How One CEO Grows Her Business with Feeling

February 17, 2012

Posted in:
Harvard Business Review.

Tags: , , , , ,

What do you think causes millions of people to miss work and school in developing economies? Illness? Lack of childcare? Minimal professional training? Insufficient infrastructure? While all of those certainly play a role, I’m guessing that what Elizabeth Scharpf stumbled across as a critical factor in absenteeism wasn’t on your radar. While interning in Mozambique in 2005 for the one-person (!) private-sector development division of the World Bank — studying how small and medium-sized businesses can play a role in developing economies — Scharpf, now a 34 year-old graduate of Harvard’s graduate schools of business and government, happened to overhear a local colleague complaining that her employees often missed work because they were menstruating. Seriously? Perplexed and intrigued, Scharpf thought this might represent a business opportunity, and decided to dig deeper.

A study fielded by the Council on Foreign Relations, “Addressing the Special Needs of Girls,” underscores why missing school matters in a big, long-term way. The research found that each extra year of secondary education increases a woman’s potential earnings by 25% on average. In South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, another long-term study found that “more equal education between men and women could have led to nearly 1 percent higher annual per capita GDP growth” in each country. Beyond the humiliating difficulties for millions of impoverished individual women trying to improve themselves and support their families, this is a global issue with significant consequences for the economies of developing countries.

Scharpf was passionately determined to find a solution, tackling the problem the way she always does — by talking with people. “And when you talk to people,” she says, “you discover what’s missing. It’s that simple.” Those conversations revealed that it was the economy, stupid. A study found that 18% of school age girls in Rwanda, for instance, miss school because menstrual pads are too expensive. In countries like Mozambique and Rwanda, where the per capita GDP is under $1,000, the average annual cost of $33 (12 months x 5 days x 5 pad/day x .11/pad) for the cheapest imported sanitary pad can often be simply unaffordable. Because the “unmentionable” subject of menstruation is taboo, the market failure — supplying cheaper pads — had never received the attention it deserved.

Scharpf found that absorbent wood pulp was the biggest raw material manufacturing expense for pads, and wondered if cheaper indigenous materials could be used for local production, and if also coupled with a more efficient distribution network, there might be a real business opportunity given the huge underserved populations.

Successful Social Entrepreneurship Combines Mind and Heart

Scharpf did all the traditional MBA number-crunching and analyses, but recognized that tapping into emotion — the incredulity, outrage and fellow-feeling aroused in industrialized countries by the discovery that 21st century working women are routinely reduced to sometimes using ineffective rags, or even bark or mud in rural areas, for feminine hygiene — would be essential if a fledging enterprise were to succeed. “I have empathy with these women,” she told me, “because I don’t think where you are born should be the biggest indicator of your potential for health, wealth and happiness. I want to change that dynamic.”

Rwanda was a good place for Scharpf to launch her first initiative because local female entrepreneurs had already established their integral role to the economic renewal of the country in the years since the genocidal 1994 civil war. In 2009, with $60,000 in seed money from the not-for-profit VC organization Echoing Green, and with the Harvard Business School’s first social entrepreneur fellowship, Scharpf founded Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE).

Instead of simply raising charity cash to import finished pads, Scharpf and her organization are inventing a whole new system of community-based education, business training, manufacture and distribution from locally-sourced banana fiber — that is, solving this serious problem and creating a sustainable regional business. SHE has created a franchise model — providing business skill training, technical expertise, and co-investment — to partner with women in Rwanda and other developing-country communities to distribute and ultimately manufacture and launch their own SHE LaunchPads franchises. As product is sold, some of the initial working capital that SHE puts up is paid back, with the entrepreneurs eventually owning their local franchises. In turn, SHE reinvests its profits in new geographies or other disruptive enterprises.

Emotion Creates a Common Language

Scharpf says her challenge in dealing with scientists, academics, businesspeople, community activists and policy wonks “is always, ‘How do I speak in the same language to each of these different constituencies each with their unique language and objectives?’”

Scharpf and the SHE team, for example, first identified in banana-plants a local agro-waste fiber, and after experimenting, concluded that it had the potential to be an absorbent, cheap, safe material. They then approached MIT to partner on enhancing the process to make it more absorbent. She didn’t initiate the conversations by tugging on the professors’ heartstrings, highlighting SHE’s efforts to improve girl’s and women’s lives, but rather by challenging the scientists to help her solve a complicated new chemical engineering problem. But she realizes that it was the practical need to pioneer new materials technology under strict cost constraints in tandem with improving lives that really accelerated the innovation process. “I’ve found,” says Scharpf, “that the common language is the one of emotion.”

Emotion Attracts Good People

Scharpf told me she recently ran an ad for SHE’s first job opening in New York. “If you read the job description,” she said, “beside the intro and stuff about the need to financially analyze the potential to grow a business in x y and z ways, it was very dry stuff, but when we added the emotional elements around that factual description — that we are trying to basically change the paradigm of how international development is done, that we’re trying to work with communities to help improve lives, that we want to be disruptors — all those good things — well, the response was overwhelming.”

Scharpf has experienced firsthand that what inspires people — a mission to improve lives — is also good for business. This elusive component is something that behavioral economists are beginning to document. As Gretchen Spreitzer and Christine Porath reported in a recent issue of HBR, for organizations to prosper today, their employees need to feel as if they are “engaged in creating the future — the company’s and their own.” Research is also demonstrating that basing performance purely on beating the competition or making money can actually decrease employees’ intrinsic motivations to pursue a goal. In her book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Winifred Gallagher cited a study in which “college students who were paid to do a puzzle were significantly less motivated than those who worked for free.”

Emotion Inspires Ongoing Development and Builds Community

Scharpf intends for Rwanda to be just a phase-one proving ground. “We’re looking at Costa Rica and India to explore how we can technologically and operationally increase distribution either through new natural fiber based lines and/or by distributing other sorts of products via our network.” She was recently contacted by entrepreneurs from Zambia and Zimbabwe who were interested in starting SHE franchises. While doing a typical needs assessment, the first question Scharpf asks is “who is the person and what is driving them” — and then she explores the local raw materials and local business conditions. Scharpf ardently believes that SHE’s performance is influenced not only by the through-put of their machines and the efficiency of their distribution network, but by their ability to align people’s interests and passions with their roles.

Managing Emotion Effectively Keeps Business On Track

Scharpf says being attuned to the emotional aspect of work keeps her sensitive to issues that otherwise might not be immediately obvious — allowing her to pre-emptively deal with challenges before they grow disruptive. “The biggest challenges I have on a daily basis are with regard to human emotions,” she says. “They should have a psychology class at the business school because I am finding I am most effective when I understand what drives people to do what they do, whether it’s what they are passionate about, or what makes them feel insecure, or what makes them feel good about themselves, or what makes them have confidence, or what they can be proud of — keeping in mind all of those things.”

The bottom line is that empathy without rigorous, rational analysis solves no important problems — but rationality without empathy simply misses plenty of important and soluble problems. To be a responsible human and to be a successful entrepreneur requires both, working in tandem.

Leave a Comment »

The Business Case for Reading Novels

January 11, 2012

Posted in:
Emotion and Work, Harvard Business Review.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been a devoted, even fanatical reader of fiction my whole life, but sometimes I feel like I’m wasting time if I spend an evening immersed in Lee Child’s newest thriller, or re-reading The Great Gatsby. Shouldn’t I be plowing through my in-box? Or getting the hang of some new productivity app? Or catching up on my back issues of The Economist? That slight feeling of self-indulgence that haunts me when I’m reading fake stories about fake people is what made me so grateful to stumble on a piece in Scientific American Mind by cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley extolling the practical benefits to be derived particularly from consuming fiction.

Over the past decade, academic researchers such as Oatley and Raymond Mar from York University have gathered data indicating that fiction-reading activates neuronal pathways in the brain that measurably help the reader better understand real human emotion — improving his or her overall social skillfulness. For instance, in fMRI studies of people reading fiction, neuroscientists detect activity in the pre-frontal cortex — a part of the brain involved with setting goals — when the participants read about characters setting a new goal. It turns out that when Henry James, more than a century ago, defended the value of fiction by saying that “a novel is a direct impression of life,” he was more right than he knew.

In one of Oatley and Mar’s studies in 2006, 94 subjects were asked to guess the emotional state of a person from a photograph of their eyes. “The more fiction people [had] read,” they discovered, “the better they were at perceiving emotion in the eyes, and…correctly interpreting social cues.” In 2009, wondering, as Oatley put it, if “devouring novels might be a result, not a cause, of having a strong theory of mind,” they expanded the scope of their research, testing 252 adults on the “Big Five” personality traits — extraversion, emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness — and correlated those results with how much time the subjects generally spent reading fiction. Once again, they discovered “a significant relation between the amount of fiction people read and their empathic and theory-of-mind abilities” allowing them to conclude that it was reading fiction that improved the subjects’ social skills, not that those with already high interpersonal skills tended to read more.

Theory of mind, the ability to interpret and respond to those different from us — colleagues, employees, bosses, customers and clients — is plainly critical to success, particularly in a globalized economy. The imperative to try to understand others’ points of view — to be empathetic — is essential in any collaborative enterprise.

Emotions also have an impact on the bottom line. A 1996 study published in the journal Training and Development assessing the value of training workers at a manufacturing plant in emotional management skills — teaching employees to focus on how their work affects others rather than simply on getting the job done — found that union grievance filings were reduced by two-thirds while productivity increased substantially. And a study of a Fortune 400 health insurance company conducted by Peter Salovey, a psychology professor at Yale, looked at the correlations between emotional intelligence and salary and found that people rated highest by their peers in emotional intelligence received the biggest raises and were promoted most frequently.

To bring the subject home, think about how many different people you interact with during the course of a given day — coworkers, clients, passing strangers, store clerks. Then think about how much effort you devoted to thinking about their emotional state or the emotional quality of your interaction. It’s when we read fiction that we have the time and opportunity to think deeply about the feelings of others, really imagining the shape and flavor of alternate worlds of experience. Right now, I’m in the middle of Irene Nemirovsky’s posthumously published novel about France’s fall to the Nazis in 1940. Her simple sentences sketch a sense of uncertainty, moral ambiguity, and heartbreak — feelings I certainly wouldn’t want to dwell on in “real” life, but emotions I’m better off for having taken the time to consider.

But nourishing empathy doesn’t require such grimness. And if you want your diet of fiction, as it’s shaping your mind to be more emotionally acute, to be specifically relevant to work, there is a body of great literature about business and organizational behavior. For instance, Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, inspired by 19th century financial scandals among the British elite, resonates powerfully today. In his autobiography, Trollope wrote that “a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write The Way We Live Now.” Seems fairly au courant to me.

From now on, I’m going to feel less like an escapist slacker when I’m engrossed in a new novel. In addition to the Trollope, below are some of my favorite books to get you started.

Kurt Andersen, Turn of the Century — set in 2000 and 2001, a successful TV producer husband and digital entrepreneur wife, trying to balance the demands of work and life, wind up pitted against each other as executives in a U.S. media empire. His mistrust grows when she becomes a favorite of the Rupert Murdoch-like chairman. Meanwhile, their hedge-fund-manager best friend is involved in big-time stock manipulation. (Full disclosure: my husband is the author)

Jane Austen, Sandition — in this unfinished fragment of a novel, Austen departs from her typical marriage plot to describe the zealous entrepreneurialism of a real estate speculator. While we can never know how the novel would have ended, we can be pretty sure his housing bubble will burst.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House — Dickens’ tenth novel explores the human cost of prolonged litigation through the eyes of Esther Summerson, who is caught up in a multi-generational dispute over the disposition over an inheritance. Anyone who has ever been entangled in a lawsuit will revel in the characterization of the process. At the time of publication, 1852–1853, public outrage over injustice in the English legal system helped the novel to spark legal reform that culminated in the 1870s.

William Gaddis, JR — in the 1976 National Book Award winner, the 11-year old protagonist, JR, secretly trades penny stocks, using the tools of the trade at the time — money orders and payphones — to build a fortune. Written entirely in dialogue, the absurdity of a precocious child’s feat satirizes as Gaddis put it, “the American dream turned inside out.” His description of dysfunctional boards and the corrosive effect of corporate takeovers and asset stripping are as current today as they were 30 years ago.

Joseph Heller, Something Happened — Heller’s stream of consciousness second novel follows a regular-joe middle manager as he prepares for a promotion. The messy interweaving of his thoughts about his job, family, sex, and childhood perfectly distill how complicated the selves we bring to work really are.

One Comment »

Why You Really Shouldn’t Curse at Work (Much)

December 27, 2011

Posted in:
Emotion and Work, Harvard Business Review.

Tags: , , , , ,

The media brouhaha over Carol Bartz’s coarse language in the wake of her firing was telling. Rather than responsibly assessing her merits as the chief executive of Yahoo!, the conversation instantly devolved into what kind of woman swears on the job. That, to me, is so twentieth century. When we’ve reached a point in our anything-goes culture that the anchors of the most important newscasts (Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert) curse nightly, and public figures like prime-time teenage role model Lea Michele, the actress who plays a goody-goody(ish) character on Glee, talks (as we used to say) like a stevedore in interviews, it strikes me that managers and executives need to seriously rethink the words they choose to communicate displeasure.

In fact, we’re now so inured to vulgarity that it takes something really over-the-top — say, the baby doll being sold this holiday season that apparently curses — to make us stop and take notice. Taboo words, with a couple of true taboo exceptions, have always been used sparingly to communicate powerful emotions, but when swearing becomes simply reflexive and ubiquitous — as it is today — those words cease to have much power or meaning. And when crude words do shock, the language deflects our focus from the serious issues at hand.

Take, for instance, the internal Goldman Sachs e-mail that Senator Carl Levin read aloud last year during a Congressional hearing: “Boy, that Timberwolf was one shitty deal.’” Hard to tell without more context whether the guy who wrote that e-mail (now a Bank of America division president) was proud of the group for pulling the wool over the public’s eyes, or just candidly stating the facts. But one thing became clear pretty quickly — to the American public, the language made what looked like double-dealing cynicism more memorably rotten. And the immediate consequence? Rather than suggest to their employees that they not sell bad deals to their clients, Goldman Sachs chose to focus on the language and its potential for embarrassment, instructing their employees to stop using profanity in e-mails.

The emotionally laden words that communicate our more powerful feelings are particularly slippery at work, where we spend the majority of our waking hours and where our livelihoods hang in the balance. How we choose to interpret hyper-charged no-longer-taboo words changes from moment to moment and office to hallway, according to permutations of status, gender, ethnicity, education, age and the particular setting — one person’s obscenity is another’s spicy punctuation.

“In-house” language is often at odds with public norms. I was talking with a female partner in a New York corporate communications company that advises companies on critical communications challenges. “I think of swearing,” she told me, “the way I think of Yiddish. It’s very expressive.” But she also asked to be quoted anonymously, perhaps anxious that her cheerful acceptance of workplace swearing might be seen as an endorsement — and might offend clients, current or prospective.

And yet many of the people I spoke with about this subject, men as well as women, suggested that swearing was a strategic part of the lexicon they developed to be taken seriously as potential alphas of their organizations. I can relate. My first jobs were in banking and then media sales — businesses at the time completely dominated by men and fueled by a backslapping, crude-joke-telling camaraderie. Swearing definitely helped me come across as one of the guys, and thereby granted me access to the kind of casual gossiping and information-trading upon which deals are sometimes built. “Swearing,” as one senior female attorney told me, “gives others, men and women, reciprocal permission to let their hair down and feel comfortable sharing revelations.” This approach — swearing as an effective social tool that can enhance work relationships and allow women in particular to present an equal-to-men or even crypto-masculine identity — has been documented by psychology and linguistics researchers.

But not all swearing is equal. Take swearing in anger. Swearing is positively correlated with extraversion and Type A hostility and many scholarly studies (Jennifer Coates, 1993, Vivian de Klerk, 1991, 1997) identify swearing as intrinsically aggressive. Take Dick Cheney’s unapologetic snarling at Senator Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor, or Serena Williams’s outburst to a ref about a foot-fault call. Their curses were meant to take charge, to intimidate.

And swearing men and swearing women are perceived differently. De Klerk discovered that women risk being viewed more negatively than men when using obscenities. Elizabeth Gordon, who studies speech and gender stereotypes at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, has found in her research that women who were “non-standard” speakers — that is, foul-mouthed — were judged to be of lower social and moral strata. We’ve seen this play out in public. Cheney refused to apologize for his f-bomb and reported that he felt “better” after his exchange with Senator Leahy, whereas at Serena Williams’s next press conference, she was subdued and entirely contrite.

These days, it’s practically meaningless and way too easy to say something “sucks,” or (much) worse. And the rough waters in which we all now work makes it increasingly important to be clear and precise about what is going on emotionally inside and around us — not to be milquetoasty, but to be calibrated. As a person who allowed (and, I confess, still occasionally allows) herself to resort to default swearing, it seems to me that in this laissez faire age, and as we start a new year with new intentions, that it’s a good idea — indeed, a damn fine notion — for business leaders to get more truly creative about their language and use the various linguistic bombs only sparingly.

Leave a Comment »

A Female-Dominated Workplace Won’t Fix Everything

October 17, 2011

Posted in:
Emotion and Work, Harvard Business Review.

Tags: , ,

From the Harvard Business Review

Men on the job must feel besieged. Two seismic shifts are underway that are irrevocably changing the ways in which we’ve believed work works.

On the one hand, new technologies have enabled neuroscience to discover that men and women tend to be wired differently in ways that incline men — can it be? — to behave more emotionally and irrationally in certain work situations, exploding the myth that women are the only emotional creatures in the workplace. Recent research, like that led by Cambridge University neuroscientist John Coates, suggests that surges in male financial traders’ testosterone produce states of euphoria that cause them to understate risk, thus contributing to the overleveraged global financial crash. Since men naturally produce ten times as much testosterone as women, it’s being suggested that a more gender-balanced financial workforce could be stabilizing for firms and for the system as a whole.

On the other hand, the metrics of 21st century female professional and economic empowerment have become a tide. As of the last two years, more American workers are female than male, and the postindustrial occupations in which women predominate — health and education, among others — are the growth sectors. Women today account for 57% of college undergraduates, 62% of graduate students, and majorities of those graduating from medical and law schools. Despite the continuing rarity of women at the very tops of large corporations (which will inexorably shift as the cohort of overwhelmingly male CEOs retires during the next decade) and in finance, a 2004 study by the women’s group Catalyst, The Bottom Line: Connecting Corporate Performance and Gender Diversity, concluded that companies with the highest percentages of women in their executive ranks achieved 35% higher returns on average. What’s more, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research, women today own 40% of the private businesses in the United States and a study released last year found that (the relatively few) high-tech start-ups led by women fail less frequently than those led by men. After 40 years of feminist-era dues paying, women’s moment has come. Hear us roar.

As a woman who came of age in the late 1970s and who has worked in sometimes unproductively male-dominated workplaces, I’m with the program so far. Two-income families are the new normal. Economic parity for women is a good thing. But I don’t think we should rush into simplistically thinking that a female-dominated workplace will change everything and overnight make the world perfect. The bigger opportunity, and indeed an essential rethink if we are to reboot our economy, is finally to move beyond circa-1970s gender-centric ideology into a larger, more constructive conversation about how to reinvent workplace norms.

We humans, women and men alike, are hobbled by a gigantic evolutionary time lag. We have no clue how to handle 21st century cognitive threats, real life in the modern workplace. We evolved, survived, through our ability to respond to physical threat — is that a snake on the trail or a stick? Our bodies’ stress hormones, adrenaline, cortisol and testosterone, among others, which raise blood pressure and send more blood to our muscles, historically made us more alert in preparation to fight or flee imminent physical threats. Whether I’m fleeing a charging lion or cowering before a screaming boss, the amygdala responds, on a basic level, in a very similar way. Deep inside we are all irredeemably super-old-school. But the reality is that emotion is far more complicated in a modern work setting than it was for our prehistoric ancestors on the savanna. Is the person in the next cubicle gunning for my job? How will I get my work done when the babysitter calls in sick? And this disconnect — this evolutionary delay in the development of more emotionally nuanced or sophisticated responses to psychological challenges — is a huge contributor to what makes navigating modern work/life so incredibly hard.

In a 2008 paper on gender differences, five psychologists — Kateri McRae and James Gross of Stanford, Kevin Ochsner of Columbia, Iris Mauss of the University of Denver, and John Gabrieli of MIT — reported that while men and women don’t really differ in their basic “reactivity” to emotional provocation, they are quite different in the ways in which they respond. Based on both subsequent questioning and neural responses to aversive photos as measured by fMRI brain scans, the authors discovered no significant differences between the genders in the speed of their reactions to stimuli. But there are gender-based distinctions in how men and women were able to regulate and manage their emotional response to these stimuli. The amygdala was less activated in men’s brains than in women’s, and portions of the women’s prefrontal cortex, the cognitive control center, were more active than those of the men. The relatively new science of emotion is beginning to pinpoint precisely the neurochemical differences between the ways women and men tend to approach and deal with emotion, and it is important neither to let PC feminist ideology or neo-Victorian “Ooh, ick” squeamishness blind us to the findings. A too-reductive men-are-from-mars-women-are-from-venus perspective serves no one.

Rather than stigmatize the characteristic emotional biologies of one gender or the other, it should be the goal of any person or organization to allow all emotion at work, in all of its gendered nuances, its full due. Understanding the truths that neuroscience is revealing will allow us greater awareness and thus control of the emotions that shape our decisions and behavior at work. Learning and paying attention to the emotions that motivate and/or hobble us and in what measure — anger, anxiety, fear, joy — can help us learn to manage and use those emotions more effectively. I’d like to think that today, with U.S. women irrevocably at work and the economy in such dire straits, that we can safely raise all kinds of questions without endangering progress. When it comes to emotions and work, we should start being more unflinchingly analytical and empirical than ever before. As science discovers, confirms, and refines new understandings of gender-based aspects of emotion, let’s try not to react to them too emotionally.

Leave a Comment »

Taking Your Feelings To Work

June 14, 2011

Posted in:
Emotion and Work.

Tags: , , , ,

WHEN I graduated from college in 1977, the world was still neatly divided into two spheres: work and everything else. Work was supposed to be a hyperrational realm of logic, filled with timetables, organizational charts and returns on investment. It was only outside of work that emotions — so dangerously ill-defined and unpredictable — were supposed to emerge.

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Anne Kreamer says that “home life, with all its messy, complicated emotional currents, has become inextricably and undeniably woven into the workplace.”

But from the first day of my first real job, as an administrative assistant at the Park Avenue headquarters of a commercial bank that is now defunct, I realized that emotions were simmering everywhere in the workplace.

My desk, on the hushed, deep-pile-carpeted executive floor, was a few feet opposite the restroom doors. (Clearly, I was lowest in the pecking order.) Every few days, one of the three executive women on my half of the floor would rush into the restroom and, after a little too long, re-emerge with the remnants of a good cry still visible on her splotchy face. I also watched men dash into the men’s room and leave a few minutes later, tight-lipped and ashen.

Even as a 21-year-old workplace neophyte, I realized that emotion is a force that underlies all of our behavior. For my book, “It’s Always Personal: Emotion in the New Workplace,” I spent two years exploring Americans’ attitudes toward emotion at work today, and my findings suggest this amended version of Descartes’s famous line: I think and feel, therefore I am.

In the old days — pre-Internet, pre-cellphones — it was a lot easier to believe “work equals rational” and “home equals emotional.” But now that work and home life constantly bleed into each other, that distinction has become anachronistic and probably self-defeating. People text and e-mail their friends and family members throughout the workday, and they receive messages from colleagues and clients on nights and weekends and during vacations.

The membranes between private life and work, especially office work, have always been porous, but today employers and employees expect accessibility and accountability pretty much round-the-clock. And whereas old-school office memos and business letters generally weren’t expected to be friendly or candid — that is, human — business e-mails most definitely are.

Conversely, what used to be considered private behavior can instantly reverberate at work through social networking. People fire off e-mails late at night, only to regret their tone and intent in the cold light of day. Facebook friends from work can stumble upon wild and crazy pictures from a bachelorette party. Tweets and anonymous mobile video uploads can instantly broadcast unflattering emotional displays by surly customer service employees or misbehaving C.E.O.’s.

The conventional wisdom used to be that we brought home the emotions we couldn’t express at work — snapping (or worse) at blameless partners and children. That is still true, but what’s new is that home life, with all its messy, complicated emotional currents, has become inextricably and undeniably woven into the workplace.

The rulebook for modern office etiquette has yet to be codified. How do we avoid hurting one another’s feelings if everything is supposed to be rational, yet also transparent and accessible? How can others understand the emotion behind what we’re trying to say in an e-mail if no one takes the time to read beyond the subject line and the first sentence?

And the more we relegate communication to the electronic realm, the greater our longing for face-to-face contact. Our new “flat” organizational structures at work might seem to promote a more hang-loose level of emotional expression. But, if anything, flatter organizations tend to require even higher levels of emotional competency and effort in order to navigate amorphous command structures.

NO one is sure where the lines are anymore. Should we high-five an underling? Is it cool to make jokes with the boss? What if we overhear the man in the next cubicle crying?

Clear rules for this new working world simply don’t exist. But one thing is certain. The Millennials, a generation raised with the 24/7 naked emotional transparency of texting and social networking, is now entering the work force by the millions each year. As they replace old-schoolers born in the 1940s and ’50s, there is no turning back to a compartmentalized world.

I like to imagine that if men and women were to express more emotion routinely and easily at work — jokes, warmth, sadness, anger, tears, joy, all of it — then as a people we might not feel so chronically anxious and overwhelmed. By denying the range of emotional expressiveness intrinsic and appropriate to the workplace, we find ourselves at a loss for how to handle this brave new boundary-less world.

Overtly acknowledging how and in what measure anger, anxiety, fear and pleasure color and shape our working lives can help us manage those emotions and use them to our benefit, both at work and at home.

E-mail: preoccupations@nytimes.com.

Leave a Comment »
  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4

© 2006–2012 Anne Kreamer. Site designed by KBS and powered by WordPress. Subscribe to RSS.