Two Steps to Improve Your Dealings with Feelings

What follows is based on the assumptions that you want a workplace in which:

• your colleagues and/or reports like working

• they feel respected

• the default state is diligence

If those don't apply, this may not be of much use to you.

There is an uncomfortable and unpopular truth that needs telling. Take a moment to prepare yourself: sip some tea, breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, fix your posture, center yourself. All set? Here it is:

People are people, even at work.

If you're rolling your eyes and saying, "Of course they're people, Rebecca, they're professional people at work," then I hear you, but I'm asking you to bear with me. The lie we have perpetuated in business and (oh my yes) in academia, is that good professionals and scholars do not have feelings. Those dreadful, unprofessional people going around and having feelings about what happens at work or school are making the rest of us professionals and scholars very uncomfortable and it's frankly just inconsiderate on their parts.

I understand this position. I was raised in New England, where if people are going to have feelings, they darned well have them on their own time, in the privacy of their own homes. It turns out that despite centuries of wanting this to be true, it still isn't. People still insist on have feelings, sometimes right out in the open! In order to communicate with them and accomplish our working goals, the very first step has to be acknowledging that fact in general, and whatever feelings are being had right now in particular.

There is a whole spectrum of behavior in response to other people's feelings, from completely ignoring them to weeping openly with them. What a lot of professionals do is select from the following menu:

1. Ignore them (continue the meeting in which one attendee is crying just as though they weren't)

2. Put them out of sight and put the onus of removing the feelings on the feelings-haver (reschedule the meeting for later "when everyone is a bit calmer")*

3. Invalidate the person's reasoning and emotions in an attempt to get back on course ("really, you're wrong about the situation which is why you're upset, so you should stop being wrong and upset and start seeing it like I do")

You may have done one or all of those familiar things, or engaged in adjacent behaviors, and felt that project goals were met, so what am I on about? Yup, maybe that report did get filed, the presentation made, the paper draft written, and as far as you can tell, everything has gone back to normal. It's certainly easier to see the cost of poor practice if it has these nicely articulated quanta of success attached to it, and easier to ignore when those quanta are fulfilled. Don't be fooled, though, those are not the only places a price is exacted. Ignoring what someone is going through, or belittling them for it, has a long-term cost in your relationship with them individually and your reputation at large.

How frustrating is it to have someone not understand you in a conversation, misrepresent what you've said, and carry on as though you supported whatever point they were making? It's intensely frustrating! Provided you feel like the situation allows it, you will probably stop the conversation and go back over what you said to make your point again, possibly several times, until they demonstrate they've understood you correctly. Expressing feelings about something works the same way. If you do not engage with the important thing someone is expressing to you, by acknowledging it and demonstrating that you understand where it comes from ("I know this is stressful; it's a lot to do in a short time," e.g.), the other party to your conversation is getting a nice dose of frustration on top of whatever else is already going on.

Strong emotions make for compelling memories, and you are inviting the moment of writing up a 360 in which this person's strongest memory of working with you is saturated in frustration. You're also inviting that person to be distracted right now, just as you are in the conversation where you're being misrepresented. So yes, maybe that report came in, but it's probably not as excellent a piece of analysis as it would have been, or it was later than it could have been, if the author had been undistracted.

Before your hackles go all the way up at the affront of being saddled with responsibility for other people's emotions, let me be clear: that's not what this is about. You are not being asked to be anyone's therapist (unless you're an actual therapist, in which case, nice of you to read this, but I imagine it's not something you struggle with). You are not being asked to accept blame for environmental factors beyond your control. You are being asked to listen and show the object of your listening that you have done so.

Have you ever had that nightmare where you're shouting and no one even looks at you? If you haven't, doesn't it sound pretty awful? Acknowledging someone's feeling is what needs to happen to stop working with you from becoming that nightmare. It takes about two sentences, it's something we all have time for, and the long-term advantages are great. There are two basic steps to making it happen:

Step 1: Acknowledge & Sympathize

If you know where the stress is coming from, say so!

• "This is rough, isn't it? It's really dispiriting when a client is so rude and demanding."

• "I'd be livid if someone changed out a deadline like that on me. Sorry it's happening to you."

If you don't know where it's coming from, that's fine. Ask them.

• "Tough day, huh? What's going on over there {with that client|in your department|by that shifty-looking ficus}?"

• "Man, you are really hopping! What's got you all fired up?"

These are not going to be perfect templates for every situation. You will need to adjust them to be the words you would use, in the register (formality) that is appropriate for you and your workplace. The semantic content needs to be represented, though, in which you acknowledge the person's feeling and express your sympathy for it. Even if you aren't feeling [insert feeling here] about the circumstances surrounding you, you've probably felt [that feeling] before, so draw on that when it comes to expressing sympathy. Whether you accomplish the latter with word or tone is up to you.

Step 2: Move On

The person having a terrible day doesn't want to wallow in it. They are at work. Remember the assumption that your work is a place where the default is diligence? That's what's going on here. The desire is to move past the gravity well pulling the person's energy off course. The moving on can be what you do to address the cause of the negative feelings, if that's appropriate and feasible, or it can be to get back to the shared goal you're meeting about.

If your meeting is to talk about the transfer of your colleague to another manager, and it turns out he has some feelings about that because the new manager called him an unprintable name, it's time to reconsider. If your colleague is struggling with something like a close family member's poor health, just knowing that a colleague cares can help relieve the burden of not the situation, but having to perform unfeeling professionalism as it has so long been defined. If you feel like it, offer to take the conversation offline after work.

Acknowledging people's feelings can have some significant advantages in heading off problems before they start. In one of the above examples, you avoid an HR disaster down the road because you noticed and opened a dialogue about the feelings that revealed a problem. In the other, you get a better sense of the context in which your colleague is living and working, and you can manage your expectations around overtime or particularly grueling assignments. You may have saved the company from losing a great employee. You may have restored someone's motivation. You may have prevented an embarrassing error from being printed where a client sees it. You may have saved a client relationship, indirectly, or realized that it's not worth saving, and energy is best spent elsewhere. None of these touches the additional advantages of having built or supported a relationship that can reward you in unforeseeable ways, both professionally and personally. There's a lot to your direct and company benefit in this practice, is what I'm saying.

After years of being taught that work is not a place to have feelings, it's likely to be difficult to get over the hurdle of discomfort to engage with them, in yourself and others. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that every difficult thing is proportionally rewarding, but I do believe this difficult thing is worth doing - and not just because "people-focused" has become a buzzword. It will take practice and patience, but it is worth it, and the cost of not doing it is too high to ignore.

* This one is really only problematic if you combine it with ignoring the feelings of the person who has them. If the feelings-haver asks to move things back, or accepts your offer to move them back, good on all of you for being open and clear with one another. If you just do it preventively to avoid dealing with the fact that someone is having feelings near you, that is not advised.

#communication #language #basics #transferableskills