Emotional Labor and Vulnerability
Vulnerability, a favorite buzzword for the last decade, is a key topic in all three of my classes this semester. In our groups and culture class, we discuss the importance of vulnerability and safety in the making of groups and how that leads to high performing and magnetic workplaces. In my speech class, the ability to deliver a speech with authenticity will make or break our grade and authenticity means delving into being vulnerable with your audience. In my stress, coping, and resilience class, understanding where you are vulnerable to stress is key to understanding how you’ll cope and build resistance to it.
But what is vulnerability? My dad doesn’t like the word. He always relates it to war and battle and how the last thing you want in a battle is to be vulnerable. Indeed, a blanket definition we were given about vulnerability in my groups and cultures class is, “vulnerability is the state of being open to injury.” So why is everyone talking about how important it is to be vulnerable? I don’t want to be injured! In that same class, our professor cited that “vulnerability fosters deeper, closer, and more authentic bonds with others. It evokes empathy.” She often says, as human beings, we are social creatures that crave connection and belonging. So, how can we be vulnerable in a way that fosters connections and still protect ourselves?
Well of course, I can’t talk about vulnerability and not at least mention Brene Brown. I love that in the Instagram live she had with Adam Grant a couple of weeks ago, she said something to the effect of, “I will be vulnerable with you, but that does not mean I need to be intimate with you.” In a professional setting, I really like this distinction. If we are in a work group, I will need time in what Daniel Coyle in his book The Culture Code calls a vulnerability loop. This is how I will work out how vulnerable I’m willing to be with you and we can begin to build trust. According to Coyle, a vulnerability loop has 3 key moments: 1) the first person offers something vulnerable, 2) the vulnerable thing is accepted by others (which is a big deal when it comes to feeling safe and like you belong), and 3) the next person offers something vulnerable. I think as we are testing out relationships, we start small in what we are willing to offer to see how much we can trust each other.
Honestly, vulnerability loops require work. There are many times that what I want to do is just get down to business. I don’t want to have to deal with complex emotions. I want to solve the rational business problem and move on. I don’t know that I always have the capacity for the emotional labor it takes to open up the group to the underlying feelings in the room. And yet, as Crucial Conversations says, “If you don’t talk it out, you’ll act it out.”
I had this happen once in a meeting that I was trying to run a couple of years ago. It was a couple of weeks into the new year, and I was frustrated with how little traction we had gotten on a specific project. I knew that the week before many members of our team had some difficult personal things happen and so I had let the performance objectives of that week soften so we could give them space. However, on this Monday morning, I was impatient and wanted to get back on track. Instead of asking how everyone was at the start of the meeting, I jumped right into our agenda and began describing the strategy we needed to tackle. I remember the look on one of our team leader’s face as she leaned away from the camera and did the tell tale “look to the sky” as a way to keep tears from falling. I assumed she’d just needed a minute to compose herself, so I chose to do what I thought was kind and not call attention to her. Later, she admitted to me that she felt like I was ignoring her and that I didn’t care about what she had been through. Needless to say, that meeting was not very productive. One of our brightest voices didn’t contribute that day because we didn’t take the time to tend to lack of safety in that moment.
In our groups and cultures class this week, I learned what I should have done in that moment instead. You see, I was hyper focused on the content of that meeting and was ignoring how the process was affecting a team that was already emotionally weary. However, instead of noticing and naming what was happening, I chose to just plow through and hope everyone would pull up their bootstraps so we could get things rolling already. Ignoring the underlying emotions, however, did not magically make the meeting productive. It was still a bust. What if, however, I had said something like this when I noticed our project was still stalling, “I can’t help but notice that we’re not all contributing, and I wonder why that is?” Now, it might have opened things up and it might not have. But no matter what it would have named what was happening which makes it reality so as a group we can choose what we want to do about it instead of relying on our assumptions of what the behaviors of others mean. My teacher this week said something to the effect of “we can only read behaviors; we can’t read the why behind those behaviors. We have to ask about the why.”
If our group had cultural norms for calling out behaviors that were impacting what we were trying to accomplish and then safely using curiosity to invite others to share their why, we would have had a very different meeting. For instance, any group member could have called out that they noticed I was very performance focused that day and wondered if we were all on the same page. Wow, even writing that out makes me wish we had fostered that kind of culture. As a leader, the pressure to always get it right is so demanding. I’m guessing I’m not alone in saying that I would give almost anything to have a group that would have my back like that, and I can see how that kind of culture would have a positive impact on our team’s performance and connection. To do that though, takes an incredible amount of vulnerability and a culture that is safe enough to celebrate those kinds of risks.
I guess the emotional labor could be worth it after all.