Don’t Leave Your Personal Problems At Home

3 things to learn and do about emotions at work (and at personal productivity also)

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

There is this new trend in leadership and management that finally talks about emotions at work.

You may have heard that a good leader or executive is the one who can overcome stress, anger, and difficult social interactions in the office.

The emotional resilient leader can be productive in the middle of any crisis.

Unfortunately, that sounds like a person avoiding emotions instead of dealing with them.

Stress, anger, and difficult social interactions are part of life. Resilience doesn’t mean avoid emotional handicaps and come back to work.

Emotions are usually out of the equation of work and productivity.

And I’m not talking just about the boss’ emotions: your emotions, your coworkers emotions, and the emotions as a group.

Team work and any kind of work is as human as any emotion.

No management school teaches socioemotional management as a priority or essential credit. Some of them talk about emotions under a behavioral economics perspective.

At work, some companies leave the ‘emotional stuff’ to Human Resources, meaning ‘under the carpet’ or ‘in the closet’.

But, productive, intellectual, or operational skills become useless in managers that can’t handle emotions.

And the opposite, some managers fail in management skills but are able to keep everything together with an efficient management of emotions.

Instead of trying to put apart emotions at work, you need to learn how to manage them.

Your emotions and the other’s.

How do we usually handle emotions at work?

“You leave your personal problems at home”, is one common phrase. “Don’t take it personally, it’s just work”, is another one. One of my favorites, “Let’s be professionals and put emotions aside.”

That is clear denial, and denial is one of the most common responses to emotions at work.