Emotions at work: series — Collaborative Future

One of my earliest memories of work was a senior leader imparting their wisdom to me when I first started managing people at the age of 19. Earlier in the day I had expressed my frustrations to that leader and someone I managed about the ‘that’s the way things have always been done’ mentality within the organisation more widely and found myself welling up with tears. The leader pulled me aside later on and told me that if I was going to be a competent leader myself then I needed to avoid sharing too much with others, and in particular avoid expressing my emotions.

My initial reaction to this piece of feedback had been to try and take this on board. In order to achieve this I found myself for a few months avoiding situations where I might find myself sharing too much or where I might be caught off guard and shed a tear. The pressure to reign in who I was actually caused me to become a more unpredictable as a manager and colleague, and lead me to ignore or hide much of the emotional intelligence and intuition that had helped me to win over teams and individuals to date.

I quickly realised the reality of me hiding my emotions at work was too much to bear and decided that if I couldn’t be a competent leader AND be myself then so be it. I would simply accept that I was never destined to lead in order to remain true to who I was and how I liked to work. So I reverted back to my emotional & passionate ways (albeit with the constant fear of judgement and shame lingering that I wasn’t the right person for the job).

In spite of that I found myself gaining more support from teams and being thrust into leadership positions faster than I felt comfortable. And I started to realise that whereas I’d been told my emotions and honesty would be my downfall, it actually gave me authenticity and enabled certain people to trust me more. I vividly remember a female colleague saying she loved how when I addressed our whole company on a difficult topic she noticed that my neck would often become flushed due to the emotion I was feeling in relation to what I was saying.

In contrast however I also started to discover that others (usually senior men) often perceived ‘emotion’ and ‘crying’ as interchangeable and felt uncomfortable in the face of it, so instead opted to surround themselves with ‘rational’ leaders (usually other men) who they perceived were capable of taking actions and making decisions in a void of emotion - a myth I will debunk in a later article. But not only did they presume a lack of emotion among their ‘rational’ colleagues, they also seemed to find emotion in places it was not. I remember hearing a black female colleague of mine being told by a director that she needed to reign in her anger towards him during a conversation where she was nothing other than measured and calm.

These were all experiences that led me to realise it was not emotion that was the problem but our perceptions and understanding of emotion. Emotions are core to how we collaborate together so it became core to me and my work to to go deeper in my exploration of emotions. I needed to understand how emotions work and what place they have in helping us work better.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be writing about topics such as how you can harness your emotions to make better decisions at work, how you can support your teammates to express and manage their emotions and the ways in which our beliefs around ‘rational’ thinking are holding us all back.

Read more:

Part 2: The myth of the rational leader

Part 3: Harnessing our emotions to do better work

Part 4: Empowering our teams to express themselves

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