The Art of Empathy (45 page)

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 GOSSIP
⁵⁷

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.