Transcriber: Yahya Mansour Reviewer: Ghada Khalil
Have you ever felt uncomfortable showing your emotions at work?
Have you ever had to hold back tears?
In business, the locations and rooms,
where products and services are created, are called workplaces.
The name itself identifies what we expect to happen there.
Work.
But there’s a problem with that,
emotional humans driven by their emotional brains
will be present in those spaces.
The workplace is not designed to be the sometimes anxious place,
or even the joyous place.
So there’s a mismatch between design and user characteristics,
which is never good.
How does this mismatch show up in some subtle and not so subtle ways?
It looks a lot like the grief process.
Grief and emotions more generally are not symptoms of flawed individuals.
It’s human.
Compared to other species that can walk minutes after Earth.
Human newborns can do almost nothing except emote.
They cry.
Emotions are basic biology,
complex patterns born out of neurotransmitters signaling
between the hundred billion neurons and glia present in each person,
which cannot be checked at the door before arriving at work.
Because we have tended to define workplaces through mechanistic terms
like productivity,
we leave individuals to experience anxieties,
disappointments and frustrations in isolation.
Philosophers call that suffering.
The brain is the only organ in one body
that can affect the same organ in another body.
The status of my liver does nothing to the status of your liver.
But if one brain is injured or traumatized,
or emitting harmful behaviors,
that can leave a residual impact on other brains.
Mirror neurons respond to the experiences of others.
The scientific term for this is emotional contagion.
We all know the pattern of grief responses:
denial, anger, bargaining, despair and acceptance.
We can observe a given workplace
and see where it is in that process.
The denial phase leader or denial phase company
makes no mention of emotion
and expects all individuals will be operating within the exact manner,
consistent with some factory specifications.
The anger phase leader
recognizes that humans are sometimes emotional,
and thus has issued a warning that such behaviors will not be tolerated.
The bargaining phase rewards for less emotionality,
but this is a difficult exchange
because humans do not give up their basic need for trust and tribe
in exchange for trinkets or travel.
The despair phase leader feels overwhelmed
by the emotions of the teams they manage,
and may find themselves in despair.
The acceptance phase organization has recognized that emotions exist,
and may have policies for those dealing with anxieties,
accommodations for those feeling in other ways,
but this still isn’t enough.
There’s a sixth phase after the other responses,
where we begin to celebrate emotions in our professional enviroments.
Some of the most progressive organizations in the world
achieve their excellence by asking different questions;
they focus on emotion.
Rather than how can we ensure 100% compliance,
they ask how will people feel about this?
Rather than whom should we promote based on past operational metrics,
they ask whom should we promote based on the ability to inspire?
And compassionately care for the teams they manage.
It’s a different mindset.
But all this begins by first acknowledging that humans feel burdened,
and sometimes worried, and sometimes just need laughter.
We all, at varying moments,
are sustained by the emotional boosts that come from things,
like gratitude, imagination, praise, feeling included,
and the many other ways
that we are reminded that we matter to others.
Including emotions in our workplace design
is not the responsibility of others.
It actually begins with each of us;
self-reflection on where we are in that grief process,
and having empathy for where others might be.
Once we do so, we give permission to others to do so also.
And once all of us can acknowledge that emotions exist
and begin to celebrate that,
we’ve created a new design.
Imagine a future,
where you would feel comfortable crying in front of your manager,
and even better,
just being human.
Thank you.
(Applause)