Historically, the corporate world prided itself on being unemotional and purely logical. To safeguard against what we now call "drama," emotions and sensitivity were viewed and feared as unintelligent strangers or even enemies of the workplace. We now know how inhumane that is and that respecting the feelings and perspectives of others is the impetus for motivation and productivity.
Help feelers focus.
Are you struggling with dramatic employees who complain, gossip or sensationalize?
Anyone can be caught up in drama, depending on their emotional history and whether they’re a concrete thinker (less emotional) or abstract thinker (more emotional).
There are two kinds of emotionally sensitive people who seek deeper relationships at work: those who are aware of and able to regulate their own emotions and those who aren’t.
The first category, who I call the focused feelers, have emotional intelligence, or the awareness and ability to regulate their emotions. I call the second category the unfocused feelers. It’s obvious their front brain is offline when they’re dramatizing. They impulsively waste time, pull others into their drama and fail to focus on their work.
The unfocused feelers can’t regulate what they don’t have (emotional intelligence), but why don’t they have it?
A lack of self-esteem is at the core of drama. Here’s why: Emotional intelligence and self-regulation (self-esteem) are developed in the front brain through experiences that grow self-awareness, self-acceptance and security. Some people have performed well in life but haven’t established emotional security through their performance. In this case, they still have a self-focus: trying to prove themselves.
For this reason, it can be said that self-esteem is having a focused self, not a self-focus. Self-esteem is developed when a person feels seen and known for who they truly are, not just for what they do. If your employee is drawn to drama, they are actually bidding for attention to their emotionally hungry self-image.
Is a culture of emotional connection a slippery slope or retention strategy?
Empathetic leaders find younger workers lacking empathy like never before, yet can adequately build the self-image of their workers of any age by emotionally connecting with their state of mind. This is a retention strategy that doesn’t take long because the nervous system is emotionally reading others hundreds of times per second.
Empathetic leaders avoid judgments about drama and instead identify the emotions within. By shifting the focus from the attention-getting facts to the heart of the matter, employees internalize your authenticity, which evokes maturity and belonging. Belonging is crucial to motivation. People work harder when they feel belonging.
You have three options: (1) Terminate dramatizers, (2) shut drama down with cognitive reasoning, which unfocused, underdeveloped people can’t sustain, or (3) model empathy for the employee’s state of mind and rely on the science of empathy to send chemicals to their higher brain. Once their facial expression, body language and eye contact become calmer, you can shift to reasoning about the issues at hand, which will now make a more sustainable impact.
Without empathy training, many employers regret welcoming a social work environment only to find themselves tolerating gossip and drama. Worse yet, they report finding themselves pulled into it, asking:
“How did I get caught up in that?”
“How can I emotionally connect with my employees and not get sucked into their drama?”
“How can I redirect their energy to their work?”
Employers talk about sympathizing, but sympathy is not enough. When they increase their own empathy quotient, they are equipped to turn their employees’ episodes of drama into opportunities for thought leadership. Incorporating empathy curtails drama, but leaders must first have it to model it.
One such rehabilitating episode was resolved over a matter of days when a senior partner complained (quite dramatically) that direct reports were doing very little work and wasting time in backbiting. He felt victimized, disrespected, taken advantage of, overworked and at the point of leaving the company.
I empathized with and validated him before exploring the dynamics behind their drama and differences between himself and his subordinates that could be driving them all off course. Besides his own stress turned drama, he was strong-willed, and the workers were compliant. It seemed likely that they felt threatened by his demeanor and style, which they resisted.
Strong-willed people tend to push and pursue when stressed, whereas compliant people tend to resist and avoid when stressed. My client felt empathized with as we explored these dynamics and took this dose of empathy to work. Uncomfortable yet eager to try a new strategy, he checked some negativity at the door the next morning, complimented his team and was extremely surprised to find them coming in multiple times that day to get more work. He had to practice and receive more empathy to sustain his new style, but with practice, he became a natural and was proud of the work environment he was creating.
Sympathy feeds drama whereas empathy kills it.
Empathy is a brain-changer. When empathy is evoked in a person, a sense of calm and focus is activated in the brain. My client wasn’t needing sympathy, which is more abundant than empathy because it’s easier to feel sorry for someone than to feel their feelings and share their state of mind. It can be a high-stimulus replacement for real emotional connection pulling people into roles of victim and persecutor while imagining they’re a sympathetically moral hero. My client needed increased emotional awareness so his front brain could analyze new points of view.
Getting back to the historical fear of all this drama, like my client, handling co-workers focused on drama is challenging for top performers to protect their productivity and reputation. Showing empathy for people who create distractions and political power struggles transforms emotionally exhausting environments into stable, productive ones. When you notice someone ramped up for an emotional fix, give them one that stops the drama. Utilize empathy, and grow their brain.
