Most workplaces are optimized for efficiency, not emotional truth
Motherhood in Gaza, the purpose of education, and making real things (Issue #309)
One piece of advice for you this week, from the Executive Director of Case Research at Harvard, Carin-Isabel Knoop: Bring your emotions to work.
In an essay about the unspoken feelings many of us carry into our jobs (and throughout our lives), Isabel-Knoop asks: Is there something you’re carrying alone that you wish others understood? She encourages leaders to not just check in on the state of their businesses, but on the “emotional pulse” of their teams, because — and this feels very true to me — most workplaces are optimized for efficiency, not for emotional truth. (When was the last time you left a meeting feeling like some “emotional truth” had been revealed? I can remember a few meetings that felt like that, but they’re rare—and transformative, when they do happen.)
How would you build a workplace that’s emotionally true? A few of Isabel-Knoop’s thought starters…
- What if we measured how safe people feel to say “I’m not okay”?
- Do you feel proud of who you are here — not just what you do?
- How many trusted relationships do you feel that you have at work? Do you have someone here you can trust when things are hard?
- How often do you feel that someone listens to you without interrupting?
Last year, we published an issue of this newsletter on bringing your “whole self” to work — and we pushed back on the idea a bit, arguing that, sure, bringing your whole self is fine… but what you really want is to bring your best self to work. Many people equate their “best selves” with emotionless automatons, but that doesn’t have to be true. As executive coach Melody Wilding writes, your emotions themselves, especially at work, are less important than your self-awareness about them. “If you take ownership of your feelings and reactions, it conveys strength and confidence that other people will respect.”
Also today…
- A Palestinian academic on raising a child in Gaza: “motherhood in our precarious situation [demands] a more strenuous intellectual engagement than anything I [have] previously undertaken.” (Elina Kumra)
- A college professor on the inequities Covid exposed amongst his students (some dropped out of school to support their parents; others had ample space and resources to keep studying): “We can’t control what the next crisis looks like. But we can shape how our kids prepare for it. That starts by reframing how we talk about education. College isn’t the automatic finish line it was once seen to be. It’s a tool.” (Dave Hallmon)
- Essayist Kristy Arbuckle Lommen reflects on her pandemic hobby: aimlessly strolling through her town (Salem, Oregon) and noticing odd engravings in the sidewalk memorializing people who lived (and died) there a century ago: “I realized that these were the very same houses where their families rode out the influenza pandemic of 1918. I felt the stirrings of a kinship.”
✋ A dose of practical wisdom
This week, at least once, go make something with your hands and then share it.
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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