In this episode of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, Brandon Laws interviews Karla McLaren — author, researcher, and workplace consultant — about her most recent book, The Power of Emotions at Work. Karla shares some insight from her lifelong research of emotions in the workplace. Read on and learn how leaders can foster emotional intelligence, strong communication, and empathy in the workplace.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Karla McLaren has spent her career delving into the undeniable power of emotions. An accomplished author, researcher, and consultant, Karla is passionate about teaching leaders to “revalue” their emotions to create effective communication and deeper empathy in the workplace. Her latest book, The Power of Emotions at Work: Accessing the Vital Intelligence in Your Workplace, is available wherever books are sold.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
THE TOP TAKEAWAY
Avoid the Devil’s Floor Plan
As she was writing her master’s thesis, Karla McLaren began to understand the problems inherent in an open work environment. She recalled, “I was studying autism and how autistic kids are taught. Many of them are in a special education classroom that wasn’t ever meant to be a classroom. And there might be kids from the fourth grade over at one table working on math, kids from third grade over at another table working on English, and so on.”
But what has been found with special education is that the children do worse when they’re expected to work in this type of classroom environment. “It turns out,” according to Karla, “that the sound of other humans talking near you is an extremely difficult thing for your brain to filter because it’s called irrelevant, meaningful noise — meaning it’s irrelevant to you, but it’s meaningful because your brain is focused on human speech.”
Of course, it’s possible to learn to work in an environment where many human voices are making irrelevant speech (on their phone or in a meeting), but it is an incredible cognitive load to expect people to bear.
Ultimately, the open office environment is “terrible for cognition and terrible for focus.” When people go from a normal environment with walls to an open office environment — even though it’s supposed to be “the land of milk and honey” — interpersonal communication drops by 70% immediately, and it’s because people are overwhelmed.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Having a Choice
“Without having autonomy and without having the dignity of making their own choices, any person will lose motivation. Many of the ways that we’ve set up the workplace — and we didn’t realize it — reduce motivation and mental and emotional health in people. This horrifying pandemic has taken so many people from us, and it has also shown us some of the deep truths about what our world really is.”
The Importance of Emotion
“If we are telling people that they cannot feel emotion, which is one of the most fundamental aspects of our capacity to understand the world, then we are asking them not only not to show up, but to shut up. And we’ve all seen it in workplaces where there’s something serious going on in the emotional realm, and nobody can speak to it.”
Emotions and Action
“Each emotion has a very specific purpose in cognition, decision-making, and action. So for instance, anxiety — which most people have been taught is a problem — its purpose is to help you focus and get ready to complete a task or to meet a deadline. So anxiety has some energy that helps you get on task, and if you don’t understand that energy, you may experience it as destabilizing.”
Unreasonable Expectations
“A lot of people get promoted into management, and they don’t really have the skills they need. I’ve worked with a lot of people who don’t want to manage people, and they see that as a problem. And I’m like, ‘No, it’s not. You are really good with processes, and you don’t have time for people’s little stuff. So no one should have put you into a management position and hoped that you would somehow change a basic feature of your humanity.’”
Taking Steps Forward
“So how do you create a place for human bodies to be in one place for eight or ten hours so that the physical aspect of the workplace isn’t dragging them? In many cases, the workplace doesn’t even realize that it wasn’t built for human bodies, for human ears, for human pelvises and low backs. It just wasn’t built for humans. And so that’s one of the main things that I talk about in the book. I ask, ‘What are the rest times? What are the rest areas? Do people have the right to get up and stretch and get out for a minute and take care of themselves? Or are they just, you know, slammed eight hours a day?’”
The Emotions That Drain Us
“The emotions that drain us do so for extremely important reasons. It’s so that we’ll pay attention to them and ask what’s wrong. […] Anger is an excellent energy emotion, and anger only arises in the presence of something you care about deeply. You can’t get angry about things that don’t matter. So it’s a way to sort of mark this matter and say ‘this matters to me.’”
Empathy is Key
Empathy is built entirely on emotions. To be empathic is to have emotional skills that translate into relationships. You can have emotional skills that are focused on yourself, but empathy is where you bring your emotional skills out into the world. […] And for many people, the empathy they’re learning in the workplace is really truncated.”
LEARN MORE
Karla’s book, The Power of Emotions at Work: Accessing the Vital Intelligence in Your Workplace, is a great starting point for people who are wanting to build the kind of workplace that we discussed in this episode. Check out Karla’s website at karlamclaren.com for a free emotional vocabulary list and emotional intelligence quiz.