Hello Reader,
"We're all family here." Have you or a colleague ever worked for an organization that said that? One of my clients did, and it made her uncomfortable every time they said it.
This month's Throughline anchor is Organizational Awareness—a multilevel competency of self, others, and system. Since it's October, the month of Halloween, I wanted to touch on the underside of emotional intelligence.
This issue is a bit longer than usual, so there's no featured resource this month. You might want to break up reading it into two parts.
Let's get started.
The Throughline
Anchor Competency: Organizational Awareness
It’s Monday morning. The boss walks in. He says to his direct reports, “I want to address the bad news we all just got. So, as you know, there’s another round of layoffs coming up. It’s terrifying this department could get gutted, and I don’t know how I’ll pay my mortgage if I’m let go. I haven’t been able to sleep all weekend, and I feel helpless. I know it’s a lot, but we’re all family here. What can we do?”
The room is quiet. Two in the room, a Black woman and a transgender man, keep their eyes on him while others look elsewhere uncomfortably. To regulate him and lessen the unease in the room, they name what he’s feeling and provide reassurance.
The Black woman, who was my client and a leader herself, felt the emotional labor was necessary to help others in the room and avoid offending the boss.
Now, she had to “manage” the boss often. Doing that pulled time and focus from the team she was leading. Yet, she was a high performer, so the cost was unseen.
She was always told by the boss and her peers that she was “good with people.” Although her skill was praised, the labor was expected of her.
When an organization depends on this emotional labor as a corporate resource but treats it as private goodwill, this is an abuse of someone’s emotional intelligence.
You might say that it helped more than just the boss. Well, it did, but it wasn’t her or any other person’s responsibility to have to carry the room like that. It was the responsibility of that boss.
Relational work is integral to all workplaces, but there’s a difference between when it’s healthy and when it’s extractive.
When a certain group of people, usually those belonging to a marginalized group, is repeatedly expected to translate context, repair harm, or regulate others without the support, recognition, or compensation to do so, that’s extractive relational work. The situation with the oversharing leader is one example of that.
By contrast, healthy relational work is role-aware coordination that helps people work better with each other. Managing up, for example, is when you learn to understand your boss’s goals, communication style, and priorities so you can work together as productively as possible.
What it’s not is being put in a position where you’re regulating your boss’s emotions, absorbing their stress, or protecting their ego.
The oversharing boss had just enough Emotional Self-Awareness to recognize how heavy his words were, but not to realize his feelings early enough or understand his reliance on the team. He lacked the Emotional Self-Control to regulate himself, so he sought reassurance from them.
My client, with her sense of Organizational Awareness, did what felt necessary to improve things without directly asking the boss to change.
Organizational Awareness is the ability to recognize and understand interpersonal dynamics in the context of organizational culture. It’s layered and multilevel: self, others, and system.
When it comes to emotional labor, identity often shapes who’s expected to perform it as well as who bears a greater risk if they don’t. The guardrail is to never assume who’s more naturally suited to it.
When it came to “managing” the boss, my client improved her interactions with him first for herself by understanding her own limits, setting and maintaining boundaries (like responding to work communication only on official channels during business hours), and redirecting conversations.
But in a workplace, setting personal boundaries is not the primary means to improve interpersonal dynamics.
Next, to help her peers on the leadership team, she showed them what she had learned in “managing” the boss and built a united front with those she trusted. So now when anyone notices the boss oversharing, they can strategically redirect him to the work at hand.
This was her using the EI competency of Teamwork, which I defined in my Forbes article as “collaboration toward a shared goal and contributing effectively to the needs and capability of what the team can do.”
She proposed a standardization of team communication channels (instead of the personal text messaging the boss was using) to improve team efficiency and tracking, and co-created a team charter. She got the boss to approve both in the name of protecting productivity and preventing burnout.
Given her level, she was limited to changing her team’s system within the organization. Unfortunately, the boss’s behavior didn’t change, and the organization didn’t start to recognize or reward this labor.
My client learned to flex her EI well to “manage” this boss, but shouldn’t have had to. She already had the skills. She could’ve developed them differently without having to pay one or more invisible costs in time, attention, emotional capacity, or career bandwidth.
However, there’s also a price for not doing the emotional labor, which can be the loss of credibility and visibility, especially for someone who’s part of a marginalized group.
For anyone to have to do all this work to help themselves indicates a systemic failure. An organization that benefits from extracted emotional labor gets it for free and doesn’t have to fix anything.
As a consequence, poor leadership, inequitable systems, unresolved tension, and unclear processes are tolerated in workplaces. When you see burnout within an organization, that extractive emotional labor can be a contributing factor.
Now, I want to show you what good leadership and vulnerability look like. Remember, it was Brené Brown who said, “Vulnerability without boundaries is not vulnerability.”
It’s Monday morning. The boss walks in. He says to his direct reports, “I want to be transparent about the bad news we just got. I’m feeling anxious about another round of layoffs coming up, and I know you probably are, too. I don’t know yet what’s going to happen to this department, but my goal right now is to support you and your teams. I’ll share updates as I can, and if you have concerns, I’d love to hear them.”
Someone brings up a concern, and he responds to it. Another one is raised by someone else, and he does the same. After a few more concerns are addressed, a sense of release fills the room, and work questions soon follow.
No one in this scenario needed to regulate the boss, so no emotional labor was extracted.
You can strengthen Organizational Awareness. One thing to do when you’re struggling with a situation is to notice who you turn to. When there’s a power differential, can they safely say no if they need to?
Another is, after one of your leaders has a tough meeting, to find out who carried the room and what it cost them.
When subtle acts of exclusion show up, what are the stated rules or values compared with the unstated ones in the organization? Notice who pays for the gap between them.
When the same person or group of people shows up at the levels of self, others, and system, that’s a systemic pattern to watch closely.
EI competencies are building blocks. Here are four examples, one per domain, that go with Organizational Awareness, drawn from the vulnerable leader example:
Emotional Self-Awareness (Self-Awareness) helps this leader to recognize what he’s feeling ahead of the meeting. He demonstrates awareness by honestly naming his anxiety before anyone else has to.
And his willingness to be vulnerable shows he’s human. But one thing he knows is that he’s there to support others, not be comforted by them.
Notice and take care of your own needs so they don’t get in the way of your leadership effectiveness.
Emotional Self-Control (Self-Management) allows him to make his emotions work for him. He adjusts his anxiety, like calibrating the flow of a valve, and dials it back without closing it off. With it in check, he taps into different emotions he has—compassion and deep regard—and dials those up to best serve the situation.
It’s your responsibility to emotionally regulate yourself before you walk into a room or address your team. Do that and no one has to do it for you afterward.
Empathy (Social Awareness) provides the sense and understanding of what the team is likely feeling and drives his genuine interest in their concerns. This leader names the feeling out loud for them and shows he cares.
The leadership move here: direct empathy toward the team instead of letting it get extracted from those holding less power.
Teamwork (Relationship Management) enables him to provide support to his direct reports and their teams. In considering how to do that best, he openly invites them to raise concerns because it’s part of how the team operates. The focus on shared work is protected.
Remember my client who had to build a united front with her peers on the leadership team? Don’t put someone with less power and authority in a position that necessitates extractive relational work, no matter how skilled they may be.
It’s not their job. It’s yours.
Systemic change is for every leader. Leaders at every level have the responsibility to cultivate the right culture and conditions for the people below them to thrive without anyone having to carry emotional labor upward.
- Notice when extractive relational work occurs and put the work back where it belongs. When you see a direct report managing their leader’s emotions, smoothing over conflict, or doing repair, that work needs to be returned to whoever has the authority to address it.
- Rooted in emotional intelligence, relational work goes beyond personality. Acknowledge the time, effort, and scope of this work in assignments. Recognize its results and impact in reviews and promotions.
Organizational Awareness, along with the other building blocks, is the throughline to making sure the right person is the one carrying the room.
Create psychological safety: be the first to name uneven labor, remove the risk of repercussions for speaking up, and respond without defensiveness.
For marginalized leaders, you’ve always had some degree of Organizational Awareness to know how to navigate through the system to get where you are now. But reading the room well doesn’t necessarily make it your job to carry it. I know that sometimes it feels like that’s what you have to do to belong or be seen as credible.
Conformity isn’t required to lead well. Decide for yourself whether or not the upward emotional labor is really worth it. If you happen to be carrying the room for a leader above you while leading your own team, know that you don’t have to be like that leader.
For accomplices, step in before the extractive relational work falls to the same people. Share the load and help redirect your boss to the work at hand. Even when you know someone is good with people, don’t default to expecting that it’s easy for them and that there’s no cost to bear for doing the work.
Voice of the Month
Dr. Pragya Agarwal, Visiting Professor of Social Inequities and Injustice, Loughborough University
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This work—constantly being on high alert to figure out the emotional norms in the workplace, making an effort to appear to be warm and likeable, and suppressing emotions in order to create comfort for others—all have an impact on the health and wellbeing of women and women of colour in particular.
CliftonStrengths Spotlight
Relator (Relationship Building)
A person with Relator is genuine and values close, caring, mutual relationships. They want to know more about those closest to them. Because of this, they tend to be seen as selective in their relationships.
People tend to open up to a Relator and make them a confidant by default. For a traditional leader, that looks like someone who’s approachable and has a loyal inner circle. For a marginalized leader, that often looks like someone who gets too involved, is cliquish, and plays favorites, while still being expected to carry what isn’t their responsibility. When one of their leaders has a tough meeting, a Relator is well placed to ask who carried the room and what it cost someone.
From the Red Team Thinking Toolkit
Lies We Tell Ourselves
What it is: The team anonymously lists the comforting lies the organization tells itself, picks the most critical, then asks why each isn't true and how to make it truer.
Used when: Starting any Red Teaming work, to level set expectations and open the door to honesty.
Why it matters for leaders: It surfaces long-standing assumptions and hard truths, and builds a culture of honesty and openness.
Monthly Reflection Prompt
Name one comforting thing your organization says about itself, like "we're all family here." Who pays for the gap between that and how things actually work? Hit reply and tell me what you noticed.