I’ve had many moments in my leadership that bring up regret or shame because, looking back, I can see where my choices hurt someone or sent a damaging message to my team.  Often, I wasn’t coming from an honest place in those moments -  I was acting too quickly from a place of defensiveness, fear, or hurt - I just didn’t realize it. 

Many leaders have mixed feelings about inviting more vulnerability on their teams.  But when a team can’t be vulnerable, they manipulate instead.

“Manipulate” is a word that gets a strong reaction from most people.  But when we consider the definition – to control or influence someone – it’s often not a devious behavior, but a very common and understandable one.  Especially at work.  And especially when people don’t feel completely safe.  

On average, we have about 4,000 weeks to spend on this planet. Most of those will be “work weeks.”

We spend a lot of our lives with the people we work with. When it comes to the emotional roller-coaster that is the human experience, the reality is that much of that ride will be taken with our coworkers.

My daughter is a year and a half, and the question that’s been looming over my wife and me is whether we’re going to try for a second child.  When we first started talking about it, it seemed like we were just in different places (I wanted another one and she didn’t).  But recently we started having a fully honest conversation. 

What emotions are you comfortable with?  What emotions are you uncomfortable with?  If you’re in a leadership position, then your team can probably answer that question for you.

What do the words “emotional constancy” mean to you? For most of the leaders we work with, they’ve internalized those words to mean that they shouldn’t register “negative” emotions - and feelings like fear or anger should never see the light of day. For many of those leaders, “emotional constancy” is a good thing - something they’ve been praised for and feel a need to convey - but it’s also driven by fear, and deeply connected to race and gender.

Imagine you’re watching a team during an emotional meeting. Two team members are sharing their frustration with each other. Then someone is tearing up as they come clean about how much pressure and stress they’ve been feeling. Moments later, other team members are sharing their own fears about a new direction the team may be taking.

How does it feel seeing all this happen?

Now, imagine that you’re the leader of this team. Does that change how it feels?

I once told a colleague of mine that I was frustrated with them for sending me urgent emails late at night.  At the time, I was proud of myself for being honest.  But looking back, I was only sharing something half-honest.  The full truth would have sounded something like this:  “I’m feeling anxiety about my lack of presence with my family and I’m feeling a ton of pressure to keep my inbox clean because I’m afraid of being seen as someone that’s not responsive enough.”  The surface level truth was that I was frustrated with them.  The deeper truth was about my own struggle.  

Have you ever gotten feedback that you were too emotional?  Or, had the fear that you were coming across as too emotional?  Maybe you judged someone else for being “too emotional.” 

But what does “too emotional” actually mean? 

When I was 25 years old, I went to bed one night feeling totally normal and woke up the next morning with excruciating back-pain that made it nearly impossible to get out of bed.  At the time, I was bewildered.  How could something like this come out of nowhere?  I hoped that something that came on so quickly might leave just as quickly, but it was only the beginning of a decade-plus of various chiropractors getting me back into alignment, and many months (more than someone in their 20s/30s would care to admit) of wearing a back brace under my clothing.