There's No Crying in Corporate!

This episode gets into why workplace emotion is treated like a malfunction, why the rules are applied completely differently depending on who you are. Hhhmmmmm!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to We Lead Anyway. I'm Noelle, senior leader career coach, and your host. A little while ago in a previous company, I was on a Zoom call. I was with a group of other senior leaders when an announcement was made. One of my favorite senior vice presidents was leaving the company. This man has been instrumental in my success personally and academically. And I was just shocked. I was devastated. Miss you, Steve. But before I could act, before I knew what was happening, tears had sprinted down my face. And I turned off the Zoom camera. But not soon enough. After that meeting, my CPO and another VP reached out to me to check on me. I wasn't trying to draw attention to myself. My reaction was authentic and I was fine with that. But I vowed to myself I would never cry at work again. And then I did. I cried again with my VP and CPO. But this time there was some foolery that had popped off. And I was passionately advocating for truth, justice, and the African-American way. And I felt it. I knew it was going down. Like I'm 50. I've been in perimenopause for way too long. And what I've learned is I'ma cry. I wanted to end that meeting so bad. I felt it coming. And as soon as my voice broke, I knew I was cooked. So many things went through my head. Probably think I'm a little BI. Maybe they figure I'm overwhelmed and I can't handle the job. I was so mad. No? I wasn't mad. I was disappointed. Because crying at work, it's one of those things that happens constantly and is discussed almost never. It's like the corporate's dirty little secret. People do it in the bathroom stalls, in the parking garages, and apparently on Zoom calls. And then they come back to their desk and they act like nothing happened. And yet somehow we have collectively decided that the appropriate response to human emotion in a professional setting is to pretend it doesn't exist. Which is interesting because the people that are making those rules are also human, allegedly. Today we're going to talk about crying at work, what it does and doesn't mean, and why the agreement around it is applied so wildly different depending on who you are and what you look like. So get your tissues. Let's start with basic biology because I think it helps remember that crying is a physiological response. Your nervous system gets overwhelmed by frustration or exhaustion, maybe joy. You've been blindsided in a meeting by the third passive aggressive email from Karen in accounting. And it releases that overwhelm through tears. That's it. That's the whole mechanism. And if the universe had a better sense of humor, it could be released through interpretive dance. God's not that funny. But as it stands, it happens to a lot of people. In fact, a 2018 survey found that over half of the workers have cried at work at some point. Over half. It's a lot of people. You're not alone. And you're not uniquely unprofessional. You're just regular unprofessional. I'm kidding. You're just a person who has a body that responds to stress the way bodies respond to stress. Now, does that mean every emotional moment at work is equally appropriate? No. No, context matters enormously. But let's disagree to start from a place where crying is a human thing that humans do. Good? Good talk. So here's where it gets interesting. Because the rules around crying at work are not applied equally. Not even close. We'll talk about men first, because of course we will. When a man gets visibly emotional at work, when his voice breaks in a meeting, when he pounds the table in frustration, it's often read as passion. This man is passionate. He's perceived as someone who cares deeply and leads from the heart. There are entire leadership narratives built around the emotional availability of a male executive who isn't afraid to show vulnerability. It's kind of a thing now. I remember listening to one of my former C-level execs. He was talking about his wife and her health, and he cried. And the entire room of grown adults cried with him. But a woman? Get it together, Janet. You can't handle the pressure. And then, because we cannot have a conversation about this without going there, and y'all who know me know that I go over there. Let's talk about what happens when women of color show emotion at work because the calculus shifts again. Math is hard, y'all. Passionate black woman who raises her voice, who shows frustration, or is visibly moved. Well, she's loud and difficult. Ask Congresswoman Crockett. I mean, have you ever even heard of an angry white woman? Sans Alanis Morris said, I don't think there is one. The angry black woman trope is so deeply embedded in workplace culture that black women have reported self-monitoring their emotional expression at levels that are exhausting to even talk about. So, I won't. And it's not because we're more emotional or unhinged or my favorite aggressive. It's just the consequences of being perceived as emotional are significantly higher. And it's not just black women, women of color broadly navigate a version of this, as well as gay men, where showing emotion risks confirming a false stereotype. It ain't true, y'all. We ain't all like this. So when we talk about crying at work being unprofessional, I want to be really honest about what that means in practice, which is unprofessional for some people, authentic leadership for others. I once worked with this woman who cried in almost every single meeting for one reason or another. She was given a key to the nursing room to decompress and an accommodation on her breaks. So put that in your coffee and slurp it. Okay, let's talk about when people are relatively forgiving, for lack of a better word, about emotion at work. If you just found out about something devastating or you've had a personal loss, a health scare, even just a crap day, because that happens. Any workplace worth working at will extend you basic human grace. A leader who gets emotional talking about what their team means to them or what they believe is possible, it's inspired. I can even see getting emotional about having to let somebody go, like a beloved employee or lay someone off. Most are very understanding about emotionality in these settings. Now, here's where you might want to use more discernment. In the middle of a conflict where you need to be heard, this is a hard one because tears aren't necessarily wrong in and of themselves, but they can be manipulative. They often shift the conversation from the issue to your reaction to the issue. Suddenly, the other person is managing your emotions instead of addressing the problem. And if you feel it coming in those moments, it's absolutely okay to say, I'm gonna need a minute, step out, regulate, come back. Another place you might want to use discernment is in a high stakes moment where you need your credibility to do the heavy lifting, a big presentation or a negotiation, a meeting where you're already fighting to be taken seriously. You gotta decide how to navigate it. When it becomes a pattern that's getting in the way of your own professional goals, if you're regularly overwhelmed to the point of tears at work, that's worth paying attention to. Because if your emotional overwhelm is the norm, it's usually telling you something either about your environment or your nervous system. They both may need attention. Here's the thing I keep coming back to. We built workplaces on this idea that professionalism means emotional neutrality, that the most credible, competent version of a person is the one with the flattest affect and the most controlled exterior. And we've spent decades rewarding that performance and penalizing anything that deviates from it. And it has cost us an enormous amount. It's cost us honest conversations that needed to happen, burnout employees afraid to tell us that they're struggling. It's cost us the kind of psychological safety that actually makes teams better. Because psychological safety requires people to believe that their authentic human responses won't be weaponized. Me, myself personally, I lead with my heart. I'm a lover. I lead with passion. I love the work that I do and I love the people that I do it with. And if that's soft, just change my name to Drake. Because people leaders should have some emotion around what they do. And any organization that can't make room for that, that's gonna probably keep losing its best people to places that can. Now, I want to end with this. If you've ever cried in the bathroom stall at work and then walk back to your desk and acted like nothing happened, I see you. Because your eyes are red and you have snot on your face. And if you've ever watched a colleague get emotional and thought, I would never, I gently invite you to examine what you've taught yourself to do with that feeling instead. Because it went somewhere. It always goes somewhere. The workplace is not a feelings-free zone. We all just agreed it was, and then we built systems to enforce that agreement. And some of that system is just good old-fashioned shame. I mean, shame everybody or don't shame anyone at all. You're allowed to be a person with a functioning nervous system at work. You're allowed to figure out on your own terms what to do with these feelings in a professional context. Protect your credibility where you need to, and extend yourself the same grace that you would extend to someone you actually like. You know what I used to do? I found a buddy. I found a buddy. It was that one person I could always drag into a conference room, have an emotional outburst, get it out of my system, curse, scream, and then move on. Man, those are the best. She was the best cook. She didn't speak lick English, but she was a great listener. Well, that's it. That's the whole thing. If you have a topic you'd like to discuss, email me at noelleadsanyway at gmail.com. And if you're interested in personal or professional development, visit leadwithnoelle.com. Till then, go cry in your car.