The good-bad news about making the workplace more human.
My “discovery” of Brene Brown
When Brene Brown’s book Dare to Lead book came out in 2018, I didn’t know much about her (even though my mom had gifted me at least 2 of her books in the last handful of years). I quickly consumed her whole book. I was IN LOVE with the idea of brave leadership (over armored leadership).
She begins her book with “I want to take my two decades of research and my experiences inside hundreds of organizations to give you a practical, no-BS, actionable book about what it takes to be a daring leader.” I mean, to someone who has been scouring books, articles and all the things for data, evidence, and support of the way that I saw the world, this book felt like coming home. I mean, this was a book that outlined evidence of why acknowledging feelings at work is important WITH outlines on how to do just that.
Two things were going on here
1) so often the advice that we get and even research that we read in terms of being a better leader, or making a process work more smoothly makes so much sense. They include a list of steps or implemented as a process that makes a lot of sense. Do these things and you will succeed, or something like that, but they never seemed to actually truly work. THESE instructions seemed to finally start to get at a part that is often missing. Feelings!
Which is the other thing that was going on
2) I have consistently been called “intense,” “emotional,” and feel pretty connected to my feelings. I often got frustrated at work because it felt like my colleagues weren’t understanding me. I went and got my PhD because I thought that having a doctoral level education would give me better tools to explain myself, but those frustrating moments still happened.So when I read this, I felt like someone got me,
“In those bad moments, it’s not our job to make things better. It’s just not. Our job is to connect. It’s to take the perspective of someone else. Empathy is not connecting to an experience, it’s connecting to the emotions that underpin that experience.”
I wanted so badly for folks to connect with the emotions that I was trying to express and felt strongly that it was important to hold empathy for my co-workers. Through my encouragement, my boss had our leadership team (all men, and me) read some of the book together. I kept coming back to the table (fun fact about me, I love tables) on daring and armored leadership (the one up there in this blog). How I longed for other people to see themselves the way I saw them - rewarding exhaustion and associating productivity with self worth (oof that feels hard to say outloud) and also having empathy for each other in how hard our work could be sometimes.
I had always felt that my experiences were different and often I was led to believe that my expertise and perspective did not make sense. So this book helped me see how I could get others to understand me. I could not have articulated it that way at the time. It felt more like this is what makes sense to do and be in the workplace. My co-workers seemed to be into some of the ideas in the book, so we were exploring vulnerability, daring leadership, and taking off the armor at work.
Vulnerability at The Office
So one day, after a particularly hard conversation with our leadership team, my boss asked to talk to me in his office with the door closed. He wanted to know how that conversation could have gone better and proceeded to share how he was feeling about these hard conversations. I appreciated being vulnerable and I realized a couple days later, something didn’t feel good in my body about that conversation.
Looking back at this experience has made me realize that in many ways up until this point, I had felt misunderstood, but relatively safe in my workplaces. I was a pretty outspoken and frank white woman who had the resources that she needed to ensure that my outspoken-ness wouldn’t be held against me, anymore than it already was (in the getting passed over for promotions and not invited to meetings, they had already done that to me, what else could happen). To be fair, I’ve had at least one experience where a boss tried to fire me, but the way I tell it, I didn’t let him (not sure how he would tell it).
So, I want to pause here and acknowledge that I am human and that I am sharing this story with you to show the ways that my humanness showed up at work. Learning about Daring Leadership, ways to bring empathy into my work, just knowing that someone else believes that feelings have a place in the office, all of these were helpful tools that have helped me be a better leader, researcher, and co-worker. AND my experiences with bringing these concepts in the office taught me how much I didn’t know about others’ experiences, showed me my own personal wounding and how it shows up in the office (which I was able to see over the course of the past 2 years in therapy) .
I had been so absorbed in my feeling out of place and so desperately wanted other folks to understand or have compassion for me, I had become the thing that I was so frustrated about. Looking back, this quote describes both what I wanted for myself and what I was doing to others.
“One of the signature mistakes with empathy is that we believe we can take our lenses off and look through the lenses of someone else. We can’t. Our lenses are soldered to who we are. What we can do, however, is honor people’s perspectives as truth even when they’re different from ours. That’s a challenge if you were raised in majority culture–white, straight, male, middle class, Christian–and you were likely taught that your perspective is the correct perspective and everyone else needs to adjust their lens. Or, more accurately, you weren’t taught anything about perspective taking, and the default –My truth is my truth–is reinforced by every system and situation you encounter.”
The Good-Bad News
In the leadership development, professional development, organizational development, institutional effectiveness, and coaching spaces (among many other), I have seen and participated in the idea that there are tools that will solve the problems that I faced
not being able to be seen or heard in my workplace, (ahem, being passed over for promotions and important opportunities that were given to men who had less experience and less knowledge about a particular subject),
Wanting very much to bring about change in my organizations, to address the things that I was hearing folks talk about not feeling good, but not invited to the meetings or being invited and dismissed in conversation
Feeling horrible about setting boundaries about when I was able to work
Telling folks at work when something didn’t feel good only to have the conversation turned back on me for having strong feelings or “making it personal”
In my 20s and early 30s, I saw the tomes of books and articles on these things as a gold mine of “the answers.” Because when we see people as problems to be solved, of course we can come up with a solution. Just find the right mindset, the right technology, the right customer management system (CRM), the right project management software, the right leadership model … then things will click into place and things will run smoothly, on time, and efficient.
When was the last time your organization or workplace bought software in the hopes that it would make life easier? Did it?
The good-bad news is that there is no easy fix for making the workplace a space for different kinds of humans to feel, I won’t say safe, or that they belong, because I feel like those terms gets tossed around a lot, but feel like they want to be there, that they are welcome (which in turns brings up ALL the metrics that matter for the bottom line).
And, guess what? It’s “messy,” which means it feels uncomfortable It also feels great. I make mistakes. I think when we stop avoiding discomfort and making mistakes and recognize that all of that is just part of feeling more at home at work.*
*I want to be clear that there are plenty! of systemic issues that contribute to mistakes and discomfort being real important clues about protecting yourself. Those are important and valid parts of the process of making the workplace more human and all of the things
