Ep. 6: If You’re Faking It, You Won’t Make It
About this episode:
Original Air Date: March 17 2024Every time something changes at work, someone’s bound to be upset. Digital transformations take resources from analog teams; restructuring a department can take authority from one group and give it to another; removing a step from a workflow can eliminate a role altogether. Any change, including those meant to make things better, will create winners and losers and that’s bound to kick up a hornet’s nest of feelings.
Here’s the puzzling part: Despite research showing us that surfacing and processing these feelings is key to unlocking a company’s ability to be adapt, many workplaces often treat emotions as taboo. They’re messy, unpredictable, and nobody wants to touch them—even when ignoring them does more harm that good. And playing pretend isn't getting us anywhere.
In this episode of At Work with The Ready, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin explore why we have negative feelings about big feelings and how it’s holding our organizations back from evolving into the places they could be.
Mentioned in this episode:
Tabea's Meet The Ready post
"unconsciously protecting status quo": Immunity to Change, 2009 book by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey
2024 BBC article about the unpaid emotional labor expected of women at work
"last year at SXSW": BNW Ep. 162 with Brian Elliott
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Sam Spurlin
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Sam Spurlin:
If we think about the ultimate scarce resource in an organization, it's not money, it is attention. And if we are going to use the emotional turmoil in an organization as a endless attention pit, then that is attention that we no longer have to apply to anything productive or valuable.
[Intro music]
Rodney Evans:
Hey everybody, welcome to the show. I'm Rodney Evans, and that is Sam Spurlin.
Sam Spurlin:
Hey, Rodney. You really nailed that enunciation. Good job.
Rodney Evans:
I really stuck the landing on your last name. Welcome back to At Work With The Ready, a podcast about modernizing organizations as the future of work meets the present moment.
Sam Spurlin:
In each episode, we turn our attention to one common organizational pattern that we think is worth digging into. And we pull it apart and we propose solutions for what to do instead.
Rodney Evans:
This week, we are talking about... I'm calling it the underbelly of doing change work. We're going to talk about emotional labor in transformation. And when I started writing about this episode, the headline that I said was, "Change has winners and losers. The losers are big mad." And we do encounter this. And so today, we're going to talk about this self-fulfilling pattern in orgs. But before we do, we're going to do a check-in round. And I don't know what it is because I didn't read the card.
Sam Spurlin:
Well, I'm just saying that with this new video world that we're in, I'm going to have to really resist lots of visual gags because I almost stood up and pulled up my shirt when you said underbelly.
Rodney Evans:
Mmmm...okay.
Sam Spurlin:
And the fact that I kept it together is a good sign, I think, for my professionalism. Check-in question. Here we go. We're talking about emotions, so we're going to do a relevant check-in question. What's the most recent positive emotion you've felt at work? And what were you doing?
Rodney Evans:
I feel positive things at work all the time, every day. any, many times every day.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Right now doesn't count. Obviously right now, you're feeling some combination of-
Rodney Evans:
Anytime I'm not here with you.
Sam Spurlin:
... thrill and joy, and yeah.
Rodney Evans:
No, it's not this. So The Ready is doing this series on LinkedIn of introducing our members, and this morning's was Tabea's, and I read it. And first of all, I learned things about her that I didn't know, which is cool and fun because we work together all the time. And second, it was just like there was such smart stuff in there. And so I think the positive emotion that I felt was general pride. I was generally proud for this person who I know and think a lot of privately, but to see her talking to the world, I was like, "Yeah, go get it."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I like that series. I am surprised how much I'm learning about my colleagues through this LinkedIn. Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
I know. Same. What about you?
Sam Spurlin:
Surprisingly, I'm also going with pride, but for a different angle. And it was earlier today, one of our clients, who we've been working with very closely, had designed a session that I gave some very cursory design advice on. And she ran it totally by herself, and it was really good. And I was just on the call with my video camera off on mute just kinda watching. And I was very proud of her.
Rodney Evans:
Don't you love that?
Sam Spurlin:
It's a great feeling.
Rodney Evans:
It's such a good feeling. The consultants out in the world that create dependency and reliance, I'm like, "First of all, you're shitty at being a consultant. And second of all, I feel sorry for them that they will never experience that joy that you get to feel when one of your clients is like, 'I got this.'"
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Yeah, we're right in the midst of that with one of my projects right now, and it's so-
Rodney Evans:
It's great.
Sam Spurlin:
... cool to watch them fly on the own.
Rodney Evans:
Watch them fly, watch them soar.
Sam Spurlin:
Rodney, before we jump into this, we have a very simple request coming hat in hand to the listeners, which is if you have never left a review for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, we would love it if you could do that. It would legitimately help quite a bit. The algorithm supposedly likes that. And the way I think of it is that these reviews aren't for us. They're for people who haven't found the show yet. So you're leaving them for the next person who needs this podcast and just doesn't realize it yet.
Rodney Evans:
That's a great, great reframe, Sam.
Sam Spurlin:
Thanks.
Rodney Evans:
Speaking of emotional labor-
Sam Spurlin:
What a segue.
Rodney Evans:
... because you're doing it for me today.
Sam Spurlin:
What a segue.
The Pattern: Ignoring emotions in change work keeps the change from actually sticking
Rodney Evans:
Thanks. Thanks so much. So I wrote down how I want to describe the essential pattern that we're going to talk about today, because as I delved into the research around this topic, it got away from me real quickly. In my mind, it was just chutes and ladders of ideas and thoughts and alleys to look down. And I was like, "Okay, girl, rein it in."
Here's the pattern that we're going to dig into. It is essentially that any change that is real requires trade-offs. Trade-offs will have winners and losers. The willful ignorance of the loss prevents real change from happening. And for the people who are like, "We could have win-win"... okay, there's going to be a whole podcast episode about it, so just settle down because there's something here that we see time and time and time and time again. So, that's the TL;DR. Sam, do you want to weave us into this very thorny and complex subject?
Sam Spurlin:
I will do my best. There's so much going on here. When we were doing the prep around this episode as just throwing ideas around, the way that I was coming to it was really through the lens of being a change consultant. Every time we are coming into an organization, it is not to just solidify the status quo.
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
I think some consultants exist to solidify status quos. And that is not-
Rodney Evans:
It's their whole deal. It's a much more lucrative business, incidentally, than ours.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, maybe we should look into that.
Rodney Evans:
We should pivot.
Sam Spurlin:
So if we're coming into an organization, there's change happening, and it always stirs up all sorts of interesting stuff, and usually not right away. It's a little bit later on into the process. It's easy to skate by weird feelings about change and loss early on, but you eventually get to a point in a project where if you don't start talking about, and making sense of and working through some of these really strong emotions, you've hit a ceiling that is actually quite low on the effectiveness of what you can actually do in an organization. So there's the emotions of being a change agent trying to bring new ideas to the organization, and then there's the other side of it, which is maybe you aren't actually part of that team bringing the change to the organization, and are instead being asked or expected to change, and what that experience is like. So we're going to be talking about both, and maybe we'll try to disambiguate where we can, but that's where my mind went when we started talking about this.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Usually when we are brought in, or when we're making a change internally, nobody changes for the sake of change. And that is understandable because nobody hires people like us just because they're like, "What if we were healthier?" Nobody does that, really. But I think as a result of that, the focus of whatever the thing is that we are brought into work on is always this very businessy, clear, hard thing that's like, "We need to grow our top line revenue by 10% using a new product," or, "We need to become digital first," or, "We need to reorganize," or whatever. I think the brief that comes to us is quite sanitized. It's like, "We're doing this thing and we just need some help with execution."
Sam Spurlin:
Just. And then we hear the word just. It's like, hmm-
Rodney Evans:
We just need a "little" help.
Sam Spurlin:
... alarm bells are going off.
Rodney Evans:
"We just need to smooth out some of the workflows and just have some new moves around how we're collaborating...." And it's like as soon as you get in there, as soon as we get in there, or anybody who's trying to change anything, what is often overlooked in that tidy hygienic brief is the fact that any change of any kind, from what a team is called to removing a step in a workflow, to eliminating an approval, someone somewhere is almost always like, "Wait, that's my thing." And it's like the who of my cheese shit shows up almost immediately, and I cannot tell you how many times I have been surprised by where it shows up in places that I'm like, "Oh, I did not anticipate this being controversial."
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. The most common one that I see all the time is somebody doesn't even like this thing that they're in charge of or their role, and the change is somehow going to be touching some aspect of it. But as soon as it becomes apparent that there will be something different about this thing that they perceive as theirs, even if they don't like it...
Rodney Evans:
Even though it doesn't matter.
Sam Spurlin:
... raise serious hackles.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, absolutely. And actually, that was a point that was made in the research that Jack gave us, which I thought was so interesting. Basically, it says there's a protection state where people resist change even when presented with the evidence of a better way, especially if they went through that situation in trauma. So basically, in the scenario you're portraying, even if I don't like it, the fact that I had to go through the difficult experience of disliking it means I'm like, "Well, I don't want to have suffered for nothing."
Sam Spurlin:
Right.
Rodney Evans:
I sat through this shit weekly meeting for two years, and I hate it. And I got berated every week by my boss, and I have full on reactive response to it. And you come in and you're like, "We're not going to do that meeting anymore, y'all. Let's do a better kind of meeting," even if I'm signed up for it, even if it's not mine, I might be one of the people that's like, "Dude, I suffered for this." And even... there's so many different ways that we end up protecting the status quo.
What emotions show up during change work
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm wondering, when we're talking about emotional labor in this work or in organizations, what are some of those emotions that we see popping up in this work?
Rodney Evans:
My first answer is fear. So I think underneath most aggressive and uncooperative reactions is some fear of loss of control, uncertainty about the future. There's a bunch of other ones worry that I will no longer be valuable or have status, or... I think the fear of the unknown can cover a lot of this. And if we don't know what it's going to look like on the other side, that almost always shows right up.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, fear is definitely that base level that sprouts lots of other ones. What comes to mind for me is just everything around anxiety and uncertainty when you are kinda off balance, when you don't really know what is happening and just how that can really close people off from being curious or optimistic. Or it's really like, I don't know what's happening, so I'm going to narrow my perspective into my little zone, protect my little zone, and woe to you if you get near it.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I also think that... And this is related to the thing I was saying before from the research, but I know when I've been the biggest asshole at work in my past, it presented as anger about a change that someone wanted to make or whatever, but what was usually underneath the anger was a feeling of under appreciation. So usually, I was angry because someone was coming in and being like, "We're going to fix this," or "We're going to change this," or "This thing sucks." And I was angry because I was like, "Well, I worked really hard on that thing. You weren't here when I was the only one who did the thing, and so easy for you to say."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, must be nice. You show up and throw around some ideas about how to make this thing better. I took it from zero to one.
Rodney Evans:
Exactly.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Okay.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, that felt so, so bad. I also feel like sometimes with words that get very accepted and very buzzy, people underestimate the weight of them. So it's very typical to start some transformation or evolution project, and the OD people are like, "mindsets and skill sets."
Sam Spurlin:
Mindsets, baby.
Rodney Evans:
Mindsets and-
Sam Spurlin:
Just mindsets.
Rodney Evans:
Mindsets. And it's like, yes, 100% that. And what that means is you're asking someone to alter their worldview, which is not really so easy, to have someone abandon what has kept them safe and gotten them to this point to have this new mindset. It's just like we talk about this, it's not that hard, but it's super hard.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. And you just made the point that I was going to emphasize, which is you're not only just asking people to let go of this thing that is very close to them, but it's the thing that got them to their current position,-
Rodney Evans:
Yes, absolutely.
Sam Spurlin:
... which is probably the peak of their current career. And you just want me to, just, again, that word, let go of that mindset-
Rodney Evans:
Just.
Sam Spurlin:
... and step into this other one, which I think we actually have... The way we do this work really honors the fact that you can't think your way into a new mindset, at least not in a particularly cogent way. You actually have to start acting into it. But I think we could probably dig into that more a little bit later.
Why leaders hesitate to name the trade-offs in change
Rodney Evans:
That brings up another point for me, which is that change always requires trade-offs. And I find one of the big issues in a lot of what we've already covered even so far is there's a real hesitance I find, when a change is underway, to name what we're trading off. There are going to be trade offs at some point, because even if you have complete abundance, you can't do everything or you don't have a company. And I just find when we are brought in and they're like, "We want a new op model," nobody wants to say, we are prioritizing these people over these people or this outcome over this outcome or this strategy over this strategy. And when we say prioritizing, we mean we care about it more, we're going to invest in it more, and we're willing to live with that at the detriment of this other thing.
Nobody wants to say that, and I know why that's hard because I have to say that literally every day at The Ready, but you have to do it or you're just creating a world of hurt. And by avoiding naming competing commitments and real trade-offs, you create more emotional labor because people are trying to figure out, is it Sam's thing, or is it Rodney's thing? Am I in the tent or am I not? And people are trying to make their own sense, and frankly create their own sense of security by refusing to just articulate what is true. You're just making it worse. You're making all those emotions that we just named heightened for more people.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. And those trade-offs that you're talking about would somehow be easier if it was 100% on this thing and 0% on this thing.
Rodney Evans:
Of course. It rarely is.
Sam Spurlin:
But in most cases cases, it's like we need the analog business to keep doing their thing and keep doing it really well, and keep throwing off those profits that we are going to reinvest in over here. So it's some real emotional labor to have a conversation around, "Hey, this role or this division or whatever...not the future. And deal with that, and also keep doing good work because we need you too. And those are adult conversations.
Rodney Evans:
But there are so hard.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
It's so hard to be the person who's working on the thing that isn't the future but is supposed to still be committed and fired up. Not for everybody, but I think for a lot of people, that's really hard.
Why "efficiency" crowds out space for emotions
Rodney Evans:
One other thing I wanted to throw into the mix on the emotional labor thing is I feel like part of why it gets skipped over... and we're going to talk about some of the skill that's required to deal with it. But I also think that in making significant change in any part of your operating system, everyone is so, so focused on efficiency and just like... You talk a lot on this show about creating a false sense of urgency, and we should do a whole episode about that, but I always feel like these programs are like, we got targets to hit, we got milestones meet, et cetera, et cetera, and the processing and dealing with the emotional dust that gets kicked up is seen as wasteful.
Sam Spurlin:
Oh, totally. That's not very efficient.
Rodney Evans:
Just tell them to shut up in color cause we got a deadline to meet. And it's like that, unfortunately, is not how humans tend to function. They don't go like, "Oh, okay, well I just won't have these feelings because we have a release on Friday." It's just like, well, those feelings are still there and you're going to deal with them sooner or later, so you might as well do it in a way that is channeled and considered and well facilitated and useful rather than being, "Shut up and meet the deadline because feelings are wasteful."
Sam Spurlin:
Well, and that just gets to the metaphor we talk about with operating systems being either complicated or complex. This industrial era conceptualization of how an organization works, cogs interchangeable. We just can swap people out. Take this crying one and put a non-crying one in instead, and now we're working better. Doesn't really work that way. And we can try to convince ourselves that it does, and I think plenty of the leaders that we have seen and worked with to pretend they live in a world where they can do that, but it's obviously true that that is not the case.
Rodney Evans:
That's just not how it goes. Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
And that reminds me, we haven't really talked about what I see one of the major lenses that people bring to this emotional labor at work conversation, which is the gender component and the marginalized identity component, and how generally when we're talking about people who are doing the emotional labor at work, it's not the powerful white men.
Rodney Evans:
Rarely.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. So I don't know how we want to weave that through or how it shows up in this conversation, but I think it's worth mentioning and calling out as a pattern that we certainly see and want to acknowledge as well in this work.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Yeah. I think let's talk about it in the costs of the pattern. I thought about this a lot, and I actually think there's a whole other episode in here for you and I to talk about at a later date that gets into some of that.
Why It Persists: Talking about feelings is uncomfortable, especially for leaders
Rodney Evans:
But before we do, let's talk about why this persists. We go into these situations, there's a groundswell of support for the thing to be done, the change to be made, and then it kicks up all of this stuff at many altitudes. Most people don't like the feeling of fear and grief and anger and loss and uncertainty and whatever. So why does this continue? You're a psychology expert. Tell us.
Sam Spurlin:
That is not true. I will-
Rodney Evans:
Isn't it? You almost get a PhD.
Sam Spurlin:
I have a master's degree, and I'm a PhD dropout. Let's be careful with how we throw around the E word.
Rodney Evans:
I have a bookshelf, so I think let's do your thing.
Sam Spurlin:
And here's my completely non psychology expert opinion, but that stuff is awkward and difficult to talk about. And we all have our lives outside of work where we often don't have a choice about having to talk about and deal with emotional stuff. People are more okay with the idea that there is going to be shit that comes up in my life that I'm going to have to deal with, and I shouldn't also have to deal with it at work. This is where I come to make the donuts, sometimes literally. Keep this emotion stuff out of here. And I think it's really common for folks in positions of leadership who don't know what to do with that, and that being just the human stuff. And part of the reason we're talking about this stuff is that it does get in the way of being able to do good work. The purpose that we have-
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, it's a distraction tactic.
Sam Spurlin:
... as an organization, we're not able to pursue it as well because there's all this stuff going on below the surface. So if you actually want that efficiency, then the move is to actually be smart and open to how we deal with the emotional undercurrent stuff.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, that's right. I totally agree. The corporate mask and the guise of professionalism, which obviously has real equity and justice issues under it, is a really handy excuse and distraction from the feelings that we don't want to deal with. I also think that maybe the flip side of that coin is I've had a number of interactions with senior leaders where I don't even think they're really tuned into how they feel. I think there is a real lack of both self-awareness in terms of internal experience and life, and then also lack of situational awareness in terms of how their behavior is impacting the external and how the external is impacting their behavior. And I have been in the conversations with leaders in a one-on-one where I've been like, "You seem mad. What's going on?" And they're like, "I'm not mad!" And you're like, "Okay. Okay. All right. Let's start with there."
And so I think there is some foundational self work to be done to, at the very least, know when you're afraid, or know when you're angry, or know when you're anxious, or know when you're sad. And no judgment because I did not do this work until I was an older person either, but it's quite easy to just never even notice or have the skills to notice that you're freaking the fuck out.
Sam Spurlin:
Right. And once you get to a certain level of positional power, you can skate by not doing that because there's nobody else to call you out on it. You've got your peers, anybody who's above you. So maybe you have a particularly empathic or empathetic colleague who pulls you aside and you have a good relationship with them, but as you work your way up, there's fewer and fewer of those people. And then once you're in that positional power, you can really wreak some havoc, not even realizing it.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, totally.
Why emotional work can't be planned for or finished once
Sam Spurlin:
One other thing that comes to mind for me is that it's not like we can front load all the emotional work at the beginning of a project. The change work that we are doing within the organization, it is a process of unfolding, and you cannot yet know what the unfolding six months from now is going to look like here on day one. And because we can't know exactly how things are going to unfold, we don't know what emotions we're going to spin up in which people, and that means this has to be ongoing work sensing and responding into that change and building that muscle over time. So as we uncover these moments we're like, "Oh shit, didn't realize this role was going to be seriously affected by this work," how do we deal with that?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. And that all change has different phases. Ideas go from being incubated to being developed and designed to being tested, to being delivered. And at each phase of any big shift, there are stars and supporting actors, and also people who got sent off the set. That's how this goes. And I think that when you're in a team or a program or a company that is undergoing significant change, it can be hard when you're like, well, my just desserts will not be showing up until two years from now. I am going to be the last beneficiary of what's going on here once the high tide is lifted all boats. I'm in one of those boats. And so I also think different people are going to have different experiences of things that are changing, both based on the content and based on their own personal makeup and trauma and worldview, and based on the phase of change.
How many times have you been in a project where the people who wanted to kick you out of the room on the first day by the end, were like, "You are my guy, and this is how we do it," and the people who hired you who thought you were the best thing since sliced bread are barely speaking to you by the end? Because I've had that experience more than once.
Sam Spurlin:
I was actually just about to ask if I could give a specific example.
Rodney Evans:
Please do.
The grief of change you didn't choose
Sam Spurlin:
Thank you. I'm going to. And the example that I'm thinking of is that often, an early group of allies in some projects are the project management people. Maybe we're brought in through that organization. I'm working on a project right now where it's... They're not true PMs, but they have project management-esque role. We get into the work. One of the things we often do with organizations is help them establish more cross-functional, mission-based teams that if they are working correctly, have internalized a lot of the stuff that a specific project manager would be doing for them. So we have this moment of, oh, this project management role as we have traditionally thought of it at this organization is actually not part of the future. It doesn't mean "Goodbye. You're gone."
Rodney Evans:
Of course.
Sam Spurlin:
For many of these folks, it is an opportunity because what we have discovered is that what this team needs now is an org design coach. They need really dope facilitators. They need people like us in the moment to moment reality-
Rodney Evans:
Inside.
Sam Spurlin:
... of that team.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Exactly. And if they're open that change, then they are stepping into that pretty seamlessly. And if they get hung up on the weight, "I know project management. Here's my Gantt chart. What do you mean we don't need that?" that's... Talk about emotions that get spun up, betrayal, confusion, all the things.
Rodney Evans:
And, even with what you just said, I know so many leaders who are like, "This is an opportunity for those people. This is an opportunity to develop new more modern skill sets and to..." And it's like, sure, great, but they didn't ask for that. They were not the people who hired us to tell them that. And so even the painting of something like that is like, this is just all upside. It's not. That's not how a lot of those people hear that. What those people hear is like, "I'm worthless now unless I do something completely different than I've been doing for 10 to 30 years." And it's like, woof, man, that sucks.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, totally. And it doesn't have an easy answer because it's probably not like, "Oh, you're right, you're sad, so we'll just keep project managers forever."
Rodney Evans:
Of course. Of course.
Sam Spurlin:
I feel like an ass even just saying that, but-
Rodney Evans:
But it's true. It happens all the time.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
The Cost: Avoiding emotions always comes back to bite you
Rodney Evans:
So we've talked a little bit about... We've talked a lot about what the thing is. We've talked a lot about why we can't get out of our own way. Let's talk about what the cost of letting this just fester and bubble underneath the surface and hoping that somebody else deals with it eventually, let's talk about what that looks like.
Sam Spurlin:
Well, that's a known strategy for things going well, ignore it while it bubbles underneath the surface, and then I'm sure eventually it'll go away. No, that's not generally how it goes. You can ignore it for a long time. I've been in plenty of experiences where we did a heroic job of ignoring shit that was going on.
Rodney Evans:
Nice.
Sam Spurlin:
And there's not a happy ending to that story because there's always a moment. There's something-
Rodney Evans:
It's coming back.
Sam Spurlin:
Something happens, yeah. If you don't process the stuff, then you're not going to have the outcomes that you want. It's as really as simple as that. Going back to that efficiency mindset, we're here to do work, well, you know what? You can use that logic for why you have to work through the emotional stuff, because it is the work and it will prevent what you think is the actual work from ever getting done.
How avoiding emotions impacts some identities more than others
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I think that's right. I also think that, to your earlier point about particular identities carrying more of this work, it's true. It's statistically true. There is a lot of research about this. And as a person who has done an obscene amount of unseen emotional labor at The Ready and in other places, if you're someone who wants to be a good ally, don't just outsource that shit to somebody and be like, "That seems unpleasant or unnecessary or untoward," when really what it is something that you are not wanting to or capable of dealing with, and being like, "Rodney's got it." And it's like, do I have a hand in that?
Sam Spurlin:
You're so good, Rodney.
Rodney Evans:
Of course I do.
Sam Spurlin:
You're so good at it. You can do it.
Rodney Evans:
Thanks so much, Sam. That's what I've been hearing for decades. And it's like I'm an agentic adult who can say no and can set boundaries, but also, I think it's really important for people who have a lot of power to not just let that happen to people in their system who are maybe more well tooled, maybe have done more of their own work, maybe are more empathic, maybe are more connected to more people. I think it's really important that leaders not just let that unseen labor persist because I know that they know what's going on, and I know that they know who's taking people out for coffee and wiping their tears, and they're just like, "Better her than me." But don't do that. That's gross.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, it is very gross. One other thought that sparks for me is that it's such an opportunity to have these breakthrough moments for an organization. And it's not like... I don't know. I wonder if what people are thinking about when we talk about doing the emotional work. It's not like let's all, 100 people get in a room and have a group crying session.
Rodney Evans:
Of course not.
Sam Spurlin:
It's not that at all. It's like, can we have a real conversation in a team meeting when we all know what the elephant in the room is? Can we talk about that? Do you follow up and have that coffee with someone who knows having a rough time? And these are the types of things that you can get good at. You can practice it, and it feels less scary the more you do it. And I feel like an ass even saying it because this is a very transactional way of thinking of it, but the props that you get in a system when you are good at doing the emotional work...it can unlock some really impressive things in terms of the change that we're trying to create. I think about these projects that we've worked on where a resistant leader has that conversation or they have the team meeting where they share some real vulnerable stuff. And you ask them about it afterward, and it was like, yeah, it was scary. Maybe they wouldn't want to do it again, but it wasn't that bad, and you can move forward from there.
So we have a way of building it up into this thing that is impossible to do, when really, it's like any other skill.
Rodney Evans:
And it's like emotions and people's feelings and reactions to what's happening in a system is such important data for what could be done to make the change successful. It's like going back to your project manager example. If there's a space for me as an existing project manager to say, "I understand that you're painting a compelling and vivid idea for the future of this function, but for me, it's really scary and I'm really worried about having to learn facilitation because I'm actually not someone who's that comfortable in a group, and that sounds like hell to me," now we can do something with that. We can figure out, is there a way for me to do that without facilitation? Are there different skills needed by different project managers? Is there training or a buddy or a way to get reps? It's like that's valid data that really helps to unlock and make sticky the thing that you're trying to do.
Why avoiding emotions costs you attention and productivity
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, totally. One last thought for us to bat around here is that the emotions are going to exist either way. They're either going to exist in a way that we can talk about them and do something with them, or they're going to exist below the surface. But either way, they are there, and they are going to take up energy. So if we think about the ultimate scarce resource in an organization, it's not money. It is attention. And if we are going to basically use the emotional turmoil in an organization as a endless attention pit, then that is attention that we no longer have to apply to anything productive or valuable.
Rodney Evans:
Say more about that. That's interesting to me.
Sam Spurlin:
So if we are good at dealing with the emotional work that is existing within an organization, it's like we can move beyond it, right?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Like if you've ever had that cathartic conversation, you're no longer spinning on what the conversation might be. You've had it, and either it went well or it didn't. But in most cases, until the next moment comes up, you're not having to consistently just rework it over and over in your mind. And I think scaling that across an organization, I think we have a very similar type thing. If there's a bunch of stuff that nobody feels like they can talk about or they're only talking about with each other via DM behind the scenes, I guess picture that as a very diffuse and unproductive use of attention within the organization, where if you instead are able to bring these things up and process them, we are able to close them off even just temporarily and redirect that attention into other more productive things. Does that make sense?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, it totally makes sense. And Jack reminded me that I said this thing at South by Southwest last year that was good, so I'm going to say it here too because I forgot about it.
Sam Spurlin:
So it.
Rodney Evans:
I think that makes the point, Sam, of the slippery slope argument, which is one of my least favorite arguments, when leaders are like, "Well, if we start talking about our feelings, then what? It's just that's all we're going to talk about. And everybody's just going to sit in the office and cry all day, and we're never going to get anything done." And that is not what happens, actually. There is a period of time where everything that you've been avoiding and suppressing does come out when there's some freedom, whether it's in a meeting structures or however this happens. But the truth is that then, it starts to diffuse and there's not so much pent up gunk in the works.
And a really easy and good example of this is about this time last year I started doing confidential AMAs The Ready. And I was just like, "Look, my sense is that there's some ghosts in the past. We need to slay them or they will haunt us forever. I don't know how safe people feel addressing certain topics. It will be in a confidential form, and I am going to answer them all or ask someone to answer them if it's not me, and we are just going to one by one go through the thing that you will not say out loud until we get to the bottom of it." And the first one we did, there were fucking like 30 things. And the last one we did, there were two. And actually, the answers to both of them were things that had been in Slack that I think the time of the thing was they had submitted it before it had gotten posted, which to me was a great signal that it's like, oh, people are pushing the information that people want to hear. There's no there there. Great.
But it's like that was inside of a year that it went from people being like, "I've never asked this question out loud," and me getting this list and being like, ehhhh, to being like, there's not actually that much left in the bottom of this well.
Sam Spurlin:
I love the AMA that you and Source have instituted. And what I love...there are two things I love about it, two very deliberate design choices that you all did. One, confidential or anonymous. Anybody can submit, no names attached. And two, they are not discussion topics. They are questions that one person will answer. And often, it's you, but often you'll direct it to someone who obviously has the better information. And they just answer it, and then that's it. We don't talk about it.
Rodney Evans:
That's it.
Sam Spurlin:
And maybe that's... It seems like, oh, that seems counter to what we're talking about. What if it creates a bunch of feelings? Guess what? We have another AMA in a month. If you still have a question, throw it in there, or if there's not another venue where you feel safe bringing it up. But I think that has worked really well.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I'm glad.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Cool.
Tip 1: Treat emotional data like any other data
Rodney Evans:
So let's talk about what the people can do, Sam. What are some ideas you've got for them?
Sam Spurlin:
The people, that's right. All right, here's one. So let's treat emotional data, like other data. Let's collect it and understand it and make sense of it. So you can do lots of different surveys or whatever, but basically collect some initial data about how people are feeling about the organization, about the change effort specifically, and pulse them over time to see how things are going. And I wouldn't over index on any one moment, but sentiment data gathered over time tells interesting stories and helps you ask better questions about what is going on. Sentiment tanks hard, a couple of pulses in a row. I, as a leader, would be thinking, all right, what's going on here? What conversations do we need to have? What are people wanting to hear from me? I would be doing a little bit more investigative work and trying to head that off, and... No and. Period.
Rodney Evans:
Okay. you've done survey design before, haven't you?
Sam Spurlin:
A little bit in my very nascent PhD career.
Rodney Evans:
Okay. So here's what I've never seen in an insights survey like this. Would you ever recommend to a client asking feeling questions?
Sam Spurlin:
I don't know, actually. Here's what I actually would love to see.
Rodney Evans:
I don't know either.
Sam Spurlin:
And I've never really worked in an organization that has done it. Most culture surveys are long as shit-
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
... and done too infrequently to be useful, I think.
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
I would want three questions once a week. And I've been on project teams where we've done that, and that has actually been helpful where we can see, oh yeah, the client was being a bunch of dickheads last week, and our sentiment is way in the ground. Do we want to do anything about that? Maybe we do. Maybe we don't. So I'm talking more about a very light touch. And in that case, I think I would ask feeling questions.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I really like that.
Sam Spurlin:
With the understanding that feelings are ephemeral.
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
And your feelings don't have to drive you. They are real, and also, they don't have to drive you.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, cool. I was just curious.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Tip 2: Using 360 feedback for self-awareness and outside perspective
Rodney Evans:
My first thought is about the self-awareness question because I just think that at the root of so much of this avoidance is people not being in touch with their own inner worlds. And I think that finding a way to get that feedback to get 360 degree data is really important. And I am not recommending doing this in a shitty HR way that impacts your bonus. I am talking about this as data that comes to you as a receiver in whatever format you can handle it with support from someone who does not have control over your livelihood to process it, whether that is a coach, whether that's someone who administers the 360. I've had many of these in my career, and my ability to take in difficult feedback with a professional outside of my organization is much, much higher than my ability to have my HR business partner be like, "So the people who report to you love you and your peers want to murder you."
It's like it doesn't go well that way, but you got to get the data. And then the support thing is really important, both for the receiver's ability to process the feedback in pursuit of self-awareness and for the reason we talked about before, which is so that when they get the feedback, they don't end up adding, projecting, and requiring and demanding that attention from people who carry marginalized identities, which is what normally happens. It's like the system just gives them the information with no support, and then they turn around and they enlist their own support, but it's always from the same folks.
Tip 3: Rethink the role of leaders in change work
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Yeah. I like that. That's a good segue, I think for the other one idea I have, which is more around coaching of the leader. And what is the expectation of the leader in this, or a leader in doing this work? In this one, I would be looking to... And I'm putting my consultant hat on and picturing myself working with a leader and trying to be a bit of a mirror to them and help them conceptualize what they need to do to role model here, what their work looks like to unlock other people's work. I think we do ourselves a disservice by underplaying the role of leaders in clearly hierarchical organizations. And instead, let's acknowledge the power that leaders have, often to set the tone and model what we're actually trying to do, and create ways for those leaders to step into those new ways of being. If you can get a leader to fundamentally start to shift how they're showing up and engaging with people, that can radiate quite far because of how much goes through them.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
I guess if you're sitting in a leadership role, be looking for that opportunity, and hopefully relishing the opportunity to create outsized positive impact by changing how you show up.
Rodney Evans:
If you have a leader that you've worked with that is doing the inner work to actually be able to role model more flexible, more emotional behavior, how have you seen leaders actually transmit that really well to the organization?
Sam Spurlin:
My first instinct is that it's not a deliberate transmission.
Rodney Evans:
Okay.
Sam Spurlin:
When you have a reputation of being one way and you are consciously trying to be another way that transmits itself. The people who report to you and show up in other parts of the organization, they experience it, they talk about it. So I actually wouldn't be thinking about kind any deliberate transmission in that point. I'd be like, just worry about your locus of control, how you are showing up to the people you interact with the most. And chances are if you're actually doing the work, that will radiate itself.
Rodney Evans:
Cool. I love that.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. What about you? One last one?
Tip 4: Acknowledge losses and give them real time
Rodney Evans:
One last one. To just acknowledge the losses. Just trying to hose people into thinking that this is nothing but net is... First of all, it's not treating them like adults. It's treating them like fucking morons. And secondly, I think it's disrespectful to not be able to say to people, "There will be things in this change that are important to you that are no longer. And that doesn't mean that they weren't valid, it doesn't mean that they're not appreciated, and we invite you to stick with it for these reasons in the short and medium and longer term." But I just think the overly positive, overly political, overly massaged messaging that never acknowledges that for some people, this is not all good news, is a real miss. I think human beings can handle more than we give them credit for, and I just feel like the more we can be straight with people and let them make their own decisions, the better.
So whether you're a change agent of some kind, or you're a leader who is trying to do a new thing, to just be open about the fact that we cannot both change and stay the same. And people will likely have feelings about that, and we are interested in supporting them in processing those feelings so that they can make it to the other side with us. I also just think that knowing that in any significant organizational change effort, there are seasons in that. And it's not all positive, it's not all fast, it's not all anything all the time. If you're doing a technology implementation that's going to take two years, it's not going to be of one character for two years.
And so knowing that there are going to be ebbs and flows in energy, in attention, in who steps forward in who's exhausted, in where there are setbacks, let's just be a little reasonable and a little patient with the fact that in complexity, things don't move at a normalized pace, and the feelings that come with them don't move at a normalized pace, and we just have to be with the mess. Because if there is no mess, you're not doing it.
Sam Spurlin:
I wanted to let that breathe because that's a good line.
Rodney Evans:
Let it breathe.
Sam Spurlin:
All right.
Rodney Evans:
All right.
Sam Spurlin:
Hot takes? Not hot takes. First steps?
Rodney Evans:
Oh, man. I don't think I have a first step today.
Sam Spurlin:
I don't know...I was feeling similarly because this is such a-
Rodney Evans:
We covered a lot of ground.
Sam Spurlin:
We covered a lot of ground. It's a very big topic that I think we won't be coming back to consistently. This was the intro course, and I think there are 201, 301, 401, and graduate level classes-
Rodney Evans:
100%.
Sam Spurlin:
... that we could do on specific topics here. So this is the primer.
Rodney Evans:
Should we wrap it up?
Sam Spurlin:
Let's wrap it up. We are always looking for new topics for the show. In fact, I'm not going to make any promises here, but we did have a listener email us, and we recorded a bespoke 10 minute episode that we then sent back to them. So no promises, but if your question is really good, we'll turn it into an episode for sure.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
So shoot us an email podcast [at] theready [dot] com.
Rodney Evans:
Thank you, as always, to Taylor Marvin for engineering this show, and to the wondrous Jack Van Amburg for producing. This episode had so much research behind it that Sam and I did not do because Jack did it for us. We really appreciate it. At Work With The Ready is created by The Ready where we help organizations around the world change the way they work. Thanks for listening.