Empathy at Work
Excelling in the Art of Emotion Work
I’M JUST GOING to say this outright: the workplace is problematic empathically. I notice that of all the places where empathy is developed or impeded, the workplace is one of the most obvious culprits in the reduction of emotional awareness and empathy. People focus a lot of energy on schools in terms of providing an empathy-building and antibullying curriculum. But I’d like to focus a great deal more energy on the workplace, since it is by far the most time-intensive aspect of our lives. School obviously occurs during a crucial and formative span in our lives, but unlike work, school ends after twelve years (unless we go on to college, though even then it might only go on for another two to eight years). We might spend twenty years in school, but we’ll probably spend forty years or more in the workplace.
Work is where we are: if we work a normal forty-hour week, we spend more time at work than we do with our families or at home. In essence, we live at work. As adults, the only thing that we spend more time on than work is sleeping. And yet the world of work has not found ways to create a healthy emotional, empathic, or aesthetic environment for us. If you think about it, the difference between how we approach work and how we approach sleep in terms of the relative importance of each in our lives is kind of bizarre. For instance, in almost any-sized town, you’ll find a number of home and bedding stores where you can buy hundreds of different mattresses and choose bedding in nearly any style, from contemporary to sensual to wildly artistic. The bed and bedding industries continually send messages about how vital and important your sleep life is; they’ve created a competitive sleep luxury market with increasingly expensive beds and sheets with thread counts that reach absurd numbers. The constant message is that your sleep comfort and luxury are crucial to the quality of your life.
Contrast this to your local office supply store—where in most places, small mom-and-pop shops have been replaced by large, impersonal chains. Use your Einfühlung capacity to feel your way into and around a typical office supply store. If you want to organize your office or cubicle, you have only a few choices—usually there are items in black, smoke, or silver mesh, though some designers have created color-coordinated office supplies for what’s being called the home office (which annoyingly includes canning, sewing, and scrapbook supplies—sigh). But in the more serious office supply section, nothing is truly original or even particularly attractive. Look at the mouse pads, which is one place where many people can personalize their workstations. Depending on the store, you’ll find some flowers, some pictures of space, some kittens or puppies, or perhaps a print of some painting you’ve seen before. Even the art is pedestrian, and all of it says, “These are nonthreatening deviations from total conformity.” Even though you’re using your own money to set up a space where you’ll spend the lion’s share of your life, your choices are few.
If you’re lucky enough to be able to choose your own chair and desk, you might be able to find something fairly comfortable, but it won’t be beautiful or artistic, really. The concept of comfort exists in high-end chairs and ergonomic workstations, but the comfort is not about you and your empathic, aesthetic, unique needs as much as it is about making you a better working machine. Of course, in defense of the workplace as an entity, your purpose is to be a cog in the machine of the workplace, and you are being paid to perform. However, the workplace as an entity has not yet become aware that we are spending the greater portion of our days, our weeks, and our lives away from home, away from our families, and away from an aesthetically pleasing, emotionally supportive, and empathically welcoming environment.
Please put your anthropologist’s hat back on and empathically observe your workplace and your office or workstation in the way you observed your home in Chapter 6. Ask yourself whether this place supports you as a unique human being? Is your workplace an extension of your home environment in that it supports your sensory, social, and emotional needs? Or does your workstation create problems for you? Is your workplace a healthy terrarium for you? If not, why not?
As you study your workplace, look at it specifically in terms of the thresholds I mentioned in Chapter 6: Do you have the privacy you need to do your work? Do you have the room you need? Is your sensory environment supportive, or do sounds, scents, lights, or commotion impede your ability to focus? Is your workstation organized and functional? Are there separate areas for you to take breaks or rest or eat? If not, why not?
If you have the power to do so, see if you can make changes to your workstation so that you can feel more physically and aesthetically comfortable. If your workplace is filled with open-minded and caring people, you may want to include everyone in the process, so that all of your colleagues can become more comfortable—that’s an ideal situation. But even in a deeply imperfect workplace, you can use thresholding to create privacy and protection for yourself—even in a noisy room where a cloth-covered cubicle divider is your only wall.
I do have a small warning about thresholding at work: some research suggests that the act of walking through doorways or thresholds has a kind of memory-erasing effect. In an experimental study done at the University of Notre Dame,53 psychology researchers discovered that the act of entering new rooms has a strange cognitive-boundary effect, such that people often forget what they were thinking or doing before they crossed the threshold. The hypothesis is that crossing a threshold or walking through a doorway creates the appearance of a new cognitive event or environment that requires quick orienting behaviors and the clearing of items in short-term memory. This reorienting process may also relate to the problems people have with multitasking. As you probably know, recent research is showing that most people can’t multitask at all, even (and often especially) if they think they’re good at it—their performance actually decreases on every task each time they switch tasks. It could be that multitaskers are continually crossing cognitive event boundaries and losing their train of thought. As I think back to the thresholds I used in my writing cubicles, they did have that event boundary effect, which is why they were so great: people often came in to chatter about something meaningless, but as they crossed into my little cubicle space, their faces would often go blank for an instant, which gave me the chance to refocus them on work. Thresholds are awesome!
But thresholds may have effects on memory, so a word to the wise: if your workplace includes a lot of activity where people have to move from room to room to deliver information or complete their tasks, you might want to reduce the thresholds (for instance, by painting the doorways the same color as the walls), so that your coworkers don’t lose their flow and their focus every time they cross into a new area. If the thresholds at work can’t be modified, and you’re one of the people who has to walk through possibly forgetfulness-inducing gauntlets every day, you can support your brain by writing down everything you need to do before you move through those event boundaries. Just don’t forget to bring your list with you!
The physical condition of your workplace can support you empathically as well as physically, because an organized, well-defined, and comfortable physical environment can help you tolerate the often-disorganized emotional environment at work. Physical and aesthetic comfort can help you feel grounded, focused, and resourced, and this calm, steady state can help you perform some of your most important (yet usually unpaid) work of all: emotion work.
REVISITING EMOTION WORK54
In Chapter 7, I introduced the concept of emotion work, which comes from sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s groundbreaking 1983 book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. In the book, Hochschild writes about the emotion work of flight attendants who, no matter what perils or discomforts they face, are expected to continually offer a calm, helpful, and accommodating demeanor to passengers. Although these demeanor rules are not written out explicitly in job descriptions, they’re an intrinsic part of what we’ve all learned to expect (and even demand) from flight attendants.
Hochschild’s concept of emotion work really helps us look at the often-unwritten emotional rules and empathic behaviors that are expected from us in the workplace—that is, how we must manage our own emotions and the emotions of others in order to get our work done. For instance, if airline passengers are rude, a good flight attendant won’t generally snap at them or ignore their requests, as he might if his friends or family treated him rudely. In fact, his normal human reactions would be frowned upon by the airline; therefore, part of his job description (stated or not) is to deal with rudeness and bad behavior in unusual or even counterproductive (to him) ways. This is emotion work, and in many cases, it’s actually enforced empathizing. It’s a part of our social contract with each other, and though it’s not usually spoken of explicitly as a job skill (or written down explicitly in a job description), emotion work is possibly the most important job skill you possess.
As you go through your day, pay attention to the emotion work of the people who serve you and of the people you serve. You probably have very specific (yet unspoken) emotion work rules for the owners and employees of businesses you visit (especially restaurants and stores), even if you’ve never set eyes on anyone in the business before. One unspoken expectation is that people in service or retail positions must be empathic. They must appear to care about you and your latte, or your shoes, or your cat food—even if they’re making minimum wage and you’re wealthy—even if they’re well-dressed, and you just got out of the gym with your hair still wet. It doesn’t matter—your position as a customer (or even as a potential customer) entitles you to free empathy and respect. Expectations of emotion work and professionalized empathy are everywhere, such that you and I know how every person in a business is supposed to behave toward us, how we’re supposed to behave toward them, and how other customers are supposed to behave toward both of us. Everyone has a specific part to play and a specific emotional and empathic performance that is required. Strangely, most of us have never been explicitly taught about any of this emotion work; we’re just supposed to have picked it up through cultural osmosis.
At your own job, you have specific emotion work and empathy work expectations for yourself, your coworkers, your employees and contractors, and your managers or bosses. Yet even though we all know how everyone is supposed to behave, this knowledge is not made clear, and a great deal of the trouble I see in the workplace revolves around emotion work that either is not being performed (the problem employee) or is being performed but not valued (the put-upon or heading-for-burnout employee). In many cases, the rules of emotion work require that we behave inauthentically with each other and toward ourselves. The workplace can become really miserable when there is trouble in the sphere of emotion work.
OUR UNDERGROUND AWARENESS OF EMOTION WORK
As a younger woman, I was hilariously out of place in many jobs, because emotion work was so obvious to me that I didn’t realize other people couldn’t see it. I tended to get into trouble because I would say out loud, “Hey, why don’t you tell your assistant the truth instead of doing his work for him?” or “That person is working way past her abilities, and she’s bossy and snappy because of it,” or “This person is heading for burnout, and if you call yourself a manager, then manage the tension in this job and protect your workers!” Empathically speaking, I saw poorly managed emotions, unjust emotion work, and enforced, inauthentic empathy as an integral part of the unprofitability and inefficiency of the workplace. However, until I discovered Hochschild’s work, I had no vocabulary for it.
Because I had so many persistent questions about the emotionally detrimental atmosphere of the workplace, I decided to minor in the sociology of work and occupations (this is in addition to my BA in social science and my work as a researcher). I also became certified in career testing and guidance and in human resource administration, because I wanted to know what the experts say about this situation. But after four years of study, I found that the experts say almost nothing.
Career guidance and HR administration programs spend almost no time on emotion work and enforced empathy requirements. There are a few psychology courses here and there, but the focus is more about administrative organization first and how to deal with problem employees second. There’s very little understanding of the nuances of emotion work and the ways that an unsupportive workplace can create an unproductive emotional atmosphere, which will then create problem employees! There’s also very little awareness of why people burn out; in fact, a great deal of the burnout response and prevention I was taught focused on making job tasks more interesting or varied, but there was almost no awareness of the burnout potential of unsupported, unjust, or unreasonable emotion work and enforced empathy.
Sadly, unless they’ve done extracurricular study, the career guidance professionals whose job it is to help us find work and the HR professionals who oversee the workplace usually have no direct education in or understanding of emotion work, which is the central empathic skill that makes the workplace functional (or, more commonly, dysfunctional). There is a saying that “People don’t quit their jobs; they quit their managers.” The fact is that very few people leave jobs because their daily tasks were too hard; instead, they often leave because the emotional and empathic environment was not managed effectively. It’s an ongoing problem that the workplace as an entity does not have a handle on at all. As such, I didn’t pursue career guidance or HR after I finished my certifications; however, I did discover precisely why emotion work problems in the workplace aren’t being addressed. We have on-site specialists and processes for almost every other problem that exists in the workplace, but the HR professionals whose job it is to humanize the workplace have not been reliably educated or trained to understand emotion work. Therefore, it’s up to you and me.
BRINGING EMOTION WORK INTO THE OPEN
Empaths tend to act as emotion work janitors, in the workplace and in their personal relationships. We who are empathically sensitive tend to pick up on—and then address—the emotional troubles around us. However, because emotions and emotion work live in the shadows, we are often unaware that we’re engaged in perpetual, unpaid emotion work. We tend to clean up the emotional troubles around us. We mediate between people who can’t get along. We jolly the grumpy people in our lives. We translate emotions into easily digestible chunks for our emotionally unaware friends and family. We calm people who are unaccountably anxious. We always seem to sit next to the person who wants a confidante. People tend to bring us their troubles and their conflicts. And no matter what our stated job description is, we have a second full-time job: we’re professional emotion workers and professional empaths. But because our work isn’t identified as work, we tend to burn out.
All of the skills and practices in this book will help empaths and unpaid emotion workers learn what emotions are, how they work, and how to work with them. I developed these empathic skills specifically to make emotion work less taxing: the self-soothing skills address burnout directly; boundary setting and thresholding help empaths develop a sense of privacy, so that their emotion work can become intentional rather than reflexive; and Burning Contracts and Conscious Complaining help empaths address and unload the incredible amount of emotional baggage they carry for others. In addition, these two skills have another vital purpose. Since so many empathic activities occur in the unheralded, unnoticed, yet absolutely crucial area of emotion work, both of these imaginal skills help you bring these seemingly ephemeral empathic behaviors into visual, verbal, and tangible form so you can identify, separate from, and change those behaviors.
Conscious Complaining can help you get to the core of what’s bothering you, and Burning Contracts can help you treat your emotion work as a choice rather than as your destiny. When you can visualize or make tangible the persona you’ve donned as an unpaid emotion worker, you can burn your contracts with that persona and make way for a new, more intentional, and more comfortable approach. You can still do emotion work, and you can still be an empath, but your empathic mindfulness skills will help you do so on your own terms.
IDENTIFYING YOUR OWN EMOTION WORK
What kind of emotion work do you do? Is it stated as part of your job description? (Also, do your friends, mate, and family openly acknowledge your emotion work?) Are you doing any emotion work for a colleague, such as soothing tempers if your colleague blows up, translating for your colleague when others don’t understand her behavior or her needs, or taking the lead if another colleague cannot speak up on his own? Are you mediating between family members, translating emotions for friends, or working hard to keep your mate happy, even though your own needs are going untended? What emotion work do you do? Is it being recognized? Is it working for you? And in the larger empathic sense, is it working for other people?
Specifically, how much emotion work are you doing in the area of happiness creation? Is it all right with you when other people feel angry, or do you often try to soothe anger away? Have you become a kind of portable rejuvenation and resourcing station for angry people? If so, could you be training people how not to set boundaries for themselves and how not to develop their own self-soothing skills?
Do you allow people to feel appropriate shame so that they can learn how to moderate their own behavior, or do you soothe shame away as well? Can you allow people to feel anxiety that may help them get their work done, or do you step in and help them complete the tasks they’ve been procrastinating about? Are all emotions safe in your presence, or are you actually helping people remain emotionally unskilled in the presence of difficult emotions?
As you examine your own emotion work, check in with any valencing you might be imposing upon the emotions of others. In the workplace, enforced empathy often means that you have to keep everyone calm and happy at all times—very few other emotions are welcome. This enforced reduction of emotional awareness has pretty troubling consequences for the workplace as an entity, but it also has troubling consequences for you and your coworkers.
As you observe and improve your physical workspace and your thresholding, think about creating protected areas, times, or practices (such as Conscious Complaining with a Partner) where you and your colleagues can be whole and skillful emotional beings, and not merely emotion work robots. It’s a gift to help people experience their real emotions—to feel the way they feel—and to support them in developing their own emotional skills. That’s good emotion work, if you can get it!
HIERARCHIES, MERITOCRACIES, AND HIDDEN POWER STRUCTURES AT WORK
Empathically speaking, I love to observe the power differentials in the stated organizational structure of a business—from the owners or the board of directors at the top to the management at the middle to the workers at the bottom. On paper, the power structure is clearly hierarchical; and yet in the real world, you’ll often find that the power structure actually exists in a meritocracy that the workers themselves create so that they can get their work done. A meritocracy is an organizational structure that places the most talented people in key positions because they merit those positions. They didn’t get there through family connections, they didn’t get promoted past their ability level, and they’re actually awesomely good at their work and fully merit the position they have.55 Most businesses dream of being meritocracies, and most HR departments hope to create meritocracies through effective hiring practices and employee training initiatives. But as we’ve all seen, many things get in the way of those hopes and dreams.
However, meritocracies are necessary if you want to get anything done. In many dysfunctional workplaces, workers themselves will set up what I call a shadow meritocracy of the business. Shadow meritocracies are high-functioning but unacknowledged work groups that arise in response to a failing worker (who’s often in a key position or in management), in reaction to an unjust hierarchy, or in reaction to a rigid bureaucratic structure that can’t respond quickly to change. I don’t use the word shadow to suggest that there’s something shady going on; I use it because these underground meritocracies can’t be seen in the light of day. They’re not in the organizational chart, there are no job titles for their members, and you can’t even identify them by the relative size of their members’ offices or paychecks. You can only see them out of the corner of your eye—in nuances, undercurrents, interactions, whispered communications, and workflow. These meritocracies aren’t out in the open because they can’t be; they have to exist in the shadows because they’re covering for, protecting, or working around a problem that cannot be remedied for some reason. Shadow meritocracies are an intrinsic feature of many workplaces, and they’re an intrinsic part of emotion work.
We’ve all seen or worked in businesses where an owner, manager, or key employee just wasn’t very functional and where talented assistants, other managers, or the entire staff performed emotion work and physical work to cover for that person’s shortcomings. Sometimes the person is beloved, and though the labor needed to cover his or her failings is real, the people who form the shadow meritocracy don’t seem to mind it much. They might speak confidentially with one another as a way to relieve tension, but their emotion work binds them together empathically, and they often feel content because they’re helping the nonfunctional person, connecting with each other, and making the workplace function efficiently. Shadow meritocracies can be healing and necessary structures in a workplace where troubles or troubled employees can’t be addressed openly.
However, if the troubled owner, manager, or employee isn’t beloved or is actively obstructionist, always stopping the workflow to go off on tangents, complaining all the time, or bullying others, then the shadow meritocracy can become very shadowy, indeed. This kind of emotion work is grueling, and it can lead to burnout, certainly, but it can also provide a terrible lesson in what kind of work is rewarded. If an untalented, obstructionist, self-pitying, or bullying worker is not challenged by HR, management, or the board, everyone else in the workplace will learn that talent and personal accountability are not the coins of this realm. What workers do with this knowledge is individual, but the knowledge that some people can get away with incompetence and emotional volatility at work can have an explosive effect on the workplace as a whole.
Thousands of books, seminars, and workshops are directed at this kind of workplace problem, but most of them focus on fixing problem employees rather than looking at the entire situation and the emotion work that’s occurring. Sometimes these approaches focus on the actual problem employee who created the need for the shadow meritocracy in the first place. But in many cases, that problem employee is in a position of power, and as we’ve all seen, the rules for people at the top of hierarchies are different from the rules for people at the middle or the bottom. In many cases, the problem employee will be misidentified as the one from the bottom who displays anger about injustices occurring at the top. I cannot even count the programs that target problem employees who are branded as negative (meaning they express any emotion besides happiness and they allegedly drag down the workplace) without studying or even considering the social, emotional, and empathic atmosphere of the workplace.
I saved a particularly awful example of this kind of program in some emails that my husband, Tino, sent me from a rotten job he had. Tino and his fellow managers were asked to identify employees by their leading emotion—Sad Susan, Fearful Frank, Angry Amanda, and so on. They were then told how to manipulate these people into being better workers. Tino knew that this approach would create Angry Karla, and he sent the emails with a kind of “Can you believe this crap?” message—but wow! Talk about zero understanding of emotion work, hierarchies, meritocracies, and basic human emotions. Why are managers with no training in psychology able to interfere with the basic emotional functioning of their workers, yet are not held to any professional, academic, or ethical standards themselves? Yeesh!
Dear workplace, dear managers, dear HR departments: Wake up! Emotions are reliable, action-requiring neurological programs that are evoked by reliably specific stimuli. If you follow the emotions, you can gather amazing, game-changing information about what’s actually occurring in the workplace, in the hierarchy, and in the shadow meritocracy. For instance, if Susan is always sad, has anyone checked to see whether she’s depressed, or has anyone looked to see if there’s something inherently depressing in the workplace? Could Susan be a sensitive person who’s acting as a kind of canary in the coal mine, pointing to the problems everyone else is ignoring? If Frank is always fearful, what kinds of changes is he dealing with? What is he orienting to, and is he identifying any hazards? Could Frank be an effective early-warning system for existing or upcoming problems? If Amanda is always angry, is she a sensitive person in the middle of a loud room with no protection? You can fix that, and perhaps make everyone else more comfortable at the same time. Or is Amanda performing intense emotion work and needing to set boundaries? You can help her with that. Is her voice or standpoint being threatened? If so, why? Or is she speaking up for people like Frank and Susan, who are so overwhelmed that they’ve lost their voices? Are Frank, Susan, and Amanda in a shadow meritocracy, doing heavy lifting for a failing manager or a clueless boss? And why are these employee-fixing programs always directed at workers and not at bosses, CEOs, or the entire emotional milieu? Yeesh.
I’ve read a lot of research about hierarchies, dominance, and employee voice in terms of when employees will (and won’t) communicate problems up the hierarchy. Workers often see more than managers and bosses can, because they’re actually doing the hands-on labor; yet they tend to keep problems to themselves. This is a huge impediment to workplace effectiveness—it wastes untold amounts of time, energy, and money, and it reduces productivity. In one study,56 organizational behavior researchers at the New York University Stern School of Business found that eighty-five percent of the people they interviewed had chosen not to communicate their concerns to management at one time or another. The researchers found that the reasons for this are primarily social, emotional, and structural; the reasons have nothing to do with the actual work being performed. Many people in the study reported that they didn’t communicate because they didn’t want to be identified as troublemakers or complainers; they didn’t want to rock the boat or lose their relational security. Empathically, I have to ask: Why is there so much tension in the workplace that people can’t talk about real workflow problems without endangering their position? Why are people penalized for honesty? Why are their emotions pathologized? And why can’t they point to emperors who have no clothes? The answer is this: these honest and productive actions go against the secret, underground rules of emotion work and enforced empathizing. Even if an individual is very honest and forthright in his or her private life, collective dynamics often trump individual skills. The culture drives the behavior.
As you empathically observe your workplace, look at the culture, how problems are handled, and the amount of emotion work that is unacknowledged, yet absolutely enforced. Identify any problem employees, if there are any, and look for shadow meritocracies. If one exists in your workplace, are you a part of it and, if so, what emotional labor are you performing? Does your workplace culture value excellence, which involves honesty that flows up and down the hierarchy, or is excellence just a buzzword in the mission statement? Is there any danger in bearing bad news about products, processes, ideas, supplies, or other workers? If there is danger, then you can expect that a great deal of communication will be redirected. It won’t travel upward, but it will still travel, in one of the most important forms of empathic communication there is: gossip.
ETHICAL EMPATHIC GOSSIP57
Gossip is usually belittled, despised, and pathologized, yet it’s actually one of the most important empathic tools you have. Clearly, this is not the accepted view of gossip, which is usually portrayed as toxic, deceitful, and immature. I understand this view of gossip, because I had a very hard time with gossip when I was a younger person. I saw it as an emotionally dishonest form of communication, and I had very little patience for it. In my family, gossip was the central mode of communication about serious relationship issues, and I watched as people’s honest feelings about each other were only spoken in private—to someone else—while the real relationships faltered and sputtered because people refused to talk directly to one another. As a young woman, I continually got myself into awful triangulated problems because I would tell people about what other people were saying about them. I would share the information I learned through gossip because I thought everyone would be better off if all parties knew about the troubles, the issues, the backstory, the emotions, and the truth. Then they could work together to improve their relationships, right? Hah! Ack! I got into so much trouble that I had to burn my contracts with that behavior, do some research, and work hard to become more intelligent about gossip.
What I discovered in anthropology, sociology, and social psychology is that gossip is a universal practice that is irreplaceably vital to human communication and relationships. Gossip is an essential part of social life, intimacy, and emotional health. Studies have shown that gossip is undertaken by people of all ages and both genders. Gossip is not—as I thought erroneously—a sign of cowardice or dishonesty; gossip is the tool you use to form bonds and convey (and become skilled in) the unwritten social and emotional rules of each social situation you encounter. Gossip is a vital social skill, because it gives you a quick and easy way to learn the lay of the land, socially speaking. If someone pulls you aside and warns you that a mutual friend is in a really bad mood because his car just got sideswiped, you’ve just been saved from making a social faux pas by asking him for that $40 he owes you. Gossip, which we can also call informal communication, can give you social information you can’t get any other way.
Gossip can also create an alternative social structure, especially in areas where a great deal of authority is being applied from above. Think of an authoritarian work or schooling environment in your life and how you and your peers created secretive, informal chains of communication to share information about how to behave, how to manage, or how to avoid punishment. Shadow meritocracies function on information-rich gossip, and gossip among peers can reduce the damage that a rigid, hierarchical, and authoritarian system can inflict. Gossip can create an alternative, informal power structure that gives people a certain level of freedom, even in oppressive environments.
Gossip is also a way to signal (or attain) closeness in relationships. For instance, if you enter a new job, and within a few days people begin gossiping with you about coworkers and management, it’s probably a sign that they’re welcoming you into the informal communication network—and possibly into the shadow meritocracy. Or if your friends and family regularly gossip to you, it’s a sign that you’re a trusted confidante (whoops, Karla from the past, you really screwed up by sharing all those secrets!).
I have a working hypothesis about gossip, which is that the amount of gossip in a workplace relates directly to the effectiveness of the HR department or management. Certainly, if you have a harsh, authoritarian workplace, you’ll observe large amounts of gossip as people try to find ways to navigate around oppressive social structures. But you’ll also find intricate gossip networks in lackadaisical, poorly managed workplaces, because there’s not enough structure, and people have to create shadow meritocracies and informal information networks just so they can achieve some order amid the chaos. In both oppressive and permissive workplaces, my working hypothesis is that HR and management are either not able to or not allowed to regulate and humanize the social environment; therefore, the workers have to do it themselves—and often, they do it through gossip.
When you see a great deal of gossip and indirect communication occurring in a social group, it can be a signal that you’re in the presence of an overly permissive or overly repressive social structure. Studying gossip is a fascinating way to empathically observe a social group.
For empaths, because so much of what we see about emotions and the social world is not addressable or mentionable in public, gossip can be a wonderful stress-relieving tool. Gossip can help emotionally sensitive people relieve inner tension, because it allows them to share the emotive and empathic impressions they pick up from others but are not allowed to mention openly. Gossip helps people connect to others, understand human behavior, identify or change their social position, and support (or undermine) rules and set them for others. Gossip is a powerful communication tool that exists in every social group, everywhere.
THEN WHY IS GOSSIP SO DESPISED?
The answer is simple: jealousy and envy. Think about the purpose of gossip, and then think about the things that gossip helps you achieve. Gossip is a powerful communication tool that helps you maintain your social position and your connections to sources of recognition, financial security, loyalty, social support, fairness, and love. Gossip helps you situate yourself skillfully in relation to these vital things; it’s a primary tool that helps you complete the actions that your jealousy and envy require. However, since these two vital and irreplaceable emotions are some of the most hated in the entire emotional realm, their communication tool nearly has to exist in a hidden underworld. You can’t ignore your social capital and your relational security—it would be foolish in the extreme to disregard your connections to security, fairness, recognition, loyalty, and love—and yet the emotions that help you attain and preserve these connections have been shoved into the deep, deep shadow. And gossip, which is crucial to your social viability, has been shoved into the shadow with them.
Gossip is an irreplaceable tool of informal communication. Gossip gives you an accessible way to connect to others and gather information that you simply cannot get any other way. But when a great deal of gossip is active in a social group, it usually means there is a great deal of trouble that is continually evoking jealousy and envy—there’s injustice, disloyalty, and threats to identity and security. Gossip has a purpose. It’s necessary for social survival, and when it’s very active, it’s telling you there are injustices and inequities that need to be attended to. If you can follow the gossip threads and listen to the emotions, you’ll discover key issues and crucial structural problems that many businesses hire high-priced efficiency experts to find. I say save your money and follow the gossip. Listen to the emotions, bring the emotion work out of the shadows, and bring your empathic genius to the situation. All the information is there; it’s in the gossip network.
Gossip is crucial to social awareness, social inclusion, and social survival, but by its very nature, gossip is indirect, and this can be problematic. If gossip is the only informal communication skill you have, you might learn to talk about people, rather than talking to them. When you’re trapped in a poorly managed social system, this indirect approach can save you from all kinds of trouble. In the workplace, gossip and shadow meritocracies may be your only options. But within your intimate relationships, gossip can lead to unfortunate problems precisely because it isn’t direct. Gossip can certainly help you navigate safely through social structures and workplaces that are repressive (or permissive), but you can also create a repressive social structure if you rely on gossip alone, instead of developing actual relationship skills. You can waste years talking about a friend or coworker instead of talking to him or her openly; therefore, it’s often necessary to move gossip aside so that you can communicate directly with people you care about.
Gossip can also be problematic in relationships that you want to nurture, because gossip can lead you to invade the privacy of your gossip targets as you telegraph their behavior to everyone. This is one way that gossip can create a repressive and compromising environment. If you go back to the relationship you gossiped about without addressing the problems more openly, there will always be this thing hanging out there—this gossipy information that you hope never gets repeated. Although gossip is necessary, it can be a very messy business if you aren’t conscientious and ethical about using it.
Gossip is as natural to us as breathing. Anthropologists see gossip in humans as a primal tool of socialization, almost like the preening and grooming primates use to form bonds. So gossip is primal, and it’s necessary. But that’s no reason to allow it to be unconscious, derisive, or dehumanizing. If you can understand the tension-relieving, information-gathering, and socialization opportunities that gossip provides, you can turn gossip into a tool that will support your ethics and your relationships. You can turn gossip into an ethical empathic practice.
Although this gossip practice is wonderful for your personal life, you can also use it at work if you realize you’re in a gossip network or a shadow meritocracy. These networks and shadow structures are often unconscious; you might just fall into them through peer pressures and group dynamics. That’s fine, because it’s normal to chip in and make things work when there’s dysfunction in a social structure—it’s a part of the social contract we have with one another. But these social contracts can be brought forward, observed empathically, renegotiated, or burnt. Remember that your social and emotional behaviors aren’t concrete; they’re not written in stone. They’re tendencies that you can change when you become aware of them.
ETHICAL EMPATHIC GOSSIP SESSIONS
Gossip is an irreplaceable communication and connection tool that helps you learn the informal rules of a social group. Gossip also helps you become aware of threats to your security and your relationships, and gossip can help you take the actions that your jealousy and envy require. Gossip contains an incredible amount of essential social information, and when you can create an ethical practice for your gossip, you can bring the life-changing gifts of your jealousy and envy out of the shadows. This practice will also help you become more able to empathize with and provide support to the currently unaware gossipers in your life. Here are some guidelines for creating an Ethical Empathic Gossip session with a supportive friend or coworker:
1. Identify a person you gossip about consistently and with whom your relationship has stalled.
2. Open the gossip session by acknowledging your trouble in the situation.
3. Ask your friend for help in dealing with your gossip target and to listen with the goal of providing opinions, ideas, techniques, and skills that will help you re-enter the relationship or situation in a different way.
4. Go for it—just gossip—but be aware of any shadow issues that come forward. Remember that gossip targets nearly always hold some of your shadow!
5. When your friend gives you feedback, pay attention.
6. Close your gossip session with thanks, and then go back to the original relationship or situation with your new skills and insights. Or let it go if it’s too damaged to survive. But don’t go back in the same old way; that’s what led to the need for gossip in the first place.
When your gossip is conscious and ethical, you’ll increase your social skills and your empathy, and you’ll become more able to create honest, healthy relationships. What’s amazing to me in this practice is that when gossip is made conscious, you can clearly see what a stupendous information-gathering tool it is. When you’re able to gossip ethically in this safe, firmly bounded empathic practice, you may be amazed to learn how much intricate social information you’ve gathered about your gossip targets. This practice will connect you to the deep and emotionally rich undercurrents that flow through your informal gossip networks.
This practice will also remind you that you can ask for and receive help in dealing with difficult emotions, difficult situations, and difficult people. When you’ve hit a wall, remember to reach out for the assistance of others instead of isolating yourself. None of us knows how to deal with all emotions, all situations, or all relationships, because we simply weren’t taught how. For goodness’ sake, most of us weren’t even taught how to name our own emotions! We’re all working without a guidebook here, and we can always use some empathic assistance.
IF YOUR WORK IS EMPATHIC IN NATURE
Not surprisingly, many empathic people choose empathy-requiring jobs in health care, counseling, teaching, and other social support occupations. If your occupation requires high-level empathy and emotion work, then of course, all of the empathic mindfulness skills in this book apply to your occupational health and well-being. You might burn out if you don’t have ways to ground, focus, resource, and define yourself in your work, in your workspace, and between clients. High empathy work can be wonderful, and I’m grateful that you’re openly using your empathic skills, so let’s make sure that your workplace supports you.
Please put on your anthropologist’s hat again and use your Einfühlung capacity to observe and feel your way into the physical and aesthetic qualities of your workspace in the way you observed your home. Who works here, and what is important to this person? What is beautiful to you, and why? Which aspects of this workspace support you, and which aspects are problematic? Are you able to create thresholds and privacy for your work? Do you have a comfortable break area? Can you get outside for a walk? Do you have a private place where you can go when you need to resource or rejuvenate yourself during work?
Look at the chair, desk, or station where you do your intentional empathic work: What have you placed nearest to your body? Are you physically comfortable when you work? Is your workplace quiet enough for you? What are you looking out upon? Are there soothing and beautiful vistas or artworks? Are there areas of sensual and visual delight for you to observe as you work? If not, why not?
As a professional empath, the quality of your home life and your relationships will directly affect the quality of your work and your capacity to care for yourself. If your home and your relationships are supportive and healing, they can provide rest, rejuvenation, and real downtime in which you can unwind, let go, and replenish your emotions and your empathic skills. But as I pointed out in Chapter 6, if your home and your relationships are not supportive, then you’ll be doing empathic work and emotion work all day and all night as well. There’s just no way to keep yourself well if you have nothing in your life that feeds you. If you perform heavy empathic labor at work and then go home to provide basic emotional life support for your emotionally unskilled mate or family members, then something’s going to fall apart. I don’t want that something to be you.
As a professional empath, please stand back and observe your workspace with the skills you bring to others: If you were consulting with the person who works in this space, what would you change, if anything? Does this physical environment support your body, your emotions, your boundaries, your aesthetic needs, and your unique self? If not, why not?
As a working empath in our emotionally troubled world, you provide a vital and valuable service that can’t be replicated. We can’t digitize you or replace you with a machine, and we can’t outsource your work to other countries. We need you here—happy, healthy, emotionally well fed, and well loved. Your work is vital, and to do it over the long term, you need support from your workplace, from your home, from your loved ones, from your healthcare providers, from your diet, from your sleep, from your artistic expression, from your movement practices, from your empathic practices, and from your empathic friends. But most important, you need support from yourself: you need to identify yourself as a working empath whose unique emotional functioning requires intentional self-care and self-love. I thank you for bringing your empathy and your emotional awareness to our waiting world; please make sure that you’re bringing empathy and emotional awareness to yourself as well. Thank you!
CREATING AN EMOTIONALLY WELL-REGULATED WORKPLACE
There are literally thousands of books and programs that target the workplace in terms of how to make people into better workers and thereby increase productivity. Empathically speaking, most of those books and programs fail (or get replaced in a number of months by the next miracle book or program) because they ignore emotion work and focus on the individual instead of the overriding power of workplace culture in driving behavior. With that in mind, I’ve focused on seven approaches that may help you create an emotionally well-regulated workplace that is respectful of the real needs of real human beings.
1. Honor emotions in the workplace. Emotions are reliable, action-requiring neurological programs that arise reliably in response to specific stimuli. They are an intrinsic part of cognition and an intrinsic part of social intelligence. Emotions can lead you directly to crucial issues that affect your workplace, the workflow, or employee and vendor relationships. Honor emotions and honor the people who feel them. You can do this by copying the list of emotions and their actions from Chapter 4 and having people regularly check in (with themselves or others) about how they’re feeling about work, upcoming deadlines, or changes in workflow. A tremendous amount of information is contained in emotions. Use it well.
2. Identify any unsupported emotion work and acknowledge it openly. Put on your empath’s hat and observe the emotion work requirements at your workplace. What emotions are required in interactions with customers, suppliers, and coworkers? Is empathy toward customers required but unacknowledged? What emotion rules are active and for whom? Are the emotion rules different at different levels of the hierarchy? For instance, can one person or group display anger, depression, or anxiety, while everyone else must display only happiness and complacency? To the extent that you can, acknowledge this openly. If you can’t do it openly, use Ethical Empathic Gossip to help people clearly identify the emotion work they’re being expected to perform.
3. Support healthy thresholding and help people become physically comfortable. Remember the stark differences between a bedding store and an office supply store and challenge that paradigm. People live at work, and they need to be physically and emotionally comfortable.
4. Create many ways for problems to be communicated upward without danger. Employees will be honest in a supportive work culture where bearers of bad news are welcomed. However, if problem-identifying employees are shunned, shamed, or jollied out of their positions, gossip networks will have to intensify, and a shadow meritocracy may become necessary. If you notice a great deal of gossip in your workplace, yet unusual silence occurs when management or HR show up, there is probably a culture of emotion valencing, repression, or even punishment at work. If your workplace is currently incapable of dealing with problems in a focused and emotionally honest way, your workforce may not trust any changes you might make to this process. Suggestion boxes may be necessary at first, but even those may not be trusted. In a culture of silencing or punishment, you may need to bring in a mediator to help work through the multilayered dysfunctions that reliably arise in a problem-averse workplace.
5. Hire overqualified people and trust them. An old, dusty canard in HR lore is that overqualified employees are a problem because they might get bored and leave. Empathically and logistically speaking, that’s nonsense, especially in our new workforce where pretty much everyone job-hops every three years, on average. If you’re lucky enough to have highly skilled and experienced workers applying for jobs, you’ve struck gold. Experienced workers require fewer training days, fewer corrective management interactions, and less time to learn their jobs. They can think on their feet, and they understand the workplace as an entity. In other words, they know what they’re doing. If you hire overqualified people, then you’re well on your way to creating the true meritocracy that most businesses dream of. All you have to do is acknowledge your concerns about possible boredom levels. If highly qualified and experienced people are not concerned about that, believe them, hire them, and stand back and watch your workplace actually work.
6. Honor shadow meritocracies and support them. Shadow meritocracies, which form in response to real problems in the workplace, are often the secret, underground machine that keeps everything working. To address these meritocracies, you should fix the problems that they formed to solve—don’t shun, shame, or cajole the people who formed them. In fact, throw them two parties: one to thank them before you fix the problem (and while they’re still making everything work for you), and one to thank them after you fix the problem and they can disband gracefully.
7. Honor gossip networks, but help them become ethical. Gossip is a vital and absolutely necessary form of communication, and it strengthens social bonds. However, as we all know, it can strengthen bonds in a toxic way and encourage people to express jealousy and envy harmfully. If there’s a powerful underground gossip network at your workplace, it’s signaling deep trouble in your social structure, which may be too rigid and overly authoritarian or too loose and unstructured to be truly efficient. If you can formally introduce Ethical Empathic Gossip into the gossip networks, it can help people become consciously aware of all the information that exists in gossip, and it can do so in a way that protects the dignity of everyone involved. If you can’t formally introduce this practice, see if you can use it in small work groups or within your own department. Gossip is a necessary tool, and you can learn to use it ethically as an intentional part of your workflow.
WHEN YOUR WORKPLACE IS NOT EMOTIONALLY WELL-REGULATED
If you work in an emotionally unregulated workplace, do what you can to make yourself comfortable. If you can, work with thresholding and Ethical Empathic Gossip to make your environment and your relationships as supportive as possible, and use your empathic mindfulness skills to keep yourself focused, grounded, and resourced. An emotionally unregulated workplace can really drain the life out of you, so you’ll need to create as many thresholds around it as you can. Your social life away from work can provide some of that thresholding, and of course, your home can be a healing getaway and a sanctuary that will give you something to look forward to every day.
If you can’t make enough changes to detoxify your workplace, and you can’t currently move to a new job, I ask you to treat yourself as a working empath in a situation like this—and to take care of yourself as fully and with as much dedication as I suggested for professional empaths a few pages back. Emotion work is real work, and if your workplace can’t support your real work, then you’ll need to support yourself in as many ways as you can.
You can support yourself with all of the empathic practices in this book, with art and movement, with time in nature or with animals, and by spending time with people who truly understand you. In the next chapter, we’ll look at ways to connect with empathic people and empathic social justice movements so that you can help create a more truly empathic civilization for everyone.