, curious about them and then making an emotionally wise decision about what to do or not do. “Sobbing all day long publicly or angrily flipping over desks can quickly lead to you losing your job or getting a bad reputation,” he cautions. “But hold on! Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Tuning into your sadness, anger, fear or frustration and taking a moment to validate your feelings can be an asset. You may have intense sadness or anger going on and choose to tell a trusted co-worker discretely. In the process, we often find that the energy from the unpleasant emotions transforms like alchemy into motivation to pursue our professional goals.”
How To Practice Compassionate Leadership
Perhaps what is needed most from compassionate leaders is showing employees’ that you care about their psychological safety. And one way to practice that is to consider using any of the five pivotal soft skills. But that doesn’t mean you have to be a therapist, according to psychotherapist Britt Frank, author of The Science of Stuck.
I sat down with Frank and asked about the quandary many business leaders face. “I think a lot of business leaders get stuck because they mistakenly come to believe that their job is to ‘therapize’ their team,” she told me in a Zoom interview. “They get stuck in the epidemic of mental health and the thought that, ‘All my employees are struggling. Now I have a job to do, and somehow I have to balance demanding performance with a compassionate understanding that mental health is also important.’ It’s important for leaders to know that you don’t have to be a therapist to your employees, and you don’t need to know why they’re stuck to get them unstuck. Business leaders can be brokers of resources, but they do not need to get caught up in the why and be therapists to their people.”
Dr. Wills coined the fun term, emotiaphobia, for the irrational fear of emotions, noting that leaders and employees often conflate their emotions with their stories, personal information or behaviors. “When we focus just on emotions, it becomes easy to make others around you aware of your emotional state in seconds—just as a matter of fact. I like to teach people to simply ask ‘how are you’ and mean it,” he shared. “When someone asks how you are, it's a great opportunity to check in and be honest with them and yourself. For example, ‘I'm a little down and nervous today, but also quite hopeful about the project. How are you, really?’"
I asked Wills how a CEO or manager with emotiaphobia or simply awkward at expressing their emotions, can deal with an upset employee. “I love using the analogy of surfing,” he explained. “A tsunami of fear, for example, may seem like a ‘problem emotion’ to avoid, battle, fix or deal with. Tell that to a surfer. They know they'll be dead on the reef. Instead, accept that the wave is here and the goal is to become good at surfing. It is quite possible to have intense waves of emotion and simultaneously be in full peace and control by surfing with the waves to get where you want to go rather than declaring war on your own emotions.”
Psychotherapist Frank agrees that you don’t necessarily need to feel empathy or compassion to validate that someone is struggling. She suggests that if you see an employee struggling, you can convey that you understand, give them the resources and explain the expectation. “This trend of everyone being in their feelings is not only not useful, it’s contraindicated because it’s not helpful for people to be spinning around in their feelings,” Frank continues. “Validating feelings does not mean that you’re unpacking all of your personal things at work. I think that’s a big source of ‘stuckness’ in the business world.”
Educating employees and leadership about emotional intelligence and how to use our so-called "negative emotions" for good could become a company's secret power, according to Wills. “Everyone should understand some basics about emotions. We all have them happen to us and we also have little control over the intensity,” he admits. Instead of suppressing our emotions, Wills encourages employees and business leaders to tune into this emotional data in order to gain more insight about their situation to better help them navigate forward. “No matter how intense or painful the emotions may be,” he concludes, “it is key to shrewdly and wisely choose how to express them and with whom.”
