The Right Way to Manage Emotions on Your Team

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.

It’s normal for employees to feel angry, or frustrated, or down at times, and it’s very common for their supervisors to notice and to say nothing. Why? Many managers feel that it’s unprofessional to talk about negative emotions at work or they just don’t have the wherewithal to talk about them, but that’s a mistake.

Research shows that teams perform better when their leaders acknowledge their members’ emotions, and today’s guests have some advice for managers who need help with that. They’ve researched a mental checklist to run through, like asking, “Is the employee working on something time-sensitive right now? Do they seem to be coping?” This framework can help leaders know when to validate someone’s feelings, offer advice, or just give time and space.

Christina Bradley is a doctoral student, and Lindy Greer is a management professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Along with their colleague, Professor Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, they wrote the HBR article When Your Employee Feels Angry, Sad, or Dejected. Christina, great to talk to you.

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: Thank you for having us.

CURT NICKISCH: Lindy, great to talk to you too.

LINDY GREER: Excited to be here.

CURT NICKISCH: Where does your interest in emotions at work come from? For some people this is just they’d rather talk about other things and this is a downer topic, right? So what attracts you to this topic?

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: I really believe that emotions are just so central to the workplace. We’re human beings in the workplace. We bring ourselves to work. Things are going to happen in the workplace that bring up both positive and negative emotions, and really difficult to both manage our own emotions and the emotions of other people, so what do you even do when you see someone experiencing emotion? So I’ve always been really curious about how can we think about our emotions and the emotions of others in the workplace and help really bring human connection more into workplace interactions.

CURT NICKISCH: And Lindy, you’ve been studying this for a while.

LINDY GREER: I have been studying teams for a long while and topics that get hairy like conflict or diversity, power struggles, relationship conflicts – the harder things at work. In particular, at the time that Christina started her PhD program, I had just launched a class on diversity, equity, and inclusion around 2020 and found there’s often emotions in the classroom I didn’t have the tools to deal with. Being a scientist then, I went out to the literature to say, “Well, what do we know? What can science tell me of what to do when someone in my class gets angry or brings trauma?” I found there weren’t that great of answers yet, particularly in the management workplace.

CURT NICKISCH: Well, let’s get into misconceptions because one of them is that you should even acknowledge emotions at work, and you found that the research is pretty clear on this.

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: Yeah. So we find in a lot of research, it shows that people are hesitant to even engage with people’s emotions. There’s some research that shows in conflict, 90% of the time, managers avoid actually engaging with emotions at all. They say, “It’s one of the hardest things we have to manage.” We’re consistently finding that even though some people might be reluctant to engage in this type of behavior, emotional acknowledgement, asking people questions about their emotions, validating their emotions, we find consistent evidence over, and over, and over that people really appreciate this type of acknowledgement. They want people to see what they’re feeling, to be heard, and for people to be interested in how they’re feeling in the workplace.

CURT NICKISCH: Is part of the fear of getting involved in emotions just this fear of getting into mental health problems?

LINDY GREER: I mean, there’s many different reasons for it. One, emotions are contagious, and if I go sit down with someone who’s having a bad day, I’m probably going to feel pretty bad afterwards too and learn behavior. We tend to probably avoid those situations which make us feel bad. So there’s one of just dealing with… making sure that the emotions of the other person don’t become yours. A. B, in the workplace, there is this expectation of professionalism, and admittedly, probably more of a Western norm, but when we’re at work, we’re talking about the performance, the numbers, and that having that touchy-feely conversation doesn’t really ascribe to expectations of the workplace and just fear of stepping out of that expectation and crossing boundaries.

Three, you’re right. There could be also just a mental health stigma of where… Even outside of the workplace, to be honest, we’re probably not always that great either about leaning into the emotions of our friends and family.

CURT NICKISCH: Right. To be clear though, you’re saying that having an emotion at work, exhibiting that, talking about it isn’t unprofessional even if some people still think it is?

LINDY GREER: It doesn’t have to be. It depends on how you engage.

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: Absolutely. There are some times where maybe it is best to allow your employees to deal with their emotions privately if you’re getting signals that they don’t want to talk about their emotions, but at least opening the space for them to be able to talk about their emotions is really important.

CURT NICKISCH: I mean, we’re using emotions very generally here. What emotions seem to be the most problematic or the ones that that are maybe the stumbling blocks here that we have to focus on?

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: I found it really interesting when we did this review of people study both how to respond to positive and negative emotions because these emotions all show up in the workplace. There’s really interesting work by Shelly Gable that shows that when people respond to positive emotions in a way that’s engaging and excited for the person, that can actually really build relationships. When people don’t respond to those emotions, if you just passively say, “Oh, cool, you’re feeling a good, positive emotion,” those relationships actually aren’t as strong, and so even responding to people’s positive emotions can be helpful.

Negative emotions are definitely more difficult to navigate. We have more anxiety about how to respond to those. Alyssa Yu showed in her work about emotional acknowledgement that when we actually acknowledge those negative emotions, sometimes that can build even more trust because people are going out of their way. It’s more costly to respond to those emotions. They might backfire more often if you respond to those, but even responding to those negative emotions can be even more powerful because you’re taking that risk.

LINDY GREER: I see this a lot in my executive teaching work, for example, of typical emotions you can see and say a management team or a C-suite of C-level executives could be frustration over a budget allocation, anger, a perspective of someone else about how money should be spent. Maybe even disappointment. In talking to one of the CEOs in one of the teams that I worked with recently, he halfheartedly laughed, but said, “I never realized my job as CEO was chief therapist.” He’s like, “It’s impossible to actually make effective decisions on strategy, on finance, on our next acquisition if I’m not actually able to engage with the emotions of my team.”

Especially in these senior leadership teams, it’s big emotions. People have done lots of work, are representing big units of people, and when they’re having these tough discussions, emotions come out. At the end of the day, that falls to the leader to be the one to engage, and so he was feeling, “Oh, not only is this professional, but it’s a must-do in order for my team to be effective.”

CURT NICKISCH: One thing that you said that’s super helpful for people is to actually know their default mode for this kind of situation. I know for me, I often go straight to problem-solving: “You’re feeling sad about something? Let’s solve this problem right now.” Why do you think just understanding your default mode is helpful before you start encountering these situations?

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: I think it’s very natural to jump into problem-solving. That’s what we find. It seems like when we reviewed the literature, on 80% of the time, people prefer to try to problem-solve, give advice, think about the situation differently, look on the bright side. It’s a very common tendency for us to want to solve. I think also, in the workplace where a lot of our work is trying to solve problems, it becomes a tendency.

CURT NICKISCH: And it seems like it’s the quickest too, right?

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: Yeah.

CURT NICKISCH: In some ways, you’re trying to deal with the emotion by removing it.

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: Absolutely.

CURT NICKISCH: Maybe removing the problem seems like the shortest route to get there.

LINDY GREER: And that’s the funny bit of this, right, is our gut reactions from evolution, take your choice, to either fight or flight an emotion. Flight as in just avoid it and pretend it’s not happening, or fight where, “No. Don’t feel that. Let me help you reframe it. Let me fix this so you don’t feel what you feel.” It’s a very basic fight or flight reaction. The harder thing, right, is to get out of fight or flight mode yourself when you see an emotion of someone else and be able to accept it to say, “Hey, it’s okay to feel what you feel,” but that’d also be for yourself, being willing to be comfortable with emotions in the room. For all of us, that can be hard.

It starts though with self-awareness of how do we first understand these natural reactions we all can have, and work to build the muscle to be able to put ourself in situations where emotions are, and proactively just try to withhold judgment, withhold the need to fix, just be with someone else because at the end of the day, our researchers show that often is a quicker and more effective way to regulate someone, to help them get through their emotion than us trying to poke at it or fix it. If I could just say, “Hey, this meeting is a little tense,” you could just see the steam go off of people like, “Huh.”

The leader agrees, “It is tense. Okay. It’s not just me. I feel better already,” which is very different than me looking at the person in the room who is tense to be like, “You look tense. What’s the matter with you?” or, “Here’s how you think about it differently.” That makes people feel more emotional.

CURT NICKISCH: And some of this is over video conference now too, right? I mean, I think it’s one thing for a manager to walk through and then notice if someone looks stressed, confused, flustered. It’s different when your weekly or fortnightly engagement is through a one-on-one over a video conference, so do they have to work a little bit harder to try to recognize these situations?

LINDY GREER: Yeah. For sure, they do. One of the things I’ve been doing in my team is having an energy check that’s asynchronous and written in the meeting agenda before we start the meeting over just people give a number on a one to seven of how much energy they feel for the work that we do right now which allows us then a way to know if there is an emotion that we should be talking about – is one example.

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: And also, I think a lot of our conversations now in the workplace, they take place over Zoom, they take place over email. So I think even as managers, thinking about what emotions your employees might be feeling, even if you don’t actually witness them experiencing an emotion, but, “Is there something in the workplace that’s happening right now that might be causing them to feel an emotion? How can I check in, make sure that they feel taken care of, and seen, and valued?” So it might not even be in response to an emotion you see, but an emotion that you might be predicting they might be feeling.

LINDY GREER: For example, some of the videos of CEOs during layoff that were so egregious. From a distance, we know that a situation like that should evoke emotions that need some form of acknowledgement. There are certain categories of situations, events in society, elections, take your choice, where as a good manager, you’re probably wise to anticipate emotions and go unprepared to acknowledge what’s happening inside or outside the organization.

CURT NICKISCH: Sometimes you have to make a pretty quick observation and decision about how to respond, right? You might be walking past somebody. It comes up in a meeting. You have to decide how to proceed, and you offer two key questions to ask to help figure out how to proceed. One is just, “Are they working on a time-sensitive deadline?” and, “Are they coping?” Can you explain that?

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: Absolutely. So it really depends on the work that’s being done in the moment how you might respond. We talked to some surgeons, and they said, “In the moment when we are in the middle of surgery, it’s not really the time for us to be able to really ask someone how they’re doing.

And then, the second question, “Are they coping in that moment?” we thought about as, “Is there emotion facilitating their ability to complete the task? Are they so flooded with emotion in that moment where they might actually need some help regulating out of that emotion, or are they handling their emotions well in the moment that they’re able to complete their task, and then you’re able to check in after they’ve been able to do what they need to do?”

LINDY GREER: Yeah. We really try to stress test some of our ideas on this by going to different examples. So, for example, in a surgery with a resident and a lead physician, you might notice a resident getting anxious or getting rattled. Then, we had a lead physician tell us that in that situation, you actually… It’s life or death to engage with the emotion. You cannot let that go forward, but usually, you don’t have the time or the ability to validate. You just need them to get out of that now, and so this physician talked about getting up in the face of the residents being like, “Calm down,” and just really getting eye-to-eye with them and making eye contact to help them change the track that they were in.

There’s also a time and a place to validate. So, at one point too, we’re talking to a Navy SEAL and asking, “I could imagine there’s big emotions when you’re in stressful situations like a gunfight. What do you do?” It was really interesting. The story got back of the leader himself would imagine in the stressful situation holding onto a hot cup of tea, visualizing that as a way to regulate himself to make sure that he stay calm because he wasn’t able to deal with anyone else’s emotions if he wasn’t calm, and there is really interesting research that shows that temperature change is a great way to flush an emotion from our brain. So even just like that visualization of a hot cup of tea, pretty effective tool for him.

Then, if he would notice during the gun fight that someone on his team was getting too emotional, too aggressive, too angry, too upset, he would wait. So he would hold on because at that point, the person was coping enough in a high-pressure situation to not do anything, but he did want to make sure to go afterwards to check on the person. So if there’d be a lull, he would go over to the person and be like, “Hey, this is stressful. I get it. This is a lot,” to acknowledge the situation, and then he would try to help regulate because at that point, the person might seem upset, and you had a little bit of time.

So after first validating, then he would sometimes make a joke and try to insert a jolt of positive to help the person balance it out. But note, that was after first validating that what the person was feeling was normal, and then trying to offer some way to help them refrain the situation.

So, for us, we really wanted to have a simple tool for managers because this can feel so overwhelming of emotion. “What do I do?” To have just these two easy questions that can match against a lot of the different situations we can think of to help people choose the right tool out of their pocket to apply in the right moment.

CURT NICKISCH: What about when it’s not so time-sensitive? What do you recommend in those situations?

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: Yeah. So there’s one situation where it’s not time-sensitive. They are seeming to be able to… They’re holding together their emotion, they’re doing well, but they still are experiencing something. So, in those situations, just simply validating, acknowledging, expressing curiosity might be all they need in that moment. They might just need to be seen, heard, and you can leave the situation there. You might not need to have to jump in and help them solve that emotion.

Then, we talk about a different situation where it’s not time-sensitive, and they might actually express some type of need, or they might ask you, “Hey, can I talk something through with you? I do need help regulating.” In those moments, we find that first validating, so still starting with that acknowledgement, starting with the acceptance of their emotion so that they do feel seen and heard, and then following that with some type of advice, helping them reframe, think about a different situation. So there is that time and place to help them work through the emotion that they’re feeling in those situations.

CURT NICKISCH: How does that sound? Right? I think our listeners really want to hear almost like what to say and how to express or what tone to use it in.

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: So I think there’s many ways, and I’m finding that in my research that first asking questions about people’s emotions seems to be really appreciated, so, “Hey, how are you feeling about this?” Not trying to change their emotions, but just asking for them to explain and follow up on what they’re feeling. You might also-

CURT NICKISCH: Showing that you care.

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: Yeah, yeah. Exactly, showing that you care. They can then self-label their emotion and explain. You might say, as Lindy said before, “Hey, this meeting is really tough.” Showing them that you might also be feeling a similar emotion, and that it’s really okay to be feeling what they’re feeling, because no one really wants to feel that their emotions don’t make sense or invalid in any way. So saying something like, “that must be really hard right now. I’m so sorry you’re going through that.” So just letting people feel what they’re feeling, showing that you see what they’re feeling, it’s okay to be feeling that way, and that they’re not wrong to be feeling an emotion.

LINDY GREER: Speak to the situation and not to the emotion. Some of funnier failed studies Christina and I had early on, we were looking at different examples of how to validate. And on one side of it, we had people say, “Validate the emotion,” so, “Hey, Curt. I see that you’re looking frustrated today.” That’s okay. What we found is that actually made it way worse. A couple of reasons. One, we are so inaccurate at being able to precisely label the other emotions someone else is feeling, A, and then you’re mad at me because, well, I wasn’t frustrated. I was just a little confused, but now I am frustrated that you don’t understand me.

CURT NICKISCH: What are tactful ways of turning from this sympathizing and validation to a little bit of action or orientation towards solving the problem, addressing it, helping that employee. I guess number one, when do you know that it’s right that you can start to offer that and take that step, and then how do you suggest going about doing that?

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: Some of the most helpful strategies would be to help them change how they’re thinking about the situation. So there’s a lot of work in the regulating the intrapersonal emotion regulation space, a lot of work by James Gross, showing that when we change how we think about a situation, it can actually help us regulate our own emotions.

A lot of new research is showing that when we help other people change how they’re thinking about a situation, that can be the most helpful in those situations. So it might be helping them see a different perspective, so think about how another person might view the situation. If you took a broader view of what’s happening right now, what would that look like?

LINDY GREER: You can also imagine, for example, what a mentor would do in that situation. Ethan Kross at Michigan has an amazing book called Chatter that gives really great insights into how you manage your own emotions. In his research, he’s shown, “Imagine what a mentor would do,” or even, “Think about yourself in the third person.” Super awkward, but to coach the person to say, “Okay. Lindy is trying to do a surgery, and Lindy is rattled. Lindy, ask yourself. What should Lindy do on her best day? What is the right way to show up here?”

The minute you can get people outside the situation by either having them imagine what a mentor would do or a neutral third-party, or even just referring to themselves as a third person, it helps them get the space and distance they see to figure it out themself. Note here that even in this regulation, it’s more coaching than telling, right? You’re still not just telling them like, “This is how you should view the situation,” which rarely is this helpful as helping them find the distance to find the solution to fix it themself.

CURT NICKISCH: You also say that this is something managers need to be cultivating – proactively start collecting some of these phrases or ways to approach things, and just see what feels right for them and what feels natural, and have those at the ready…

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: Yeah, yeah. We say at the end of the article, “There’s many ways to learn how to do this.” How can you gather repertoire of strategies so that, as you said, in the moment, you have an idea of what to do? First, you can recognize how other people respond to you. You notice, “When that person gave me advice and I wanted acknowledgement, how did I feel?” So thinking about those situations. How do people respond to your emotions? We also say, “How can we be inspired by how other people respond to people’s emotions?”

I witnessed my colleague give wonderful advice to someone who is struggling. How can we be inspired by how they handled someone else’s emotions? This happens every day in the workplace and in our personal lives, so how can we continue to just bring awareness and to pay attention to how people are responding to the emotions of others?

CURT NICKISCH: Is it okay to do this over Slack, or email, or a digital communication tool rather than in person?

LINDY GREER: If it was me, I’d always recommend if someone has shared an emotion, I might offer to pick up the phone, or go for a walk, or meet to talk about it. Maybe you can drop in the acknowledgement that like, “Hey, what you’re feeling is okay.” But if I know someone is to the point that they’re writing in words, “I have an emotion,” at least as a manager, a peer, or a friend, I would want to make sure that I made the offer of support in some form.

CURT NICKISCH: I mean, it’s one thing to walk past somebody or have this come up in situations where it may be one-on-one and where you may have direct communication. It’s another thing if it might come out as a comment in a meeting, and even as a manager, you’re like, “Did that just happen?” or “That was a little strange.” What do you recommend for managers? Is that something for them to act upon? How would you approach it?

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: Yeah. We have a hunch that one-on-one conversations are the best for responding to people’s emotions. In public, it can be very exposing to acknowledge or ask someone about how they’re feeling. Then, it puts them in a position where they have to explain it to the group. So, as much as possible, we suggest that if you can find a time to wait in the moment and then have that conversation after the fact, we think that might be the most helpful.

LINDY GREER: If the person is at the point they’re unable to participate in the meeting, that’s when you might need to amp it up in the meeting or call a break to go offline with the person. But if it was a glimpse as you saw and they seem to be coping, going back to the two questions we introduced in the article, I would let it go and then come back later to check in.

CURT NICKISCH: What if this is just a colleague and not a direct report?

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: I think all of these things apply to our colleagues, as I said, to how our manager is experiencing emotion. We talk about leaders responding to the emotions of their employees in the article, but I think all of these can be applied to how your teammate is experiencing emotion, how your client is experiencing an emotion, so different situations in the workplace.

CURT NICKISCH: What’s your advice for a manager if they’re feeling emotional? Is there relevance here in this framework to them?

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: Yeah. I think if you’re feeling… Emotions are definitely going to come up. As leaders, you have so much responsibility, and so working on really accepting your own emotions. It’s okay to be feeling the emotions you’re feeling, but also, “How do I express these emotions to my team?”

And some new work that we’re doing is looking at how can managers navigate that situation of, “I want to be vulnerable with my team. I want to be authentic, but I also want to make sure that I’m not just laying all my emotions out on my team.”

So one strategy we’re looking at right now is just managers providing some type of context to their employees about what they’re feeling. So they might say, “Hey, I might seem stressed right now. I’m dealing with something. I just came out of a stressful meeting. It has nothing to do with you right now, but I just want to know. If you do pick up on any stress that I’m feeling, that is why.” So how can you as a manager say, “I feel emotions too, but I’m also managing them and giving you some context for what I’m feeling?”

LINDY GREER: Leaders often show the best versions of themselves, I feel like, under pressure, when there is a clear problem and a clear goal to be solved. But that ability to acknowledge emotion, acknowledge the humanity in your organization – should be something that leaders are able to do on a daily basis, would be I think one of the big hopes spinning off of this project.

CURT NICKISCH: Christina and Lindy, this was really great. Thanks so much for sharing your research and these insights with our audience.

LINDY GREER: Thank you.

CHRISTINA BRADLEY: Thank you for having us.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s Christina Bradley, a doctoral student, and Lindy Greer, a management professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, and they’re coauthors of the HBR article When Your Employee Feels Angry, Sad, or Dejected.

We have nearly 1,000 episodes and more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at hbr.org/podcasts or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Thanks to our team, Senior Producer Mary Dooe, Associate Producer Hannah Bates, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox, and Senior Production Specialist, Rob Eckhardt. Thank you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back on Tuesday with our next episode. I’m Curt Nickisch.