The emotional wounds we carry; Why emotions shouldn’t be buried, especially at work.

Every time I want to write about emotions and business, I have two opposing thoughts, part of me feels I need to immediately ‘re-write’ and part of me thinks I need to ‘just write’. Talking openly about how we feel at work feels so alien, almost as though emotions and our working lives are completely disconnected.

Today despite a productive morning, a balanced day and connecting with people in a deeper way than usual (which of course I love) – I noticed that I was carrying a sense of anger and sadness. With a little introspection, I knew that the secondary emotions I was feeling were centred around a sense of threat, anxiety and despair.

This week, Monday 22nd April marked the day, 31 years ago that Stephen Lawrence was brutally murdered in an unprovoked racist attack. As a mother myself, I cannot imagine the courage and strength that Baroness Lawrence has, to simply face the world and move forward every day without her son, let alone dealing with the way he was unjustly taken from the world. The idea of the Police being institutionally racist ensued, but how different is the world today?

My underlying feelings of anger, sadness and fear were compounded by the documentary ‘Defiance: Fighting the Far Right’, I watched on Channel 4, a three-part series that examines how Britain’s Asian community was targeted with a campaign of violence between 1976 and 1981. Knowing that racism is still present, perhaps manifesting differently, but is nevertheless very much still alive, is what is sitting with me.

We need to look no further than the genocide in Gaza to see how people are impacted where racism is at the core.  I am always trying to untangle the idea of equality for all marginalised groups and what it means. At times, Allyship can be confronting. I few years back, at the time of George Floyd’s murder, I began to better educate myself around the struggle black people face and yesterday whilst watching Defiance, I saw how Asian people were racially abused and traumatised by white and black people alike.  I have an appreciation of scale and severity of such issues as well as the profound long lasting effects. However I also see how the pain people carry can affect how they show up (or not) for themselves and for others.

Emotional wounds are everywhere in business.

So why is this important…well it’s the backdrop. We are all operating society where people are overtly abused and marginalised.  It’s systemic and in many cases our institutions exacerbate , if not create these issues. We are in a time, where inaction is visible, where the world can stand by and watch where entire populations are mistreated, and there are no consequences or repercussions for complicity. 

Yet, in every business you will find under-represented groups, black people, people of colour, people with different religions be it Jewish or Muslim, (to name a few) who are all silently carrying fear, anger and sadness. The impact this has is huge, mentally, emotionally and physiologically. In the context of work, people remain quiet silence without a true sense of belonging or safety.

In my mind part of the reason for this is that we are not adept at holding difficult conversations and navigating these emotions without judgement or rebuttal.

What if we developed these skills deeply? What if we could create psychological safety in our own workplaces?  

 What could it do for morale, for innovation, creativity, for people’s sense of safety, belonging legitimacy and freedom? Could we re-engineer our businesses to create the change we want to see in the world. I think so. We just need to focus on how.

The emotional undercurrent in a business can be a catalyst for huge transformation. How we feel affects how we perform. So let’s build inclusive workplace cultures and develop exemplary leadership, not only because it impacts the bottom line because we would all be richer if we did.

 Emotions have a place in the workplace. Let’s not bury them, let’s find a way to harness their power.

 As always, working to reimagine how we work live lead.