A yellow book caught my eye at the bookstore this morning. I was bad and didn’t support my local independent bookshop and instead purchased it on the Kindle because it’s not the kind of book I want to keep forever and it is the kind of book I want to read on the train. So I feel guilty about that.
Anyway…
The book is called It’s Always Personal, Emotion in the New Workplace, by Anne Kreamer. I haven’t read that much of it yet, but the author seems to be going somewhere interesting to me with regard to acknowledging or suppressing or ignoring genuine emotions in the workplace all of which I have done in my own “real job” past to great non-effect. Ms. Kreamer recounts just such an occasion in the first chapter of her book. She recalls a time when as an executive, she was in her office celebrating a successful sales negotiation with her team. For them it was a major accomplishment that came after months of hard work. So when a call came from the chairman of the board she expected a congratulatory compliment and was completely blindsided to the point of tears when she answered the phone to a screaming personal attack. Later she figured out that the important man was upset because the public announcement of the deal hadn’t made the parent company’s stock price go up. That wasn’t something that she, as the manager of a division within a division of the parent company had any control over. It didn’t matter. The damage was done. Something shifted within her and she went from feeling lucky to be in the right place at the right time, part of a team with shared vision and the resources to make their dreams come true to feeling like a tiny cog in a machine “that could be capriciously ripped out, smashed and discarded”. She went from thinking her job was to “make the world a better place for kids (she worked for Nikelodeon at the time) to thinking her job was to “produce a momentary uptick in a stock price”.
She said, “Two years, seven months, and fifteen days after I cried at work, I quit, without a new job.”
That is a fine example of how and why so many women leave the corporate world and technological fields entirely mid-career. It’s not because they have children. It’s because they navigate through life using their powerful emotions as a compass and it’s so damn hard to pretend that they don’t.
Ooohhhhh! I think I know where my next clown character is going to come from!