Kreamer, A. (2011).

It's always personal: Emotion in the new We All live on Earth 203
workplace. New York: Random House
If a person fails to do her job well and feels pain as a result, the
negative feeling should operate as a catalyst for stepping up her
game.
The goal of any person or organization should be to allow
emotion at work, in all ofits gendered nuances, its due-but not to
excess. Again, as with most of life, it's a Goldilocks and the Three
Bears calibration question-you want not too soft or too hard, not
TWELVE too cold or too hot, but the elusive "just right." After doing the re­
search for this book, my strong sense is that very few workplaces
We May Have Come from Mars
have their emotional temperatures set anything close to just
right-rather, that they are way too cold or way too hot or swing
and Venus, but We All Live on Earth
wildly from one extreme to the other. And that, I think, despite
universal lip-service acknowledgment of "emotional intelligence,"
is because paying careful, systematic attention to emotion has been
There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be considered beyond the scope of managers and the managed, too
aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. personal, too intangible, implicitly sexist, essentially off-limits.
To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience I've mainly discussed two evolutionary functions ofemotion­
of the soul. -Arnold Bennett to protect the individual from harm and to promote the advance­
ment of the group and species. Work is the most significant
modern environment where both kinds of emotions-l want
HOW GETTING REAL ABOUT EMOTION
more money and status to optimize my survival, .we work together so
COULD TRANSFORM THE WAY WORK WORKS
the group thrives-are in perpetual interplay. And we are, tens of
The goal of organi7:ations should not be to eliminate the expres­ thousands of years into this human project, still in the process of
sion of negative emotions at work, which is what a certain kind adopting and adapting new behavioral rules that reflect life at the
of corporate human resources paradigm endeavors to do. We are desk or the video screen or among consumers rather than lives as
Captain Kirks and Dr. McCoys, Spouters and Believers, most of hunters or, more recently, farmers, artisans, and laborers.
us, as much as or more than we are Solver-like Mr. Spocks. For Understanding the truths that neuroscience is revealing will
a particular individual in a particular job situation, negative allow us greater awareness and thus control of the emotions that
emotion can be the source of renewed energy, as an angry she­ shape our decisions and behavior at work. Learning and paying
doesn't-get-me-so-I'll-show-her prod to excellence, or as a fearful attention to what motivates us and in what measure-anger, anx­
our-sales-are-tanking concentration of the mind, or as an anxious iety, fear, happiness---can help us learn to manage and use those
what_are_the_chances-that-disaster-could-happen reality check. emotions more effectively.
 We All Live on Earth 203

If a person fails to do her job well and feels pain as a result, the
negative feeling should operate as a catalyst for stepping up her
game.
The goal of any person or organization should be to allow
emotion at work, in all of its gendered nuances, its due-but not to
excess. Again, as with most of life, it's a Goldilocks and the Three
Bears calibration question-you want not too soft or too hard, not
TWELVE too cold or too hot, but the elusive "just right." After doing the re­
book, my strong sense is that very few workplaces
We May Have Come from Mars emotional temperatures set anything close to just
right-rather, that they are way too cold or way too hot or swing
and Venus, but We All Live on Earth from one extreme to the other. And that, I think, despite
universal lip-service acknowledgment of "emotional intelligence,"
is because paying careful, systematic attention to emotion has been
There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be considered beyond the scope of managers and the managed, too
aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. personal, too intangible, implicitly sexist, essentially off-limits.
To the cormition of the brain must be added the ~V~M;~nr~ I've mainly discussed two evolutionary functions of emotion­
of the soul. -Arnold Bennett to protect the individual from harm and to promote the advance­
ment of the group and species. Work is the most significant
modern environment where both kinds of emotions--l want
HOW GETTING REAL ABOUT EMOTION more money and status to optimize my survival,· we work together so
COULD TRANSFORM THE WAY WORK WORKS the group thrives-are in perpetual interplay. And we are, tens of
The goal of organizations should not be to eliminate the expres­ thousands of years into this human project, still in the process of
of emotions at work, which is what a certain kind adopting and adapting new behavioral rules that reflect life at the
of corporate human resources paradigm endeavors to do. We are desk or the video screen or among consumers rather than lives as
Captain Kirks and Dr. McCoys, Spouters and Believers, most of hunters or, more recently, farmers, artisans, and laborers.
us, as much as or more than we are Solver-like Mr. Spocks. For Understanding the truths that neuroscience is revealing
a particular individual in a particular job situation, negative allow us greater awareness and thus control of the emotions
emotion can be the source of renewed energy, as an angry she­ shape our decisions and behavior at work. Learning
doesn't-get-me-so-I'll-show-her prod to excellence, or as a fearful attention to what motivates us and in measure-anger, anx­
our-sales-are-tanking concentration of the mind, or as an anxious iety, fear, happiness-can us learn to manage and use those
what_are-the-chances-that-disaster-could-happen reality check. emotions more effectively.
 204 IT'S ALWAYS PERSONAL We All Live on Earth 205

emotion behind what we're trying to say in an e-mail? What are

WHERE ARE WE HEADED?
the lines that should not be crossed?
If insights from developing neuroscience research coupled with Further muddying our traditional boundaries and protocols is
gender-balanced workplaces are leading to a new openness about the less rigidly hierarchical workplace ethos. The greater "flat­
what constitutes appropriate behavior on the job, other more ness" within organizations, the blending of the playful with the
structural factors are also influencing workplace interactions. In practical, jeans and T-shirts as everyday office attire, and Ping­
the twentieth century it was easy to compartmentalize (rational) Pong during breaks-all of that seems here to stay. And unlike
work life and (emotional) home life, but today our information the "open" office plans of the sixties that were organized along
economy and technology have made work more portable than rigid factory-floor-like grids, where the most junior employees
ever. Because the twenty-first-century workplace is no longer al­ were closest to the elevator banks and the most senior employees
ways strictly a specific place where people go, away from their occupied fortified corner spaces, modern open-office architecture
homes-work happens at home, at the airport, in the car, at the is supposed to eschew the grid in favor of a more organic flow­
coffee shop, or wherever-it is no longer clear how we should employees are scattered about and meeting rooms and "conversa­
manage our emotions in such a fluid social landscape. tion pods" are woven throughout. Fewer doors, less privacy, and
The membranes between work and private life are porous, glass enclosures have forced a greater transparency that brings
with employers and employees often expecting mutually interde­ the emotional life of an office into the foreground. As the CEO
pendent accessibility and accountability almost 2417. Our chil­ sees the mail clerk doing his rounds, so, too, can the assistant
dren and spouses can reach us electronically throughout the manager keep closer tabs on the actions and moods of the execu­
official workday. And private behavior can instantly reverberate tive vice president. People at all levels of an organization receive
at work through social networking platforms. One public rela­ copies of e-mails.
tions executive I know was recently fired after he tweeted dis­ Although conventional wisdom might suggest that more hor­
paragingly about one of his client's hometowns. Others fire off izontal organizations automatically promote easy, authentic,
retaliatory e-mails late at night only to regret their tone and intent hang-loose emotional expression, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale
in the cold light of day. Facebook friends from work can stumble School of Management professor and leadership expert, begs to
on compromising pictures from a bachelor party. Anonymous differ. "Flat cultures are flat only to the publicists and the titans
mobile uploads can instantly broadcast unflattering emotional who run the companies. Those in the ranks know that 'lateral'
displays of surly customer service employees or misbehaving communities remain hierarchical. These new structures create a
CEOs. And the more we relegate communication to the elec­ whole new level of inequities that are harder to manage than a
tronic realm, the greater our longing for human con~act. The rule bureaucracy. Within 'flat' organizations, there is the same
book for modern office etiquette has yet to be codified. How do amount of cronyism and rank, it's just a lot harder to figure out
we avoid hurting one another's feelings if everything is supposed what's going on. There are no clear processes for resource alloca­
to be transparent and accessible? How can others understand the tion or decision-making." If anything, nominally flatter organi­
206 IT'S ALWAYS PERSONAL We All Live on Earth 207

zations tend to require even higher levels of emotional compe­ Company, a management consulting firm, discovered in a 2007
tency and more emotional effort to navigate the amorphous com­ study, Women Matter: Female Leadership, a Competitive Edge for
mand structures. the Future, there is a clear link between management perfor­
And throughout it all, no one knows exactly how they are mance and the presence of women in management teams.
supposed to act. Should we high-five an underling? Is it cool to Women's leadership practices, McKinsey declared, will be "criti­
make jokes with the boss? What if the woman in the next cubicle cal in meeting the expected challenges companies will face over
overhears us crying? the coming years." McKinsey used a proprietary diagnostic tool
Clear rules for the new world simply don't exist. But it may to identify nine key leadership behaviors: "participative decision
be that women's biologically driven inclination to collaborate making," "role model," "inspiration," "expectations and rewards,"
lends itself best to this amorphous new circumstance. Years ago, "people development," "intellectual stimulation," "efficient com­
Judy Rosener, a professor emerita at the University of Califor­ munication," "individualistic decision making," and "control and
conducted a study of seminal male and female leaders for corrective action." The study found that "while men and women
The International Women's Forum and found that men and apply all nine leadership behaviors, they do so with different fre­
women described their leadership and its effectiveness in very quencies" and that four of the key behaviors-intellectual stimu­
different ways. According to Rosener, the men viewed their job lation, inspiration, participative decision-making, and expectations
performance as more transactional in nature-"as a series of and rewards (in other words, those areas in which women tend to
transactions with subordinates--exchanging rewards for ser­ excel)--were deemed by both women and men the most critical
vices rendered or punishment for inadequate performance ... to the success of a com pany.
[and] the men are also more likely to use power that comes These insights matter for two reasons. First, the hardest-hit
from their organizational position and formal authority." major industries in the recent recession-manufacturing, con­
Women, on the other hand, described their leadership style as struction, and finance-are also the most male-dominated sec­
more "transformational-getting subordinates to transform their tors; the great majority of the eight million Americans who've
own self-interest into the interest of the group through concern lost their jobs since 2007 are men. This served to increase the fe­
for the broader goal. Moreover, they ascribed their power to per­ male fraction of the survivors and prompted married, nonwork­
sonal characteristics like charisma, interpersonal skills, hard ing women to enter the working world. This is why women now,
work, or personal contacts rather than to organizational stature." as previously noted, suddenly make up the majority of the U.S.
Rosener was among the first to champion women's collaborative labor force. Second, America's transformation into a postindus­
styles, and concluded that the ways in which women share infor­ trial, information-centric, service-oriented economy and culture
mation and power encourages a level of personal participation continues apace. More than 60 percent of American jobs are now
that in turn lets a greater number of people feel powerful and professional, managerial, administrative, or sales-based, while
personally invested in the ongoing success of their companies less than 25 percent are in manufacturing, construction, extrac­
than is the case in more competitive workplaces. As McKinsey & tion, or transportation. Over the next few decades, jobs will grow
 208 l'5 ALWAYS PERSONAL We All Live on Earth 209

in education, health care, and elder care-jobs that have tradi­ gests to me is that while women have mostly won the war for par­
tionally been the domain of women, in part because they harness ity in men's minds, they have yet to allow themselves to believe
women's native empathy and other emotional-intelligence And by not believing it, they restrain themselves from acting in
more naturally emotional, unself-consciously female ways that
THE NEXT WAVE would let them be happier.
Perri Peltz has experienced this kind of dilemma firsthand,
For a century or two, we were. a society and culture where the first in 1996, when she was working for WNBC News in New
workplace, dominated by men, was a venue in which emotions, York City. Only five months after giving birth to her first child,
those inconvenient things, were constrained, suppressed, denied, she discovered that she was pregnant again. She remembers hid­
and hidden. That's changed. But we haven't yet arrived at the ing the second pregnancy for as long as she could because she was
next stage of equilibrium, where people have a sure sense of how afraid of the network's reaction. "But the interesting thing," she
they should or can express and respond to emotions in the public says, "was the response of my news director once he found out.
realm, especially that peculiarly intimate-yet-public realm of the He sat me down and said, 'This is what makes up the humanity
workplace. I think America and Americans are also still figuring of our news organization and· we embrace it,' and he could not
out and coming to grips with our post-sixties era: it was a very big have been more gracious or understanding." In spite of this toler­
bang that happened just four decades ago, after all, with female ant environment, though, she still had an old-school fear of ask­
emancipation and a new definition of happiness (do your own ing for special treatment for a family matter. In 2007, when she
thing, let it all hang out, follow your bliss) both gaining momen­ was anchoring the evening news broadcast for WNBC, she once
tum at once. We're still in the aftermath, still piecing together a again faced the kind oflife-balance choice all working parents do.
new paradigm that makes sense and feels right. Her son played baseball during her broadcast, and she wanted to
Because it's women's economic lives that have changed the make at least one game of his season. As she was finagling to
most quickly, and because we are, yes, more overtly emotional, come up with some excuse to leave, her news director approached
women are still at sea about how we're supposed to behave and her, saying, "We will go out of our way to make sure that you can
how we are regarded in this (still) new era of working women. go to a game. It's my job to make it happen for you." Now, few of
Women and men continue to think quite differently about what us are stars like Perri, for whom management might bend over
these changes mean. In this somewhat topsy-turvy post-women's­ backward, but I do believe her experience is nevertheless indica­
revolution age, it may befemale more than male attitudes that in­ tive of a new attitude throughout the workplace to try to accom­
hibit the establishment of new, looser norms. A 2009 Time modate work/family balance issues.
magazine poll reported that two thirds of working women be­ In spite of these heartening anecdotes suggesting that we're
lieve that men resent powerful women. And yet according to the moving toward real gender equality at work, data from the U.S.
same poll, an astonishing 75 percent of men believe something General Social Survey and The Paradox ofDeclining Female Hap­
like the opposite-that women no longer need to behave more piness study conducted in 2009 by Professors Betsey Stevenson
like men to be taken seriously in the workplace. What this sug- and Justin Wolfers at the Wharton School of Business suggest
 We All live on Earth 211
210 IT'S ALWAYS PERSONAL
young men no longer find women at work an anomaly. A greater
that women's overall happiness has dropped consistently since acceptance of emotional range for women and men on the job can
1972, regardless of income, health, or marital status. It may be be part and parcel of a new American heyday.
that in aggregate, happiness and job-market parity really have If you, like me, have a sense that the United States-as a na­
been zero-sum (or worse) for women, that the personal emotional tion and a society, politically, economically, and culturally-has
piice of modern economic independence-that is, putting up arrived at one ofits periodic sink-or-swim moments, I hope you'll
with the stresses and anxieties of the workplace-is higher than also agree that a greater tolerance for emotional expressiveness
we care to admit. for both women and men in the workplace is among the tools
Simultaneously, men are facing unprecedented shifts in their that can help us regain our footing. With so much economic up­
social and economic positions. Teresa Ghilarducci, the director of heaval and creative destruction under way, there are potentially
the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New unprecedented opportunities for organizational behavior to posi­
School for Social Research, has written extensively about how tively evolve. We have arrived at a historical point where the col­
U.S. men are on a downwardly mobile path long-term. While lective desire for Americans to get our mojo back has coincided
women over the last thirty years have seen their average pay in­ with the emergence of a more refined scientific understanding of
crease by about half, men's income has been flat. Men today ex­ human behavior. And that offers us a chance to redefine Ameri­
pect to do worse financially than their grandfathers did, while can enterprise for the twenty-first century, to rethink the way
women expect to do better than their grandmothers did. This work works.
change in status for men, especially in a society where one's iden­ I suggest that if men and women were to express more emo­
tity is so closely aligned with one's income, is a gigantic shift that tion at work routinely and easily-jokes, warmth, sadness, anger,
has barely begun. We are at a moment of powerful convergence, tears, all of it-then as a people we might not implode emotionally
when women's rising expectations are meeting men's sinking ex­ so frequently, or feel the need to gawk at others emoting in inap­
pectations. But perhaps where there is flux of this magnitude propriate ways. If we can openly acknowledge our gender-based
there is also opportunity. biological and neurological differences, we can fed freer to tackle
In my research for this book I talked to dozens of women in whatever challenges we face at full capacity. In almost every era
their twenties and early thirties, and I'm convinced that this gen­ and culture, as producers and creators and workers, as economic
eration, which wasn't even alive during the era of outright male actors, the genders have always worked as a kind of tag team. The
domination, really does embody a new force not so burdened by balance has changed in the last few years, but the tag-team model
the post-feminist-revolution confusions, fears, and overcompen­ can still work, perhaps better than ever. Both genders can win by
sations. They wear their feminism lightly, unself-consciously or granting the other-and, for women, fellow females-a greater
even unconsciously. I'm hopeful that as they and their younger range of expressiveness on the job. And women and men can both
sisters move into and through the workforce, and as older work­ be freed to bring their full, true selves to the game. Isn't it time for
ers begin to retire, the evolution I've described and encouraged in us all to get a lot more rational about emotion? The prospect of
this book will accelerate. And because a generation of men has that happening makes me so happy I could cry.
grown up working with women by their side from day one, j
~