The Invisible Load: How Unpacking 'Good Daughtering' Can Transform Leadership Communication and Prevent Workplace Burnout

Ever feel like the quiet glue holding everything together at home and at work, only to find your clarity fading and your calendar bursting? We dig into the hidden world of invisible labor—what communication scholar Dr. Allison Alford calls “good daughtering”—and how those caring reflexes migrate into our offices, meetings, and leadership choices. From anticipating needs and smoothing conflict to absorbing crisis after crisis, these habits can lift a family yet quietly drain a leader’s focus, confidence, and strategic voice.

Together we unpack what daughtering looks like in professional life: jumping in before delegation, volunteering for tasks that don’t advance your career, softening hard truths to keep harmony, and avoiding productive tension. Dr. Alford offers a practical language shift—naming care provisions, emotional triage, and cognitive load—to replace vague labels like “office mom.” With sharper words, teams can finally see, value, and share the work that sustains culture. We also talk policy and practice: treating daughtering-related PTO as legitimate, narrating contributions in small doses, and building norms that reward the thinking and time behind the scenes.

The heart of the episode is a reset from reactivity to strategy. We explore the tradeoff between hedonic hits—those fast, feel-good fixes—and eudaimonic satisfaction, the slower payoff of teaching, delegating, and building capacity. Real leadership makes space for others to try, fail, and grow. That means leaving purposeful gaps, rotating non-promotable tasks, and welcoming the kind of tension that produces better ideas. You’ll leave with a simple audit to map your invisible labor, micro-boundaries to protect bandwidth, and conversation starters to make unseen work visible without the guilt spiral.

If you’ve been carrying the backpack alone, consider this your signed prescription to set it down and share the load. Subscribe, share this episode with a teammate who does “all the little things,” and leave a review telling us the first invisible task you’re ready to name and renegotiate.

Transcript

Framing Invisible Labor And Leadership

Dr. Leah OH 0:00

Welcome to another episode of The Communicative Leader. I'm your host, Dr. Leah O, and today we're tackling a topic that is often the silent source of burnout and communication breakdown, the invisible labor women do in their personal lives, and how that unseen work impacts their professional leadership. Today we're joined by Dr. Allison Alford, a communication expert, author, and speaker with a PhD in communication studies and nearly two decades of teaching experience. Dr. Alford is the author of an upcoming book, Good Daughtering, the Work You've Always Done, The Credit You've Never Gotten, and How to Finally Feel Like Enough. Dr. Alford's groundbreaking research unpacks the unspoken expectations and emotional labor adult daughters take on. The crisis management, the emotional caregiving, the work of holding a family together. Today we're going to explore how the skills and the stress of this good daughtering translate directly into the workplace, how leaders can address these invisible burdens in their own lives and their teams, and how we can all learn to communicate for better boundaries, clearer expectations, and more sustainable leadership. Let's dive in.

Dr. Allison Alford 1:12

Hello and welcome to the communicative leader, hosted by me, Dr. Leo Emily and Hodges. My friends call me Dr. Oak. I'm a professor of communication and a leadership communication expert. On The Communicative Leader, we're working to make your work life what you want it to be.

Dr. Leah OH 1:32

Well, Dr. Alfred, thank you so much for joining us on The Community Leader. I know that you are a fellow communication scholar, and I'm excited to explore your research. So you are looking at the concept of daughtering and defining it as unpaid, invisible work of holding a family together. So I'm hoping, you know, as we start, if you could, you know, tell us how you see this concept of this invisible labor showing up in the corporate environment, especially as it relates to how women are expected to lead and communicate.

Defining Daughtering And Unseen Work

Speaker 2:06

First, thanks so much for having me on. I really love getting together with a communication person and you know, nerding out on all of those things that we love and study all the time. So, yeah, I study invisible labor. And to me, when I'm exploring that concept in my research, what that means is not only unpaid work. So there's lots of forms of unpaid work, but unpaid work that then nobody seems to be noticing. And it's not getting any kudos, it's not getting any credit, it's not getting shared, it's being taken up largely by women, and it is being done, and nobody seems to notice that it really matters. So the people who are doing it don't have a sense of feeling important or that their work matters. So when I study families and adult daughters, I see invisible the invisible labor in families being things like attending to everyone's needs, anticipating what people need before they need it, for sure, smoothing over conflict, being aware, like, oh, this person's upset at this person, so I got to do this, this, being peacekeepers who are taking in the emotional tension and really managing that, trying to make sure people are having a good time at an event, thinking ahead about a good time, thinking ahead long, long, long in the future about a possible situation. And those behaviors, those invisible labor behaviors that we see in families also show up at work because women do that for our work families, even if we don't really like these people. Whether we are, but many times we do like the people, at least mildly, that we work with. And so we smooth, we anticipate, we manage, we are organizing things, we're thinking ahead. And there's very little notice given to how that reduces the resources of women. It drains our energy, our time, our attention, and even our finances.

Dr. Leah OH 4:23

Yeah, and that's that's a great segue because I was thinking about this hidden cost, right? So, you know that you work a lot with how adult daughters carry this emotional weight of balancing their own lives with the needs of their parents. And I'm wondering from a leadership perspective in an organization, what is this communication cost when we have women coming in and carrying this invisible emotional load? And how can that deplete or compromise their authenticity and the strategic clarity of their messaging?

Workplace Costs Of Emotional Overload

Speaker 4:56

Well, you really hit the nail on the head with that word clarity. I think that's a huge part of it. When leaders are emotionally overdrawn, when we overdraw from our bank account of resources, our clarity suffers. So we're not as present in the moment, or we're not doing our best visionary thinking because we're managing these other little things that are popping up in the moment. You know, we're we're putting out tiny fires in in that we see or thinking ahead about fires. And so we're not allowing ourselves to do some of the bigger dreaming or to be the most functional leaders who have to do difficult things at work. Maybe we're thinking too much about people's emotions, so you're softening some of the hard truths that you need to give, or you're in a meeting and you're overexplaining. And or, you know, maybe somebody's birthday comes up, you take on an extra task that doesn't need to be done, or you take on extra work instead of delegating it because you don't want to upset the balance. And, you know, one of the things we talk about, particularly psychology, management, communication, we talk about resource gain and resource loss. So when we draw down on that bank account, that resource account of our energy, our time, our thinking, our emotions, it's not just little ducats, you know. We can actually get in what scholars call a resource spiral. And as we lose a resource, and it's not just going down teeny tiny bits like this, you know, I'm moving my finger down a little bitty bit. It can become like this tornado, this drain effect that then lots of things start to drain rapidly. And before we know it, we're totally overdrawn, burnt out, in the dumps, and wondering how we got there. Yeah.

Dr. Leah OH 7:01

And so let's can kind of continue with pulling this thread of what's happening to many of these good daughters in the workplace. And you know that many of these women, many people altogether, end up in positions, leadership positions, because they're subject matter experts, but they're not equipped from the role, they struggle with burnout. So, Alison, I'm wondering with your research, what are, you know, the the top two, three common behaviors you see that good daughter persona, whether it's overanticipating others' needs, the overfunctioning, what are what are we bringing into the workplace that is undermining our ability to really fulfill that titled leadership role we're in?

Overfunctioning And False Harmony

Speaker 7:48

Yeah. You know, daughters in families, we really love being part of a team. We love being part of a group. Daughters are doing daughtering in our families in order to keep everyone connected because that connection and support really matters. So sometimes what happens is we take those ideas of connecting and bringing people together, and we take it to the workplace as if that is the same kind of team family relationship. But really, we can, we can, you know, that's a mistake we kind of make trying to transfer those skills. And so one of the things that we see that daughters do in families, and then they take it to the workplace, is they jump in before anybody asks, not something that hasn't even been delegated to them. And as women, we're trying to solve a problem that's maybe not ours to fix, or we're doing it because someone came to us and told us emotionally about that problem, so we make it our problem instead of you know moving it back onto them. And now I should also be clear to say daughters do these things in families. They're not necessarily healthy in families either to do these things, but we bring them to the workplace.

Dr. Leah OH 9:07

Yeah.

Speaker 9:07

Another thing that women do is we just simply take on too much because we overemphasize ourselves as a necessary part of that experience. Like if I'm not there, it'll fall apart without me. These people need me. Uh, we don't take our PTO, we don't, you know, say that what we need in terms of, you know, funding because we're thinking, I've just I've just got to take it all on and kind of be the martyr. Um, but to our own detriment. But we're thinking, gosh, this really helps the group or the team. But the amount that it helps the team is so little compared to the massive, you know, negative impact on ourselves.

Dr. Leah OH 9:55

Yeah.

Speaker 9:55

And and, you know, and lastly, daughters, a daughtering behavior that we might see in families that could transfer the workplace, is trying to avoid necessary tension and just create harmony. And often it's a false harmony, and when we're in the workplace, a good leader has to know when to allow tension or even foster some uh difficult feelings in order to help their the the individuals they supervise grow. And in families, we like to sh daughters are like to shut that down, keep everybody happy. There's no tension that we need. And when we do that at work, we can actually stifle people we're meant to be building up because we never let them experience difficulty. Um so that's something that daughters have to be aware of that we take patterns that we do in our family life, better or worse, we bring them in the workplace because they just feel natural to us. They're just these sort of worn paths that we just keep doing over and over again.

Naming The Work And Finding Language

Dr. Leah OH 11:07

Yeah, yeah. And I see what you mean with a conflict. And it's funny because as an orgcom scholar, like conflict is great. People are invested, they want to advocate for a certain path. They're thinking about potential gains and you know, potential unintended consequences. But you're right, for a lot of folks, this is it is not embraced the same way that an orgcom scholar like reach out with two arms for that. Excellent. So, Allison, let's think about, you know, I want to think about the language that that you're using and that we're seeing around this in a way maybe that we can start to make that invisible more visible. So the work of daughtering, it's often taken for granted because it's unspoken. So I'm wondering how can leaders, especially women, begin to name and articulate this invisible labor they're doing, whether it's this personal load or the hidden emotional work they're doing for a team. So, how do they begin to name this and articulate this to others? So it's received as strategic communication of a boundary and just recognizing I'm doing more than I should be, rather than complaining or whining or not pulling their weight.

Speaker 12:22

Yeah, yeah, that's such an important question, you know, is as how do we communicate the thing that we're talking about and say it's a thing. And you know, I I I recently have been on a journey to write a book. The book's coming out February 2026. It's called Good Daughtering. And the in that book, the, you know, the number one thing, the first thing I talk about is first you got to figure out what is what is it that I'm doing? What are these patterns? Name, you know, figure out what's what the invisible is and make it visible. And I talk about daughtering in the book mostly as a form of relating to your parents. But I also talk about how daughtering could be in the workplace. It could be, you know, maybe of a work dad or a work mom. Maybe you daughter your neighbor at home who's just this, you know, older person who, you know, you have this sort of caring attitude toward. So I like the idea of this idea, Leah, of thinking about how am I doing daughtering in the workplace and kind of separating like not every behavior I'm doing to care for everyone is daughtering, but sometimes I'm bringing that.

Dr. Leah OH 13:37

That's important to raise that up. Yeah. Like you said, you don't want people to say, like, I'm warm or I'm trying to relate and build trust, and we don't want them to dismiss that as like, oh shoot, I'm daughtering.

Speaker 13:49

Yeah, yeah. So I think, you know, it is as women, we have a lot of complexity and we do a lot of roles. But daughter is the one we've always done and will always do. You know, we're born a daughter, we die a daughter. Um and while we are workers in the workplace, we are doing our working role. We might also have a mother role, a you know, a spouse role or partner role, you know, maybe we're voters, we're neighbors. Again, there's so many things. And so when we're in the workplace on any given day, we're navigating which role to bring forward. And sometimes we're bringing forward that daughtering role if we're trying to smooth, manage, you know, make a pathway. Sometimes we're bringing forward one of our other roles. But what I talk about in the book is we got to figure that out. We've got to do the thinking work. And the thinking work means I need to sit with this, I need to disentangle it, I need to ponder it, I need to make lists and evaluate myself. What am I doing and which role is that behavior attached to? And then the last thing I do in the book is say, okay, if you want to make a change, if you want to reduce conflict or find a partner in helping you with this behavior, or just get some gold stars for what you're doing.

Dr. Leah OH 15:16

Yeah.

Speaker 15:17

How do I talk to people about it? And so the book has these activities all throughout, but the essence of these things is thinking work. And we said at the at the at the top, at the first question, you know, what do we lose if we're doing too many of these caring behaviors? We lose clarity, we lose vision. This is my call to your listeners to recognize we have to take a step back sometimes and think about our own thinking. We have to notice our own communication, and that sort of meta communicative activity is so so important, but we rarely do it, we're just stuck in the daily things. And I want to encourage your listeners to go to that bigger picture place.

Dr. Leah OH 16:10

Yeah. So, Alice, I want to hear more about your book in a moment. And my next question does that, and it sounds incredible. But when you're talking and you're talking about these activities and these reflections, and I love that in a book, I love that it's something that people are learning but also working through. But I'm wondering if any, if you would suggest going to trusted co-workers or a leader or people in your home and asking them what they see.

Making The Invisible Visible, Step By Step

Speaker 16:40

Absolutely. You know, I as communication scholars, we tend to say more communication the better. So when we ask other people what they see, we're uh also asking them to help us with the language. This would kind of what you were talking about previously. We just don't have enough words to talk about women's behavior in general. And and so we often borrow words. Like if we're caring for anyone, we say, Oh, we're mothering them. I'm mothering my mother, oh, I'm mothering everybody at work, oh, I'm the mother hen around here. Or, you know, if we're have a good relationship with our dad or something, would say, like, well, we're best friends. Well, you know, maybe we have this relationship with somebody in the office and we'll say, It's my work BFF. And in many ways, while cute and aim has a good intention, those things are problematic because they lead us astray in thinking certain things about these people. Like this workplace person is not your best friend unless they are literally your best friend everywhere outside of work, you know, long-term trustworthy. And and you're not anybody's mother at work unless you're literally in a family business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a family business. Yeah, you're their mother. Yep. But those those languages, yeah. The labels, they happen because we don't have enough words for caring behaviors or for the resource use or for the labors that women do that are so vital to connecting others. Because what we're not saying here to be super clear is stop caring for people at work. We're not saying that. Yeah. We need thoughtful caring individuals. We just also need the words to be able to describe to people the care provisions, the connecting, the thinking, the noticing, the emotional outlay. And so what we're advocating here for is more nuanced words to describe what it is you're doing so that you see it and others see it. And if a trusted individual in your life can say, if you said, list everything you see me doing at work, and your partner at home could start putting some new labels and new words on it that help you and others better understand that resource use, that's all the better because we really need more language and communication around these special things women do. And I find from daughters with daughtering, especially in families, daughters aren't looking to stop doing daughtering. We're not saying, oh, this is so much labor because we want to quit doing it. We just want to talk about it, we want to share it with others and we want it to matter to everybody.

Dr. Leah OH 20:05

Yeah, you're right. And I know we're gonna get to this later on, but I think part of this too is once we have that awareness, we can enact healthy boundaries. And I know you'll talk about self-honoring, so that's a good way for us to kind of tee up there. But first, Alison, I'd like to think about your book. And I know you wrote this as a roadmap for creating relationships that flourish and aren't just functional, aren't just transactional. And so in the in the workplace, this might mean renegotiating roles and expectations. And I was hoping you could walk us through kind of a practical strategy for the leader who needs to recalibrate or move from that overburdened role where, like you said, they're mother hunting or they're, you know, they're they're displaying care, but in a way where they're bent over backwards doing doing it, you know, at the expense likely of that titled role. So I'm wondering how do we do that where we set this healthy recalibration, this healthier boundary, but we're not damaging that relationship or the trust that we have with that member or our team.

Shedding Old Narratives And Assumptions

Speaker 21:15

Yeah, yeah. Okay, and so there's two ways that I want to talk about daughtering at work. And the first is if I'm doing daughtering behaviors for my workplace people, right? Especially, you know, maybe I have an older boss or a trusted, wise person there, and I am directing these kind of daughtering behaviors at them. And that's, I think, really what your question is aimed at. But I want to start with the second one instead. And the second way I want to think about daughtering at work is that sometimes you need to advocate for taking time off work to go do your other daughtering with your family. And the whole workplace needs to agree to see that as a valuable way to use. Our PTO. Now we all know we should be able to use PTO for whatever. I should be able to use it for a Netflix day at home. But that's not the reality. People are going to ask you, what were you using that PTO for? You know, and people can feel judged depending on your workplace. Not all PTO is given or granted. So I do say in my in my book, one of the things I say is we need policy and understanding at work when women need to take off from work to go do daughtering as a valid life role. And we're quick to say, oh, well, she had to take off work because she's a mom and her kid is sick, or she had to take off work because her husband had knee surgery. So she had to, we're not very quick to think it's a good idea for a daughter to take off because she needs to give her mom a tour around the city because she's visiting for her one time a year visit. I mean, like, well, that's just fun time, you know, that doesn't matter. So that's the first thing I want to say is agree that daughtering in people's lives is important and allow that PTO and allow for policies that prioritize this as a real family activity. Okay, so then this that back to the first way that daughtering shows up at work is in care provisions and care provisions. And so we've described that we need language for how women are doing daughtering at work, you know. But one of the things that makes this labor invisible is that we as women allow it to stay invisible. We tend to have this narrative that being good means being selfless. And as long as it's, you know, if I'm a martyr, it's okay because everybody else benefits. The problem is that just becomes this self-erasure. And we're not being the type of leader that we would want other women to employ.

Dr. Leah OH 24:13

Yeah.

Speaker 24:14

So we have to negotiate for ourselves, we have to advocate for ourselves, we've got to stand up. And I think there's a movement towards this. I know I see it for sure over in healthcare, where we say, hey, if I go to the doctor and I'm not listened to, I need to stand up for myself and say, I'm not leaving until I get, you know, whatever. We can do that at work as well. We can stand up for ourselves and say, hey, I spent time and money on creating this Canva one pager for our client. You know, I bought Canva Pro with my own money because y'all wouldn't buy it around here. And I spent extra time off of work doing this. I mean, we just need to say what we're doing. And I I'm not I'm not intending to make that sound so simple. So, what I want to encourage women to do is take it a little bit at a time. You don't have to go in there and make a big splash. It begins with little bits of telling people what you're doing, making it visible, describing what you're doing. It begins with small conversations with the the leaders around you, with your team, identifying these. So taking the invisible, making it visible. And then, of course, as we discuss in the book, it also has to do with setting boundaries. So you need to know when you've reached your limit and and put up a wall and say, I guess that part won't get done. Either s either someone else will big it up or it won't get done, and you know the city won't crumble because that thing didn't get done. And put up a boundary, and that's that's the end of your work day, or that's the end of your resources at that time.

Dr. Leah OH 25:59

Yep, exactly. And you're right, it's it's little steps and it's building that into a habit where it's not as scary and it becomes more normative for you to say, nope, I'm abdicating for myself.

Speaker 26:15

Yeah, well, I would say, Leah, you know, yeah about that. A lot of times I talk to women and let's say in a family context, and they're like, I'm being walked all over and I'm just doing all this. And then when they finally decide to share, they write a text message to an entire group of 10 people in the family. And the text message is massively long. And it's like when they finally decide to do it, they just vomit all the feelings at once, and you think that you'll feel better, but then you're actually gonna get a hangover from overshipping. So, the what I what I recommend for women is that bit by bit, one conversation at a time, one text at a time, to one person at a time, you chip away at it, which means you have to have persistent, continued belief in yourself and your worth, and that daughter, the daughtering that you're doing is valuable and necessary. And so there's some internal work to do too. Yeah, you can't just get you know, get the courage for just a moment and then blast everyone.

Dr. Leah OH 27:25

Yeah, yeah. It's a lot of cleanup.

Speaker 27:28

Yeah, there's a lot of cleanup after that. Yeah you have to maintain persistent belief in your own value and advocate for it over and over and over again. And change is small, but the changes will be real and meaningful and they'll stick.

Dr. Leah OH 27:45

Yeah, and that's perfect. So I wanted to ask you about kind of this idea of leadership, presence, and resilience. So, you know, that your work it encourages daughters to reflect on relationships, honor their own needs, their own desires. So, for our listeners, I'm wondering, you know, from the work that you do, Allison, what is the most critical internal old narrative or these self-imposed stories that you see oftentimes in your work and your interviews related to service that many of our listeners need to shed in order to have that vibrant, consistent leadership presence and you know, that resiliency.

From Reactivity To Strategy And Teaching

Speaker 28:29

Yeah, I think that it's such a smart way of talking about that, Leah. What is something old and what do we need to shed? So I I want to stay inside that great visual. You know, we're wearing old clothes, we're wearing an itchy suit, and that's the old way of thinking, this is how I show up. I would say that a huge part of daughtering and what kind of gets what kind of gets us in the wrong place is a cultural idea of what's expected of us. Okay. Women are wandering around thinking, I have to. Like, who else is gonna do it? Of course I'm expected to do this. And we often haven't ever been asked to do it or even told by anyone, yeah. I want you to do it. Here is your role. You must do X, Y, and Z. Yeah. We have absorbed it through cultural messages. So I'm not, I'm also not gaslighting women and saying you came up with this and you're wrong. Yeah, we've absorbed it through movies or you know what we've observed in our own family, right?

Dr. Leah OH 29:43

We've observed extended families, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 29:46

Decades, friends, families, watching multi-generations, and a lot of times if we do that from childhood, we're watching different generations, so we're watching elder generations, and so we're not just learning something, we're watching different generations patterns, and again, we don't take the time to take stock of well, what does my generation do and think? And what do I think? So, one of the the most interesting studies I did, I asked women, what do you think that you ought to be doing in your relationship? And also, what do you think that your mom expects from you? And I was so interesting to notice that when women took a minute to to ask themselves, what does my mom want? There were some who were like, She wants so much, but there were actually a bunch of them who said she probably would want me to quit doing this. She really doesn't need and want all this from me. She wants me to be free, she wants me to be a career woman, she wants me to use my brain for intellectual things and not family dinner. She wants me to go live my life with my kids and my spouse. And and the the you know, juxtaposition was this massive light bulb for women. Like, yeah, huh. I never asked anyone what they want me to be doing. I was just assuming. So the narrative that we need to shed is that we have to be doing these things, yeah. That we ought to be, or as as that you know, that that that the title of the book and the title of that research stuff was that that to do these things means that we're good, that we're good daughters, or that we're doing good daughtering because we're doing things that nobody ever said we needed to do, nobody asked us to do, nobody's noticing that we're doing, nobody's thanking us for, and we've got to stop and shed some of those and take off that itchy old suit and say, Yeah, what does modern today version of me want to do? What do my parents want from me? What does my work colleagues and team need and want from me? And then lastly, do I agree and want to do those things also? Will they make me happy too? So there's some calibrating to do.

Dr. Leah OH 32:25

Yeah, yeah, that's really, really helpful. Cause I think you're right, so many people just feel like this is their birth obligation and have never stopped to examine that.

Speaker 32:36

Yeah. To say, like, where the heck did that idea even come from?

Dr. Leah OH 32:40

Like, why are you carrying the backpack?

Speaker 32:43

Yeah, exactly. Oh my god, we have to carry it. And no one even said the truth is nobody said that you had to carry it. And so we have to stop being martyrs. Not that women are being I'm I'm not gonna say that in talk in these terms that are so mean.

Dr. Leah OH 32:59

No, but I think you're it's like the socialization. I think it's that it's not that we're necessarily choosing to lay down at this altar, but it's been displayed so long that we just think that's the way we do it. And we haven't stopped to question whether we should.

Building A Flourishing, Shared-Load Culture

Speaker 33:17

Yeah. And I'm sure you see this in your work in organizations too, that there's some types of leaders who think I gotta do all of this because these people won't do it right, or it'll take too long to tell these people how to do it. And that's not great leadership, you know, it's not delegating, it's not sharing the load, and ultimately you're holding the team back by having that sort of self-aggrandizement that you're so necessary, and the same thing is happening in our families. We're burning ourselves out and thinking I am so necessary, and I must do it all, that we're not sharing it or dropping some of it. Yeah, and really our families would like a lighter, happier version of ourselves. Oh, yeah. On your workplace team at work, would like to learn new skills, share in the work, progress together, do it as a team, um, fail as a team, but they don't need you to be the czar of all the work.

Dr. Leah OH 34:21

Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 34:23

So open it, I really floodgates and share it.

Dr. Leah OH 34:26

Yeah. I connected with your backpack metaphor because I was thinking, you know, whether it is as a daughter in the interpersonal family context or as a leader in the workplace, go one, you know, maybe the leader does need to carry the backpack, the figurative, the literal or the figurative backpack. But, you know, if we're leading from the front, if we're being held down by it, then we're slowing our team down. And, you know, in with daughtering, it can be like, who else can hold some of this? If we do need to hold this, it's not only my responsibility. So figuring out, you know, delegation is a little different and in families, but it's still part of that idea of, like you said, shedding that old wool suit that doesn't fit anymore.

Speaker 35:14

Yeah, and and in the modern workplace, we need to acknowledge, like, hey, maybe they did this thing 20 years ago and that was super successful, and now they're, you know, this top Fortune 100 company. But what was effective 20 years ago is not necessarily gonna work for us today. And so we are in a post-COVID world, we are in a modern world, we're in a millennial driven, you know, Gen X announce and with Gen Z driven workplace. So why would we use the greatest generation or the boomers way of leading? We are we're not going to great for them, no shade to them. It worked, but that was 20 years ago, that was 40 years ago. And so our history books are full of these fantastic leaders, but we have to be the newest today version of a fantastic leader. Yeah, and that comes from communicating with our team, but the first type of communication is intra-personal. What am I doing? What can I change? What do I need? How will I be the best version of me at work?

Dr. Leah OH 36:21

Yeah, exactly. And so thinking about work, this next question is when I was preparing for a conversation, it's just kind of purely a personal curiosity. And I was thinking about, you know, I'm obviously a daughter and I'm an oldest daughter. And so I'm thinking about this crisis management in families and how whether or not it is assigned to me that a lot of times I'm like, okay, how do we go about this? So I'm wondering, Allison, if you found, you know, when daughters are often responsible for crisis mode management in the family, how does this, you know, whether they are in the the thick of it in their home life, they're feeling like they're always in this reactive communication mode, or if they're just doing it occasionally in a triage mode, but how does that kind of posture, how can that impede their ability to shift to the strategic proactive communication at work when crises do happen or when you know unexpected events occur?

Final Challenges And Practical Takeaways

Speaker 37:27

Yeah, you know, we are familiar with these ideas from neuroscience that sometimes when we make pathways in our brain of ways to do things, we get those pathways really worn down and we just keep going in that same way. So if we're a daughter and in our family life at home, we're used to reactivity. Oh, something happened, I'll handle it. You know, this issue has come up, handle it in this way. Go, go, go. Oh, middle of the night, something needs to happen. I'm gonna get up and handle it. Oh, this is you know happening over here. I'm gonna jump on the phone with three people and I'm gonna manage it. We can take those really worn neural pathways and take that reactivity to the workplace and be in a constant state of emotional triage and really be again thinking me first, like I have to handle things. But one of the ways that I think that, and so that that so to to be clear, that really impedes teamwork. That impedes collaboration because we are me centered to our detriment, that I've got to handle it. And we have lied to ourselves that we're the best for the job, that we're the best at handling it. But really we're hiring great, smart, capable people, and we've got to leverage them. So, one of the things I talk about in the book that I think we can apply here as well is that we need to be aware of thinking of two types of satisfaction or two types of happiness. And there's hedonic happiness and then there's eudaimonic happiness. Are you familiar with these um types of happiness? And I'm trying to think of the oh, it's um Seligman. Seligman writes uh has a really great book on this, and also there's another great book by Gretchen, I can't think of her last name, but it's called The Happiness Project. And oh, Gretchen Rubin. Yeah, yes, I recommend both of these books for uh leaders who are interested in thinking about how do I change a I mean, how do I change a deeply ingrained neural pathway? Well, we have to have new forms of thinking, and so the two types of happiness hedonic happiness is in the moment, what's fun, what's satisfying, what gives us that zing, you know, what is it that I am like, oh, that felt really good. So in in our life at work, sometimes we think solving it, quick answer, getting a solution, that zings me like, oh, I feel so accomplished today. Yeah, but there's this other very important kind of relaxed backburner happiness that we often neglect, and it's called eudaimonic happiness. And it refers to the type of happiness that we have a life well lived, that we have invested in things that are important and that we can feel good if we were at the end of our lives looking back and thinking, I did that really well. And eudaimonic happiness means that we often don't get the zing of the quick hit of in the moment happiness. We have to delay happiness in order to feel productive. So, in the workplace, that means not solving things, not fixing everything, but teaching and training others. And over time, we will build up leaders, we will have a stronger team, we'll have more thoughtful pitches to clients, we'll have more innovative thought leader ideas. And when we look back over five or 10 years in the workplace, we can say, I really invested in this beautifully deep, meaningful, slow payoff way. Yeah. So we we have to be aware of, you know, I call it like taking out the trash. So another way to think of it is I like being a homeowner. And being a homeowner is part of my eudaimonic happiness for my life that I really enjoy the satisfaction of owning something, of building, you know, the the wealth uh over time by homeownership allows you to build slow wealth. I don't like taking out the trash. I don't like when I have to clean the gutters. So owning a house doesn't always bring a lot of hedonic happiness, you know, meaning I don't always get that quick zing of happiness. Now there are some times where I do. I put up my Christmas lights and I'm like, zing. Yeah, hedonic happiness. Oh, I'm safe to own a house. I put up my Christmas lights or painted a you know my front door blue, and I'm like, oh, I like that. I don't want to go too far into my metaphor, but I am saying to leaders, yeah, we can't be reactive all the time, and everything can't be hedonic happiness. We've got to be aware of the slow forms of productivity and the bigger form, this important form of purposeful workplace act action, and that's our eudaimonic happiness. And that is something that we've also got to use in our family lives as daughters. What is it that I'm doing that's kind of like taking out the trash, but it's not super fun, but it builds strong families.

Dr. Leah OH 43:27

Yep, yeah, that's really, really helpful. And I think so. My my next question, and I think you've already that last that last response really got to it. It was this idea of a flourishing communication culture in the workplace. Because I know that a lot of the work that you do in your forthcoming book, Good Daughtering, is about, you know, building that flourishing culture. So is there anything else, Allison, you'd like to add where you know all employees can feel seen, valued, Empowered and not just over functioning when we're kind of contributing to this collective, collaborative, flourishing culture.

Speaker 44:09

Yeah, you know, we've kind of been talking about it, but just to repeat, when we as women overdo, overextend, and do it all ourselves, we think we're helping. But what we could actually accidentally be doing is not allowing the beauty and diversity of our team to shine. Yeah. And so then our team members are not feeling seen. And what contributes to flourishing is every person feeling seen and that their work matters. Yeah. So in families, if I'm the big sister, I'm actually the little sister in my family, and I do everything, I have to, I could say to myself, I'm I'm doing everything because no one else will do anything. Um and nobody's giving me any kudos or gold stars and nobody's noticing. So I feel bad because I don't feel like I matter when I'm doing all the work. But I have to leave some work on the table for someone else to do so they can use their gifts and skills, and then they can be seen and shine, and they can come and be the lead singer, you know, yeah, on the stage. And the same is true at work. As women, we cannot lie to ourselves that taking care of everything is helpful or all good. We must leave things to be done and allow people to grow into the skills to do those things, which means they're gonna fail at some of them sometimes, or certain things will be undone in order for people to notice, like, whoops, somebody needed to do that and it didn't get done. We have to leave gaps. Then people will lean into those gaps with their gifts, their skills, their diverse perspectives. So we cannot have the hubris of thinking we're the best choice all the time. So, you know, a flourishing culture is everybody gets to participate with their gifts and skills, and they're gonna be some foibles along the way.

Dr. Leah OH 46:27

Yeah.

Speaker 46:28

But then when they act, we either help them grow or we commend them for a job well done. We care by noticing their work. But first we have to allow them to do work.

Dr. Leah OH 46:41

Yeah, yeah. That's that's so helpful and a nice reminder. And I hope that listeners who have been feeling like they've had to do this are taking your words as permission, like their permission slip is signed by Dr. Allison Elford that they can take a step back and and let other people pitch in and to do the work to make it more equitable. Excellent.

Speaker 47:07

It's not only a permission slip, it is a prescription. I love that. You must step back. Yeah, you must allow others to do, you must leave things undone. I yeah tell you now, please do that because the beauty of our team, the beauty of our families is diversity, and different people have different skills, different attitudes, and different ways of doing things. And we want to see those things come forward. We need to see those things come forward.

Dr. Leah OH 47:42

Yeah, exactly. I love that. A prescription. So, Allison, I have two final questions for you. This is how we end all episodes of the communicative leader, and these questions kind of work together. So the first part is, you know, what is the pragmatic leadership or communication tip challenge advice you want to leave? Our titled leaders out there, our friends who are, you know, managers, directors, chairs. And then the second part is what is the leadership or leadership communication advice challenge that you want to leave for employees of all ranks?

Speaker 48:20

Yeah, my first challenge to leaders, to daughters in the workplace and in the home is audit your invisible labor, audit your bandwidth. What is the invisible work, which is unpaid and unacknowledged labor that you're doing, and it can be emotional, it can it can be cognitive, it can be tasks, and it can also be in the form of identity that nobody is seeing but people are benefiting from. Name it. That's the first step to then doing some calibrating where you could redistribute it. Okay. And my advice to employees and to others is see communication as care. Many times with communication, we think communication is talking. If we're extra thoughtful, we say communication as listening, but communication is also care. So care provisions are a communication effort coming toward you. Whether you're a manager or an intern, the words that you use to describe the those communication acts of care, they can create belonging or they can create burnout. So thinking being clear, naming, labeling what people are doing with clarity and kindness, but also adding boundaries. These are not opposing forces, these are a complementary match set that creates a thriving, flourishing workplace. And daughters, we need to do that in our families as well. And we we need to think of it as a whole set, a whole system of things that help us stay connected.

Closing Reflection And Sign-Off

Dr. Leah OH 50:18

That's so helpful. I'm writing notes down. I really love that communicationist care and making that all part and parcel and recognizing that, you know, advocating for boundaries or demonstrating care through your words or actions, it's all intertwined and interdependent. So insightful, Allison. I cannot wait. I'm gonna go pre-order your book. I cannot wait to have it and to work through this. This has been a really helpful conversation for me. I know it's gonna be really helpful and insightful for our listeners. So thank you for sharing your time and expertise with us.

Speaker 50:56

Thanks so much, Leah. I really appreciated being here. I'm so grateful for you and your listeners giving it some of that thoughtful time and consideration. And I feel really seen today. So thank you.

Speaker 1 51:11

All right, my friends, that wraps up our conversation today. Until next time, communicate with intention and lead with purpose. Looking forward to chatting with you again soon. I'm a communicative leader.