Melting Down At Work?

“It’s Always Personal” (Random House, March 2011), Anne Kreamer’s newest book gets to the heart of our emotional lives in the workplace. It’s a fascinating account of the tears and fears most of us struggle to suppress when we’re in the office. As a former corporate executive and someone who now coaches business leaders, I understand this landscape well. Kreamer has meticulously researched her subject, includes real-life examples (in full disclosure, one of those examples belongs to me), and further provides Emotional Toolkits with each chapter, ideas and strategies for managing our emotions at work.

Kreamer opens the book with her own experience as a senior executive at MTV Networks, a division of Viacom run by the mercurial Sumner Redstone. She paints the picture of a triumphant deal, a celebration after months of labor and the clinking of well deserved glasses when an unexpected phone call arrives from Redstone. Could it be congratulations for a job well done? Not to be. The Viacom Chairman reamed her from bow to stern because the deal announcement had not created an up tick in the stock price. She was in a word, devastated.

So how do we manage our disappointments, unpredictable circumstance, and anger-prone bosses? As Kreamer makes clear, we can’t we have a conversation about emotions in the workplace without raising the issue of gender. She asks a provocative question, “Have you ever cried at work?” It’s the inquiry she made of me during her early days of research and one she posed to many others in her pursuit of understanding what happens to our emotional selves when we cross the office threshold. In answer to her question, I have certainly wanted to cry at work but with the exception of some prodigious “welling up”, have never done so. I believed then (and a part of me still does) that it was not allowed, that I would lose credibility in the doing. And therein lies the rub. Kreamer explores the issue of gender in the workplace from both an emotional and neurological point of view. Women are in fact, wired differently, she states. This is not to recreate the debacle of Larry Summers and the women in the Harvard engineering department. It is to say, as Kreamer illustrates, women who have succeeded in getting that corner office, have often done so at the expense of their own physiological and emotional makeup, shortchanging, sometimes short circuiting themselves in the process.

In order to lend some heft to what Kreamer was seeing in her interviews, she enlisted the expertise of J. Walter Thompson, a global ad agency, and specifically their Brand Intelligence Department. An investigation was launched that revealed four different emotional profiles, based on the WEEP typology created by Kreamer and the JWT team. To take the survey go to annekreamer.com The emotional types, “Spouters”, “Solvers”, “Accepters” and “Believers”, are often corollary to the corporate culture in which we thrive (or oppositional in those we do not). Most of us, like Kreamer herself, have a toe in more than one type.

Critical to the topic is the seminal work of Daniel Goleman. Emotional Intelligence became the buzz word of the late 90’s and finally gave language and power to intuitive intelligence, something that Kreamer says is more prevalent among women than men. While she is careful to state that Goleman made no distinction between men and women in his work, she however, cite advances in neuroscience made possible through fMRI technology. The ability of science to watch a live brain while is it registering various stimuli has provided hard proof to the wisdom offered over the last four decades by social psychologists. Our behavior and specifically our decision making is an emotional process, a useful and perhaps alarming data point for those who still believe that logic is king.

Most psychologists would agree that resilience is the single most important attribute in emotionally healthy people. This supports the old adage that it’s not what happens to us that is important, but rather what we do with what happens to us that is. Kreamer offers solid strategies for improving emotional equilibrium and resilience, the core of which seems to be remaining attentive to one’s emotional state. This attention allows us to scan for emotional triggers and even physical precursors, such as hunger or fatigue. This kind of self-awareness, coupled with the willingness for men and women to express a more full range of emotions at work, might head off work place implosions – and even lead to an environment where both genders can operate in a “tag-team model”, leveraging the gifts and hardwiring of each.

“It’s Always Personal” is a smart book and useful for anyone (male or female) who either leads a team or is part of one. Whether in business, non-profit or volunteering at the kids’ school, we are all in the people business. Read this book! You’ll be glad you did.