One of the less obvious, but more important, differences between the more successful professional and the less successful professional, can be boiled down to one sentence:
You’re paid the big bucks, in large part, to leave your emotions at home (and if you’re not paid the big bucks, perhaps it correlates to your inability to leave your emotions at home.)
Let’s unpack that sentence because it has various implications.
First, there’s an observation that is trite and banal, but no one says out loud, so it might be useful to articulate it. In my personal experience, at least, it is the least competent employees that tend to have emotional issues, emotional breakdowns, share emotional stories, in a work context, with the greatest frequency.
The “in a work context” is important here because emotions matter, there’s just a time and a place for them. The challenge with sharing your emotions in a work context is that there is just such a strong correlation between that and incompetent work behavior. “Correlation is not causation” and correlation is just a pattern, so this is not universally true, it’s more of a rule of thumb. Sharing emotional issues at work is a huge signal that you’re just not good at your job.
But emotions are important. How can you work in a healthy and sustained way if you’re building up negative emotions? The answer has two main components. First, to deal with the emotions that relate to work, and to deal with them in healthy ways. As problems come up, talk about them in a solution-oriented way. As issues come up that aren’t problems but that rub you the wrong way emotionally, also talk about it. But make sure to talk about these problems with less frequency than talking about work itself with the appropriate people. Don’t fall into the end-of-relationship trap, when more time in a relationship is spent discussing the relationship itself than actually enjoying the relationship; that’s a sign that it’s on its last legs.
The second part is to discuss your work-related emotions at work (in the healthy way mentioned above) but what about non-work-related emotions? That’s what is important to leave at home. People often discuss their personal life, sharing stories of a fun weekend is a perfectly natural desire. But that’s different than detailing the complete breakdown you and your wife had last night. If you need to deal with that, take a day off, and come back when you’re ready, but chronicling it for your colleagues just raises the huge red low-competence flag. Even if you are high-competence, there is little benefit to implying low-competence in a professional relationship—although there are many other cases in which is it very appropriate to feign low-competence (such as when talking to a competitor or enemy, it is rarely to your advantage for them to know you’re as powerful or as knowing as you are.)
But there’s a completely different reason why this observation is important. Most of this series is about the “meta” side of work: how to work. But just as important—perhaps tied for importance—is that you do the work itself well. A younger version of myself would have argued that how well you do the work itself is more important than how you work. Today, I’m not sure. The thing is, you can’t do good work if you bring your emotions in, because emotions, by definition, cloud the logical thinking and problem solving you need for any sort of work. If you’re steaming and emoting over a frustration you’re having with a friend, how can you focus on the work problem right in front of you? You can’t. So, you need to leave your emotions at the door.
There is a time and place for emotions. Good friends. Your life partner. Your parents and siblings. There is a time and place for each relationship, and you need to treat everyone according to the relationship with them, so you can fully develop the goals of the relationship. Conflating the personal good friend relationship with the professional colleague relationship makes it much harder to achieve success in either of those.
