Life Kit - How Using (Not Hiding) Emotions Can Help Your Career

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

Emotions are everywhere, even at work. It might be tempting to hide them — but you can use them to your advantage. (This episode originally ran in December 2019.)Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Quick note before we start, this episode originally came out in December 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic. Work looks different for so many of us now, but whether you're working from home or showing up to work with a mask, we still think this episode is useful. Enjoy. This is NPR's Life Kit. I'm Megan Cain. I'm Life Kit's managing producer. Now, the last place most people want to be emotional is at work. But it happens, right? Crying in the bathroom, letting that snide comment slip in a meeting. But it's not just those big emotions that show up. Emotions happen when a deadline gets moved or when we don't get invited to that big meeting. They happen when

your boss sends a cryptic email saying, see me ASAP, or when a lazy coworker gets credit for a project they barely contributed to yet again. Now, the workplace used to be more of a nine to five, clock in, clock out situation. But these days, the boundaries between work and home are blurry. We bring more of our personal selves into work and we bring more of work home. And so when we're bringing more of our personal selves to work, emotions come with that because that's just a part of being human. That's Molly West Duffy. She's co-author of the book No Hard Feelings, The Secret Power

of Embracing Emotions at Work. She wrote it with her friend Liz Fossleen, who notes that just because we're talking emotions, the book is definitely not a invitation to become a feelings firehose. Right now, Liz uses behavioral science to improve company culture. Molly works in organizational design. So they both think a lot about how people work together and how to make it better for everyone. Because anyone who's ever worked with other people knows it can stir up a lot of feelings. And the moment that you have to work with someone else and talk to them all the time, you know, that's when disagreements arise naturally. But I think that research also bears

out that disagreement can be really productive. So you just have to create a space in which people can get along and respectfully disagree and eventually get to know each other a little more to kind of grease the wheels of innovation. Being emotional at work can be a good thing. It can lead to creativity, promotions, or even create a culture of belonging. So this episode of Life Kit will help you harness all the feelings so that the workplace is more productive, all while feeling a bit more human. I wanted to start this conversation in a really basic place. So I asked Liz Fosslane, what exactly do we mean when we're talking emotions and the workplace? Yeah, the whole book is about effectively embracing emotions at work. And so that's not sobbing in front of your team uncontrollably or screaming at someone else,

which I think we do often our minds go there when we talk about feelings in the workplace. And I think that actually happens because we've existed so long in a place where we need to suppress everything. And then you just suppress and suppress and suppress. And then that's when this uncontrollable sobbing, that's when the screaming all comes out because you didn't fix the problem or address the emotion when it wasn't such a big deal. Yeah, you don't want that. it, not suppressing it, trying to understand the valuable data within it, and then sometimes acting on it, which might mean having a difficult conversation, sometimes not acting on it. It might be that you're just frustrated because you sat in traffic all morning, and maybe the answer is you need to go for a walk around the block to cool off. There's not really anyone that you need

to have a conversation with. So it's more about just admitting that we are emotional creatures and we're going to feel feelings whether at work, at home, in the shower, wherever, and figuring out the need behind those emotions, what we should do next. It's again, it's not like a just burst into your boss's office and start yelling about everything that's wrong with the company. Yeah, that's not in this book. So the whole reason I found out about this book is because at NPR, we had a great kind of brown bag session where Liz, you came in and a lot of the people after you left were talking about and noticing a lot of women showed up to this workshop. Not a ton of men. There were some. I mean, is this something, emotions in the workplace,

is this something that women are just going to have to think about and process more? Because, I mean, that just doesn't feel fair to me. But is that the kind of sense that you've been getting when you talk about this stuff? My dad is a retired pathologist who is Scandinavian and an immigrant and very much was like, you put your head down, you do the work, you go home and you just do what needs to be done. And when he read the introduction to our book, which is titled The Future of Work is Emotional, he read a few pages and closed it and looked at me and was just like, I'm so glad I don't work anymore. This is so overwhelming. And yet then he kind of continued reading it. And as he did, he was like, oh, yeah, this would have been so valuable in talking to my supervisor. Or yes, this completely

happened. And so I think, again, it's not like men or women, or this is useful for a certain person. We all have emotions. And some of us have just been taught to express them more. And some of us haven't. Molly, did you have anything to add? So I do think, again, it goes back to we have this idea that women are more, you know, emotionally in tune. And there is some biological evidence. And again, this is all changing because, you know, gender is more fluid now. But the research does show that women do tend to pick up a little bit more on the emotions of others around them, whereas men are more sort of task focused. But I think it's a very small difference. And I think a lot of it is probably how we are just socialized as men and women growing up. And so I think it's something that both genders have to grapple with.

And it might be, you know, a little bit more traditionally difficult for men, but I think it's challenging for everybody. You all write about emotions as not something that you are or is like 100% leading a decision, but it's providing you information that they're a signal. So walk me through how decision making at work can happen when you are fueled by what feels like an all-consuming emotion. Emotions are going to be helping you make a decision whether you want to or not. Like they are just there. So the idea that we make rational decisions without any feelings is wrong. But not all feelings should be weighed equally.

So in the book, we divided up into two different types of emotions. One is relevant emotions and one is irrelevant emotions. So relevant emotions are directly tied to the choice that you're facing. So our rule of thumb is to keep relevant emotions and toss irrelevant emotions. Talk to me about like, let's say I see a male coworker who's, you know, roughly the same age, same qualifications. He gets offered a promotion and I'm still toiling away in more or less the same job. And I am super upset. I'm envious. I'm annoyed. And it can feel really all consuming. What is that envy telling me and how could I like dissect that emotion when I feel it?

Yeah, so envy again is something that we feel like is a negative emotion, but it actually can be really helpful for us. So envy can reveal to us something that we wish we had. And oftentimes we feel like, oh, I don't want to think about that envy. Like, you know, you perform all these mental gymnastics not to think about it. But if you let, if you're honest with yourself and you just let yourself feel it, it might be a sign that you need to make a change in what you're doing. So we can't pretend like everyone experience

emotions in the workplace the same way. Thinking about people who are women like myself or people of color or people who identify as LGBTQ or have any way feel othered in the office. And I wonder how you all think about that in terms of your advice? So research shows there was a study that looked at performance reviews at what tech company over six years and analyzed all the wording. And they found that women and especially women of color were much more likely to receive super vague feedback that was not actionable. So where a man might hear in your slide, slide four didn't work as well, delete it. Maybe in slide seven, move these things around. Someone else would hear, you know, your comments kind of missed the mark and didn't really work for me. And so the latter is it's impossible to figure out what to do next. There's no clear action step. And so you suddenly sit in this place where it's like, my comments missed

the mark. What does that mean? Do they always miss the mark? I don't know how to move forward. And so I'm just going to sit here and think this bad thing happened. I did a bad job. Therefore, I'm a bad person. And it really spirals. And so the first thing on the feedback topic is just whoever you're giving feedback to make it specific, make it actionable. So really clear what one thing they should do to improve in the future. And then the other thing I'll say is also there's the danger of withholding feedback because you don't want to get into this uncomfortable moment. Like it's just hard to give critical feedback. And so I spoke to a woman who is the only black female engineer on her team. And so she said during code review, which is when two engineers

sit side by side and review their code line by line and give each other feedback, she said she would watch her white male engineer friends like sit down and rip each other apart. So be like, line 71, I'm embarrassed to work with you. How could you do that? Obviously, you need this, this and this. And then they would sit down with her and be like, it was great. There's like, you know, and so and that's actually in their efforts to like not want to get into this hard place with her. They were holding her back because she was like, I cannot get promoted if I'm not getting better. And so she actually sat down with them and explained that she wanted them to give her this critical feedback. And then the situation resolved itself. But I think,

you know, obviously not everyone is going to have that confidence or feel that safe to sit down with their co-workers and say, yeah, or feel like that they won't need to be responsible for that, right? Like they have to be the one who has to be do all the emotional labor of making that huge cultural change in an office. Yes, absolutely. And so I think a big thing is, and we say this in the book too, is that every single person should really think about these micro actions, which are sort of the positive version of a microaggression. They're just these really small signals and gestures that make an enormous impact in how people feel day to day. So one example is just

like give specific and actionable feedback that shows you care about helping someone evolve and helping them level up. Another one we give in the book, and this doesn't sound like rocket science, but it just doesn't happen enough, which is like learn to spell and pronounce people's names correctly. Now, I know this is my personal guess, but perhaps maybe the biggest reason emotions come up in the workplace is other people. Coworkers that maybe don't contribute, but they still take all the credit when the manager is around. Or maybe someone who undermines you constantly in a meeting. I mean, the list just can go on. There's all different scenarios about how people at work can be frustrating. But something that's interesting to me is it feels like the automatic default to dealing with that frustration is to just vent about it to like, you know, another coworker who also maybe doesn't like that one person or that boss. But is there a more productive way to reframe your emotions when you are frustrated by someone in the workplace? Yeah. So venting is useful for a small period of time.

And if you're doing it to someone you trust. So if you had a really bad interaction, again, it's kind of the blowing off steam. So we always say, you know, don't just do something, stand there. And so that's the directive is like, if you're feeling a really strong emotion, you sometimes just need to calm down because you're not in a rational state or you're not even in a state to process that emotion and sort of figure out what you want to do next.

When it becomes negative and actually detrimental to your own success is when it turns into rumination, which is when you're just venting to vent and you have not switched yet to a problem-solving state. So I think a nice rule of thumb is a few minutes of venting, just get it out there. And then once you're a little more calm, really ask yourself, well, what one thing can I do differently? Or do I need to have a conversation with this person? And it's really about what can I do to resolve this situation? What other ways do you all recommend working with a coworker that kind of just rubs you the wrong way? What are like the best rules of thumb? So one of them is to remember that if they are complaining or if they are rubbing you the wrong way or they're being negative, that they might have something going on that you don't know about or, you know, they might be in their own envy spiral or something like that. So just to remember, like, this person is a human

just like me. This person has feelings just like me. This person has needs just like me. And just to say, okay, you know, like, can I take a step back from this? The other one is just don't ingest as much as you can limit exposure to this person. Now that's difficult you're sitting right next to them, but like just try to avoid it so that you don't pick up on that negativity. Put a bubble around yourself, like talk to them, but don't, you know, try just to be like, this is this person's thing. I'm not going to let it affect my mood. In the book, we describe that as an emotional flak jacket. And a few ways to cultivate that are just to not let your life outside of work go. So I think often this directive

to be passionate about work or like, I work at a startup and we're all a family. The danger of that is that work-life balance disappears. And when you're so invested in your job, that's when a little comment here or a coworker that maybe drives you a little batty becomes this huge problem because work is everything to you. And so if you're able to go home, and even if it's like with your cat or with your dog or just go for a walk or meet up with friends

or read a really great book, just taking the time to invest in non-work things can also be a really valuable way to come back to the office the next day with a little more distance and really start to see it as like, this is a part of my life, but it's not my entire life. That was Liz Fossling and Molly West Duffy, authors of No Hard Feelings, The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work. So for me, the biggest takeaway in this whole conversation is that emotions are a signal. They're giving you data. So listen to them and you might learn something.

For more NPR Life Kit, check out our other episodes. We have one right now about how to read more so you don't have to have that scary tower of unread books staring at you from your nightstand. You can find that one and more at npr.org slash life kit. And while you're there, subscribe to our newsletter so you don't miss an episode. And here, as always, a completely random tip, this time from NPR's Anne Standley. To avoid raw onions being too powerful in a dish, I like to soak them in ice water for two to three minutes. This also avoids having that everlasting back-at-the-throat onion taste. If you've got a good tip or want to suggest a topic, email us at lifekit at npr.org. This episode was produced by Audrey Nguyen. I'm Megan Kane. Thank you so much for listening.

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