MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. Howard Ross is here today. Passionate about your work? Married to the job? A firm believer that there's no I in team? It's all well and good as long as you remember it's not personal, it's business, right?

MR. KOJO NNAMDIWhile we don't often talk about the role emotions play in the workplace, we know what can happen if they go unchecked. Shouting overheard from the office upstairs, inside jokes that make new hires squirm, stifled sobs coming from the cubicle -- next cubicle over. As the boundaries between our work and personal lives grow increasingly blurry, emotions play an ever-bigger role at the office. Howard Ross is here. He joins us to discuss this. He's a diversity consultant and a principal at Cook Ross. Howard, always a pleasure.

MR. HOWARD ROSSGood to see you, Kojo.

NNAMDIAnd joining us from the Argo Studios in New York City is Anne Kreamer, the author of "It's Always Personal: Emotion in the Workplace." Anne Kreamer, thank you for joining us.

MS. ANNE KREAMERIt's great to be here.

NNAMDIAnd as always, this is a conversation that you, too, can join by calling 800-433-8850. Do you consider your work-self separate from your home self? How drastic is that difference? 800-433-8850. For generations, workers kept their work persona completely separate from their home life. What's changed in the last few decades that makes it harder to tease the two apart? I'll start with you, Anne Kreamer.

KREAMERWell, I think it's an interesting phenomenon. It used to be that we would get up in the morning, we'd put on a different outfit, we would actually go to a different location to do our work and they were very discreet locations where there was never any intrusion. The reality today is that, in fact, when we're in the office, people are texting us and e-mailing us and we're getting IM's from our children and there's all sorts of kind of leakage and seepage into the workplace.

KREAMERAnd simultaneously, an awful lot of people work at home or when they come home at night or over weekends, they're getting incoming e-mails from their colleagues and from their bosses. And we're expected to have 24-hour accessibility, frankly, for both spheres of our lives, our professional lives and our personal lives and that's murky.

NNAMDIHoward?

ROSSWhy, I agree with Anne completely and I think that there's something else that's happening, which is as a pattern that's evolving. Really, it started in post-World War II when there was a lot of exploration into human behavior, some of which was stimulated by the events of World War II, but some of it was just a natural evolution of organizational development theory and the like. And the reality that -- understanding that human beings bring themselves to work, they don't leave their emotions, they don't leave their personal lives behind.

ROSSThey bring that all with them. And when we create workplace environments in which everybody has to pretend that that's not happening, what you get is inauthentic people working with inauthentic people and a rise of unconscious reactions that we can't talk about, can't speak to and maybe even dull from awareness ourselves that impact the way people interact with each other in lots of different ways.

NNAMDIAnne, can you explain the concept of emotional labor?

KREAMERWell, yes. Emotional labor is the difference between how you feel in your kind of most joyful, you know, kind of authentic self, what I was referring to and how you feel you need to act within a certain sort of environment. And so let's say if you're working in an environment where you feel like you to kind of don armor and you have to become a completely different persona than your kind of usual self, that gap is called the emotion labor gap. And the degree, you know, if it's greater than you're comfortable with, you're going to be miserable.

KREAMERAnd so I think a lot of this kind of blurring of home and workplace life is leading to people trying to figure out new solutions as to how kind of create a seamless sense of self between the two worlds.

NNAMDIAnne, emotional reactions at work are something people tend to talk around rather than about, so what inspired you to take on this issue?

KREAMERWell, there were a couple of things that inspired me. I happened to be at a party a couple of years ago where an old colleague of mine from MTV Network said, why was it that every woman she knew had cried at work and wished that she hadn't? And that was kind of this epiphany for me because I realized that, of course, I was one of those women. And when I'm faced with a kind of supposed truism like that, I tend to kind of think, well, why do we have that assumption? What is the basis for that?

KREAMERAnd that coupled with the fact that woman were, for the first time in American history with the recession, over 50 percent of the workforce, made me think, well, maybe this is the time we step back and look at fresh eyes at kind of organizational behavior in workplace norms.

NNAMDIHoward?

ROSSYes, I think that the point that Anne made is a good one and that is the increase of diversity, in general, in a workplace, I would say. I mean, certainly the increase of women. I mean, we know that culturally in our society, women are allowed more emotion outside of work than men may be.

ROSSBut when you begin to have more and more people in the workplace, either women or people of color, we now have the span of generations, we have more LGBT folks who are out in the workplace, and all of a sudden you've got different cultures emerging. If we go back, you know, a couple generations to where you had overwhelmingly white men, who had -- if they were married had somebody outside of the workplace who was doing something than them. The only time that they really interacted with women in a large way was outside of the workplace.

ROSSYou begin to have this culture that's built around a particular model. Now, we've got lots of different kind of people who have different value systems, different ways of operating, different emotional expression. Even the same emotion being expressed differently shows up sometimes as a challenge. And so we're now in a much more challenging environment to keep all this stuff buried and not deal with it.

NNAMDIDo we discount the role of unconscious, emotional reactions in our decision making process in an effort to come across as rational?

ROSSWell, first of all, I think there are a couple of things about this. We've created this notion -- and it came out of the early, you know, sort of this notion of the workplace as a factory environment. We have to remember that most of our early workplace theory came from people like Frederick Winslow Taylor and people like that who were these efficiency expert types, who saw it almost like a military model. And so you begin to create this notion that if you can keep the emotional body out, people will make more rational decisions.

ROSSThat's fundamentally flawed. I mean, we now know by people who are studying brain research that there's a function of the brain, a particular part of the brain that's called the orbital frontal cortex, which is kind of right behind -- right between the eyes sort of. And it's the center of emotion and that when people have injuries to have center of the brain, they actually can't make decisions because human beings actually make more emotional decisions than we realize.

ROSSThere's a guy, Tim Wilson, over at the University of Virginia, who says if Freud used to say that the conscious was the tip of the iceberg and the unconscious the larger part underneath, but now we know that the conscious is more like a snowball on the tip of the iceberg. So when we try to shut off our emotions, we think we're making -- we've been told that it means that we're making better decisions. In actuality, we're making worse decisions. Now, there are two reasons why a lot of this stuff gets driven into the unconscious.

ROSSOne is, social cognition theorists would say, well, certain things become normal depending upon on how you're raised and everything else gets driven underground because that becomes normal and then other comes more from the (word?) side, which says that, we've got this internal -- the super ego that says you're supposed to act right and if you know that biases, for example, are wrong then you convince yourself you don't have them because you know you're not supposed to and so all of it gets driven into the underground.

ROSSAnd the only way we can get this stuff up in the surface to look at it and work with it practically is if we're willing to talk about it and able to talk about it, as Anne's saying in her book.

NNAMDISpeaking of looking at it and talking about it, Anne Kreamer, tell us a little bit about your research. How do most workplaces do on the issue of emotions? Do they manage to find a proper balance?

KREAMERI don't actually think they do. I did two giant national surveys with J. Walter Thompson, looking at kind of real life emotion in the workplace and not surprisingly, almost three-quarters of all Americans said that their dominant emotion at the time was frustration and I think we can all certainly relate to that. But what was really fascinating to me, and I think this goes back to something Howard was saying earlier, women are viewed as having a greater ability to have emotional expression outside of the workplace. But, in fact, inside the workplace, they are far more constrained with their emotional expression than even men are.

KREAMERAnd I discovered that over half of young women reported that they were angry in the workplace, far exceeding that of young men and that, you know, 41 percent of women reported that they had cried in the workplace versus nine percent of men. And I think those two data points with women go hand-in-hand because women who express anger in the workplace are labeled a word that we all know rhymes with, you know, witch and feel like they are socially conditioned not to be able to express feelings of, you know, feeling overwhelmed or undervalued or whatever it might be in a context.

KREAMERThey end up doing the kind of more social acceptable response, which is to cry. But that creates this extremely vicious cycle where they wish they'd been able to articulate what was going on in the first place. They then cried. Crying is viewed as this thing which is almost shameful in women's minds, less so in men's minds actually. And they kind of can't get out of this mess. And I don't see corporations and, you know, Howard, correct me if I'm wrong, offering any kind of support for learning how to deal with expression of these kind of basic neural, biological reflex responses.

NNAMDIHave you ever been overwhelmed by emotions, good, bad or ugly, at work? Call us, 800-433-8850. How did you and everyone around you handle that? 800-433-8850, send us a tweet @kojoshow or simply go to our website, kojoshow.org. Howard?

ROSSWell, you know, I think Anne's right. I mean, there are few and far between. Let me put it this way. There are many who are starting to, but by far, it hasn't changed the overwhelming discourse. And the overwhelming discourse is still -- because those emotions make me feel uncomfortable, particularly crying in women. And especially for male leaders, it makes me feel uncomfortable, therefore it must be wrong, therefore a woman who does that as a natural expression feels her sense of vulnerability increase and that adds to even a greater sense of inner turmoil.

ROSSIt's very much like people who have to be -- what's the expression that you often hear, African-Americans here call being in code. It's very much the same thing. I need to act like somebody else all day long. I need to act -- in the case of women, I have to act like a man all day long.

ROSSAnd we know that our responses to these kinds of things are quite automatic. I mean, when you show people a picture of a crying baby and ask -- and put a pink border around with a girl's name and ask what she's feeling, most people will say -- overwhelming percentage, like 68 percent, will say that she's afraid.

ROSSIf you show a picture of that same picture of a crying baby with a blue border around it and a boy's name, the same percentage of people say that he's angry. So we're making these interpretive decisions based on our social conditioning long before we get to this particular individual person, but it nonetheless affects that person and the way they're seen and in what they're able to do.

NNAMDIAnne, anyone who has read about your book rather than the read the book would be forgiven for thinking it's just about crying at work. Were you at all surprised by the focus on that aspect of it?

KREAMERWell, not really because of the original query that set me off on the journey, which is that every women actually has cried and wished she hadn't, by and large. So that became this kind of flashpoint that was an easy entry point for people to talk about it. But you're right, I do talk about anxiety and fear and empathy, compassion, joy in the book as well.

KREAMERAnd I think one of the most exciting things, in fact, that's going on in, you know, organizational research right now is the fact that organizations that support kind of empathy and compassion and finding ways to sort of access innovation and creativity, it's good for the bottom line.

KREAMERI mean, whether you're a hospital sort of conditioning nurses to be more empathic, which reduces, you know, the time patients spend in hospital bedrooms, or you're an organization like, you know, Google trying to create the next big thing, those are employing emotions on the positive side that show you that it's ridiculous that CEO's aren't sort of paying attention to this. Because the more they can minimize the stress and anxiety of their employees, the greater the opportunity to kind of think of other ways out of the trap we seem to have -- the hole we've dug for ourselves.

NNAMDIAnne Kreamer is the author of "It's Always Personal: Emotion in the New Workplace." She joins us from Argo Studios in New York City. In our Washington studio is our own Howard Ross. He's a diversity consultant and a principal at Cook Ross. Howard's new book, "Reinventing Diversity: Transforming Our Organizational Community to Strengthen People, Purpose and Performance," will be out on August 15th, is that correct?

ROSSThat's right. Thanks, Kojo.

NNAMDIOnto the telephones now. Here is Nick in Gaithersburg, Md. Nick, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

NICKGreat. Thank you. I just wanted to share with you guys briefly about a little bit of my employment experience. I worked at a retreat center in California, but it was a very alternative workplace. And I worked in the kitchen out there and once a week, our entire department would get together. And rather than talk about business or technique or anything like that, we would talk about how we felt. And it provided a really amazing atmosphere for work and it kind of created this space where we were allowed to be emotional with each other.

NICKFrom, you know, as personal as you wanted to get, these meetings kind of allowed people to have a more smooth workplace, as well when these emotional processes were allowed to work themselves out in a natural way. And things didn't get really bottled up. So I thought if more corporate environments could set something like that up for employees, I think it would absolutely be a help. And I think it even helps the work flow when the emotions don't get bottled up and are allowed to kind of be out in the open like that.

NNAMDIOkay, thank you very much for sharing that with us, Nick. Howard, if you've worked in a corporate setting, you've probably had to undergo some kind of, well, harassment prevention training. And if you watch "The Office," you may remember Andy Bernard being sent to anger management. Do companies offer tips for handling a colleague who bursts into tears or starts yelling in the office or advice, as Nick's workplace did, for managing their own emotions, just talking about them openly?

ROSSWell, you know, one of the challenges is that when you create an environment in which emotional expression is suppressed and, you know -- for example, when Anne was talking about frustration. People get more and more frustrated and eventually what happens is it shows up in extreme behavior. When people -- it's the tea --, you know, the classic tea kettle. If you let the steam out every now and again, it doesn't build up in the same way.

ROSSAnd a lot of organizations want the up side of emotion. They want the wow factor in customer service or this enthusiasm, we believe in passion, all this kind of stuff. But because we don't also realize that you can't have one without the other -- you can't have emotional expression on the positive side and completely suppress it on the negative side or else what you have is a lot of people who are like -- what was the movie, the "Stepford Wives" or something?

NNAMDIStepford.

ROSSStepford, thank you. "The Stepford Wives." You know, you'd have a lot of people who are Stepford employees. They walk around smiling and saying how excited they are, but in truth, they don't feel any space to share on a negative side. Now, we are finding that you can do things -- like Nick was talking about, we do a lot of work like that with our clients. But it can't be by top-down edict. You can't have a CEO say, all right, everybody is now free to emote.

ROSSIt works by developing leaders who are actually wholehearted themselves, who develop the ability to be with their own emotions because you can only take people as far as you can go. And so we've got, you know, we do a program called Journey Into the Soul of Leadership, where we work with leaders about tapping into that. We do some work in team building around that. There are ways to do it, but it has to come through a process that takes time for people to really engage by themselves and not edict.

NNAMDIAnne?

KREAMERYeah. One of the things that I think that is actually interesting, there's always been, I think, kind of executive coaching and leadership skills for the top management levels of organizations. I think where companies are missing an opportunity is doing it with their entry-level employees. I mean, I have a daughter who just started her first job and literally they gave her a key card and basically threw her into the water and, you know, hoped she could swim. Yet, you know, there were all sorts of kinds of questions.

KREAMERWith really modest kind of, I think, investment on companies, they could actually help their junior employees, right out of the box, develop the skills that would lead them ultimately into being, you know, powerful and more sort of effective leaders. So I think it's still predominantly top-down and no doubt probably because they worry about the churn in younger employees in training them up and then having them move on. But I think it's a missed opportunity.

NNAMDIGot to take a short break. When we come back, we will continue this conversation on your emotions at work. Have you ever been glad that your emotions influenced a decision you made at work? Call us, 800-433-8850. Time to open the floodgates. Have you ever cried at work? What were the repercussions? 800-433-8850 or go to our website, kojoshow.org. Ask a question or make a comment there. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWelcome back. Howard Ross is with us. He's a diversity consultant and a principal at Cook Ross. Today, we're discussing emotions at work. Also joining us from Argo Studios in New York City is Anne Kreamer, author of "It's Always Personal: Emotion in the New Workplace." We're taking your calls at 800-433-8850. And for you, it's not just about identifying the emotions we're dealing with, but about effectively managing them. How do you do that if you're not even aware of the underlying emotions?

KREAMERWell, let -- there are sort of two steps to that. One step I did, as Howard alluded to earlier, I looked at the kind of neurobiological underpinnings of how we process emotion. Because frankly, before I started my research, I didn't really understand that they were kind of hard-wired into us, almost like a muscular reflex or breathing. And what I found out was kind of fascinating. I mean, for instance, women produce six times the amount of prolactin that men produce, which is the hormone that triggers tears.

KREAMERWomen's tear ducts are actually anatomically different from men's tear ducts, so they are smaller and means when they cry the tears actually sort of stream down their face in larger quantity. And men just tear up, you know, with water in their eyes. I think to the degree that we can all kind of learn and understand some of these fundamental bases that can help us sort of step back and at least try and lose the stigma that perhaps some of the kind of historical antecedents about emotion in the workplace might have.

KREAMERThe second thing is to, you know, this sounds kind of cliché, but it is to try and become more and more aware of what your trigger responses are. So, I think of emotions being like the check engine light on your car dashboard. I mean when it goes off you don't have to get to the shop immediately, but if you don't eventually take care of the situation, you're probably going to have your car you know stop somewhere on a dark road in the middle of the night without cell reception.

KREAMERI mean emotions are like that. If you find anger welling up all the time, you know, step back and say, well, am I feeling threatened? Am I feeling undervalued? Do I not have the resources that are required? Try and do what I call a situational analysis and sort of -- if you can get the distance, step back and say what are the issues here, and then you can devise a strategy to go and address them. If you're feeling like you don't have resources, come up with a game plan and talk with your boss about it.

KREAMERIf you're feeling threatened by someone, there's a variety of ways you can approach that, which is to talk to them or, you know, figure out a way to talk with your collogues about what's going on. Or if you're feeling overwhelmed, maybe you can devise a different workflow plan. So I mean, I think the smart thing is, what we were talking about earlier in the show, which is don't pretend that these feelings don't exist and then if you just push them away, everything will all fine and dandy the next day.

KREAMERIt doesn't really work that way. So the more you can be -- I know it sounds kind of oxymoronic, rational about what's going on and kind of think about them in a step back, what they call metacognition, the more effective, I think, you can be and the happier, ultimately, I think you'll be.

NNAMDIHoward, conversations about feelings, though, tend to breakdown along a gender divide. Is that fair or foul?

ROSSWell, I mean, I think that's understandable given our cultural kind of construct. Our cultural construct is women can feel and men can't. And like we said earlier, you know, the, you know, the role of a woman is to bring in that and men can. And the reality is, of course, we all feel. The difference is more an emotional expression.

NNAMDIAnd you've pointed out before that workplaces tend to be built along a masculine model.

ROSSYeah, there's no question about that. I mean, we're built -- and that's not necessarily, in a lot of cases, because people were being intentionally exclusive. It's just if you're building a work environment, you want it to work and you want things to be the right way. Whose right way are you going to choose? I mean, obviously we choose our own as the right way. And since most of the people who build most of the organizations that we're dealing with in today's society -- at least the ones that have been around for a while -- were white and male, mostly that means that those normative structures are white and male.

ROSSNow, historically, what's happened is as more women and people of color and others have tried to come into those workplaces, what we found is that the more similar you were and the more similar you acted, the far likelier you were to be successful. So people find if they tamp down the differences, try to erase the differences as much as possible and like other people, those other people who are in the dominant group, they can, therefore, be more successful. But there's a cost in that, an extreme cost in it. And that's where a lot of the, you know, suppressed frustration comes from.

NNAMDIOnto the telephones. Here is Jessica in Washington, D.C. Jessica, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

JESSICAHi. I don't work in a corporate setting. I'm a middle school teacher so you can imagine there's a lot of emotion in my workplace. But it's an interesting relationship because students are sort of our colleagues, our products, our clients all at the same time. And I had a case, I was really upset at work with something, you know. I don't even remember at this point, you know, not related to my teaching, though.

JESSICABut I had to get into the classroom. And so I took a pause for a moment and I thought, what am I going to do? And I decided, you know, this is not just about teaching them English, this is about modeling and so it's okay for them to see that I'm sad. And when they asked me, you know, are you okay? I said, no, you know, I am sad, but without telling them the reason. I just said, grownups have feelings.

JESSICAThis is what I'm going through and I know that I'll get through it. And right now, my job is to teach and being with you guys and learning with you guys is really actually something that will cheer me up. So I felt like, you know, that was a success for me and an appropriate way of expressing my emotion at work. But I will say that, on the other hand, something like anger is a lot more complicated and I never really know what to do with that when I'm at work. So I'd like to hear you guys talk about that.

NNAMDIFirst you, Anne Kreamer.

KREAMERWell, I'd ask Jessica the question, if it's anger against your middle school students, never express it. If it's anger against your principal, for instance, or, you know, something is going on within the school environment, I would suggest again that you step back and sort of say, what is it that's making you angry? I mean, there is terrific anger. Anger on behalf of the underdog, if you see somebody being slighted, if you see somebody being kind of roughshod over, if you can step up, there has been research that says that one person has a potential to change the kind of negative environment by sort of being bold and courageous.

KREAMERAnd courage is a very underrated sort of emotion that is closely connected on many levels with anger. So it would depend on what kind, what it was, who it was about and what you could do with it. But as I say, I think if you're feeling it chronically, there must be something that's kind of occurs that you should address.

NNAMDIHoward?

ROSSYeah, I think that there's a difference between articulating our anger and emo-ing . And I think that in a lot of cases, in those kinds of environments -- and I think Jessica's example was a great one. She didn't come in and, you know, and be in grief with the kids. But what she did was say, look, I'm feeling sad and so that's what's going on with me. And it can't always be expressed that way.

ROSSBut in a lot of cases, as I was saying before, what causes the emotional outbursts for people is that they've had to suppress it for a long time. And they weren't able to just speak to it, to look at it, to observe it and speak to it. There's something about our ability to look at it in ourselves, what Bob Keegan Harper (sp?) calls the observer in us that actually allows us to dis-identify with the emotion in a healthy way. To ever see it in ourselves rather than to be taken over by it.

NNAMDIThank you very much for your call. Here's Anne, Jessica. Go ahead, Anne Kreamer.

KREAMERWell, I was going to say, (unintelligible) about the articulation versus emotion. And one easy thing also on that, if you're feeling something, is to actually write in a diary and the process of writing things down can give you the perspective and the distance to really see what's going on.

NNAMDIThank you for your call, Jessica. Here is Anike (sp?) in Washington, D.C. Anike, you are on the air. Go ahead, please.

ANIKEHi, how are you?

NNAMDII'm well.

ANIKEI was listening and, again, I'm a teacher, but I taught high school. And the last school I worked at was considered a progressive school and one of the major missions that was talked about a lot -- and I emphasize talked about -- was diversity training and commitment to diversity. I found that being a woman and sometimes being a teacher of color, I did try to fit the mold and suppress my emotions.

ANIKEBut there were times, again, not having to do with classroom management or the student, but life situations -- I had two deaths in my family. It was seen as -- the kids didn't see it, but the adults are sort of, buck up, get over it. And when they were diversity issues where some of us would get very upset, I saw one male colleague get angry, outwardly angry. And I cried because I was also angry, but that's the way I showed my emotion. And I sort of got penalized for it. And I said, you are just as emotional as I am. I'm just crying and you're just yelling.

ANIKEAnd I ended up being deemed emotionally manipulative. And when I had one of my reviews, one of the negative things -- you get a negative and a positive. One of the negative was being, quote, "overly emotional." And I found that very difficult to sort of swallow when I saw a lot of anger, a lot emotions that students and normal parents and administrators had shown, but my brand and whatever it was that women like me were feeling, also black women that were parents, was seen as something sort of to step from and something that could be ignored.

NNAMDIAnike, I'm glad you raised that issue because it's one that we wanted to talk about. I'll start with you Howard, because Anne Kreamer's research found that 42 percent of young men believe that anger could be an effective management tool. And from the story that Anike is telling us, her emotions were considered negative while her colleague's anger was seen as, I guess, entirely appropriate. Apparently, there was a study conducted by Yale indicating that when men express anger, they are viewed as more powerful.

ROSSWell, I think that we're looking at now sort of the underpinnings to all of this and that is what Anike is talking about is that the same emotion that shows up on that screen is viewed differently and interpreted differently. Now, why would we say that or why would people believe that anger is a positive thing for men, gives them a sense of power, but less so for women. Well, let's think about it for a minute.

ROSSI mean, if we look back to our history, what we can see is that when men express extreme emotion, our reaction is generally to back off from them. They're seen as dangerous. They're seen as potentially -- we're vulnerable around them. On the other hand, when women express emotion, historically, what we try to do is control them. If we go back to the '50s, you know, we were just talking about this on the break. Look at "Mad Men," and as soon as somebody gets emotional, what do we do? Hysteria was the big word, right?

ROSSWe need to calm it down. First medications were mostly geared towards women for that reason. Calm them down. Anesthetize them. Make them easier to handle. And it has to do a lot with the patriarchy of our society, this notion that men have to manage their women because they're, you know, going back centuries, of course, property. And so -- not even centuries, but property. And so, we've got this different way of looking at these things. On one hand, we have to control them, stop them from creating problems. On the other hand, you better back off from this guy because he's awfully strong. He'll get his way being strong enough.

NNAMDIAnne Kreamer?

KREAMERYeah, I'll also add that there's a neurobiological sort of underpinning to this, too. When men are under stress or feeling angry, they produce cortisol and testosterone, which are the fight or flight hormones. When women are under stress, they produce oxytocin, which is the tend and befriend hormone that we release when we're nursing. And so there are these, you know, also biologically hard-wired sort of social conditions, norms that lead to, like, men are the aggressors.

KREAMERAnd that is, you know, out in the Savannahs, that would be something that we would all want to leave, but would also be dominant, the lion on the -- you know, the lion on the plains. And so there is this history that sort of establishes that, you know, angry men are powerful and emoting women are weaker, in the sense. You know, women's jobs were to protect the family and make sure that, you know, things survived. And men's jobs were to stop predators in our most primitive hard-wired brains.

KREAMERAnd that's the problem often in the workplace is that we still are operating in our sort of daily lives and mental lives as if we're, you know, 100,000 years ago fending off predators. Workplace things are cognitive. They're not physical threats. And we have not yet evolved or developed a skill set to help us understand how to deal with that.

ANIKEI just think I have one more comment and then I'm off the air.

NNAMDIOkay.

ANIKEI think -- hold on one second. I've gotten laid off, but that's neither here nor there. But the economy has sort of, obviously, had a huge impact on education, whether it's the private or the public sector and some of the first programs to go, unfortunately, are those diversity training programs. And that's really unfortunate because those were some of the places where we could go, because there was a diversity person that pointed out that the anger and the crying were equal emotions, and then we were able to sort out our problems. And it's unfortunate that some of those diversity programs are now being pushed to the wayside.

NNAMDIThank you very much for your call. Howard Ross?

ROSSWell, I think that it's not just that they're being pushed to the wayside -- and unfortunately, that's been true for a lot of programs like we're talking about, developmental programs, staff developmental programs and things like this, in addition to diversity because over the last couple years, the first thing that got cut were things like that.

ROSSBut there's something else in it as well, which is even programs that are going forward now, the big push is to the business case. Tell me what to do. Give me the -- sort of the skills that I need to do to make this environment a better diverse environment. But we know that giving people skills to deal with diversity issues is a very small piece of the puzzle.

ROSSIt's like giving people skills to lose weight. I mean, I don't know anybody who hasn't struggled -- who struggles with their weight who doesn't know everything you need to know about dieting, you know. Everybody knows what to do. That's not the issue. And that requires time. It requires the kind of engagement that Anike's talking about. And I think that unless we give people the opportunity to do that in a constructive way, we're going to find people in the same kinds of circumstances that she was in.

NNAMDIWe're gonna take another short break. When we come back, if you have called, stay on the line. We'll get to your phone call. If the lines are busy, go to our website, kojoshow.org, join the conversation there. Are some or most of your friends current or former colleagues? Has that ever made for an awkward situation at work? Tell us about it. We'll be talking about that when we come back. 800-433-8850. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWelcome back to this conversation about emotions at work. Howard Ross is with us. He's a diversity consultant and the principal at Cook Ross. Anne Kreamer is the author of "It's Always Personal: Emotion in the New Workplace." We're taking your calls at 800-433-8850. A lot of companies have rules about romantic relationships between employees, but what about the close platonic connections that conform at work. Okay or not?

ROSSWell, I think they're necessary. I mean, I think, you know, we think about the fact that we spend so much of our lives at work. I mean, people spend, you know, a minimum eight, nine hours a day, but a lot of people a lot more than that. And, you know, this notion that we have to keep ourselves separate from people around us, first of all with those two things, it means that if you need to talk, you've gotta call somebody outside of work, or, you know, do that.

ROSSBut also, it breaks down this whole -- the whole point I made earlier about authenticity, you know. To the degree that people around me know what's going on with me, it makes it easier for me to function. I mean, I lost my mom a year and a half ago, as you probably remember.

NNAMDISure.

ROSSAnd, you know, that was a difficult time. I've had people who have gone through divorces and separations who have worked with me. I've had people who had family members who were ill, or have lost family members. I've had people going through adoptions and births of babies. I mean, all of these were very emotional kinds of things. And what ends up happening -- it's even deeply embedded in our language, Kojo, if you think about it.

ROSSWhen somebody gets emotional, we say oh, they lost it, or they're going to lose it. We might more accurately be -- I don't know, Anne, how you feel about this, but I think we might more accurately say, oh, they found it. They found out what was going on with them, you know. They discovered what they were being triggered by. Now, as Anne was saying before, now we can deal with it, because we know what's going on. But instead, it's all about burying it, and therefore, we breed a culture of in-authenticity, if we're not careful.

NNAMDIAnne, how about friendships at work?

KREAMEROh, I couldn't agree with Howard more. And I think going back to Jessica from the middle school, who had the issues with crying and the angry colleague. What I heard coming underneath that was the fact that she had two deaths in the family and that she hadn't known how to deal with it. And I think that's the kind of thing that if you go into your colleagues, into your workplace, and say, look, I've got these problems coming down the line, can you help me devise a strategy for how to deal with this.

KREAMERThere may be days where I just have to leave immediately or something, and I can't control that. Help me. That prevents these things, and then simultaneously in the research that I did, people under stress tended to sort of deal with it in a variety of ways. There were people who would go out and, you know, run or do something like that. Or there were people who would go out and have drinks after work with friends.

KREAMERThe most successful people coping with different kinds of things at work were those who turned to trusted people within the workplace. Daniel Gilbert and all the kind of positive psychology people have done a ton of research around what brings happiness in life, and the things that bring happiness in life basically boils down to the healthiness and robustness of your interpersonal relationships.

KREAMERThat's just as true at work as it is, you know, outside of work. And so I think it's important to have close relationships with people who you can share things with to get you through the good times and celebrate, you know, get you through the bad times and celebrate the good times.

NNAMDIBut Howard, let's complicate that situation a little bit. My confidant at work, my colleague, all of a sudden, becomes my boss.

ROSSMm-hmm.

NNAMDIHow do I adjust my emotional expectations?

ROSSWell, you know, look, there's no question that it's challenging. I mean, you've got somebody who is your friend, but they also potentially have your job assessment or even your job in their hands, and they have to make a decision about you relative to that job regards -- these days it's not even about poor performance. It might just be because we have layoffs and who's the person to be laid off. There's no question that that's -- that that can be an issue.

ROSSOne of the things that I do when I'm working with leaders who are in that circumstance, and people who are in early supervision particularly, is to coach them that we can have conversations with people that are distinct. We can say look, this is a personal conversation, not a business conversation. Or, conversely, this is a business conversation, not a personal conversation.

ROSSI had somebody just recently who I was talking to had to give negative feedback or constructive criticism to somebody who worked for them who was a very good friend to them. They had worked as a peer. And my recommendation was to sit down and say, look, this is not a personal conversation. I just want to be really clear, this is nothing to do with our personal relationship which I value enormously, and I have to have a conversation with you as an employee who reports to me.

ROSSAnd then have that conversation, and then at the end came back and said, once again, I want to reiterate, this is not personal in the sense that it's not about our personal relationship. As Anne said to some -- as her book title says, to some degree it's always personal. And for some people, when they get that kind of feedback from somebody who had been a friend, it's more difficult to take because it feels like a betrayal of their personal relationship.

ROSSSo that's why it's, as I said earlier, it's all about the articulation and how we're able to communicate this in a way that helps people in their mind get those distinctions, even if they do have a feeling and reaction to it.

NNAMDIBut Anne, you're my best friend. You can't possibly let me go because the finances of the company determine that I gotta go. You gotta find a way to save me. You used to be my confidant.

KREAMEROh, God, you know, Kojo, that -- it's everybody's worst nightmare, and I don't think that there's any solution, you know. Howard's right, I would say that it's always personal, and I think that that would be one of the roughest roads that you can possibly walk, and certainly, you know, everybody I know who's been in the unenviable position of massive lay -- you know, being the person conducting the massive layoffs in the past years.

KREAMERI mean, you know, "Up in the Air" I thought did a pretty good job of George Clooney being the efficiency expert firing people showing that there's -- that it's always personal and there's no way around it. So with that person I don't have any specific advice other than to say try and have as least as honest and open direct conversation as you can possibly have about dire circumstances.

NNAMDIOn to Suno (sp?) in Columbia, Md. Suno, your turn.

SUNOYes. I actually worked in a research organization where most of the researchers were women, and I work as a behaviorist, and so I usually do work with women. I found this research place to be one of the coldest places I've ever worked in. I do much better when I'm in a place where people do communicate. But I'm not, you know, probably the women and men differences may make a difference, but I think that a big part of the problem must be the hierarchical nature of these organizations.

SUNOWhen one person has power, and a lot of people don't have power, and that power is exercised in a way that is less than rational, okay, I don't know what emotions you could come up with, or what strategies you could come up with that deal with that sort of power. So when I work in organizations where power is diffuse, I work as a consultant, it just works out much better than when there is a rigid hierarchy and I think that was the problem with that group of people. So anyway, that was my comment and I'll...

NNAMDIAnne Kreamer, you care to comment on Suno's comment?

KREAMERCouple of levels of things. I mean, I think that the chain of command, hierarchical organization isn't -- I think Suno is describing something that is unique to a circumstance of an individual workplace that I can't extrapolate from. But a lot of people from the military have been responding to my book, which somewhat surprised me, saying that they have all these feelings and emotions that are going on, and they know that they cannot go against the chain of command, but they need help figuring out how to address them.

KREAMERAnd we've all read the stories of PSTD and what they're doing with post-Iraq veterans and things. You know, I think I would defer to Howard on this one more frankly, who has had experience in the field dealing with something like this more than I have probably.

NNAMDIHoward?

ROSSYeah. I mean, I -- my experience has been that it's not so much about whether it's a hierarchical or nonhierarchical circumstance. It depends on the consciousness that exists within that circumstance. So there's some organizations that have to operate hierarchically or it just fits the people that they have to hire or to operate more hierarchically. It doesn't mean that it has to be a closed environment where people can't be emotional.

ROSSWhat I've experienced is that it's more about the predictability and the certainty that people have in their environment. Are -- can they count on the way they're going to be treated, can they count on the fact that their leaders are having their concerns in mind? Can they count on a certain sense like we find in our family, like when you look at people who are adult children of alcoholics, the big thing that triggers that is the unpredictability of now knowing how mom or dad are going to be on this particular day.

ROSSI think it's very much the same way. So to the degree that people can have a sense of transparency in the way they operate, a sense of integrity in the way they operate, a sense that people know where they're making their decisions from as much as they do, then people feel more secure. And that comes from leaders who have an emotional awareness of themselves.

ROSSIf leaders are aware that look, I'm making this decision, I know it may not be the most rational one, but it's what I feel comfortable with doing, that's a much stronger message to people than coming up with some BS way of putting a rationality on something because I'll feel better if I can make them think it's rational, because I don't want them to know it's just what I feel like doing. And that's what happens in a lot of cases today in our workplaces.

NNAMDISuno, thank you very much for your call. Anne, happiness and laughter are contagious and they can be good for business, too, right?

KREAMERAbsolutely. I mean, there have been really interesting studies that -- in the kind of six degrees of separation way that show that emotions actually are contagious. So if you're working in a kind of toxic environment, that sort of breeds and reinforces toxicity and the same thing is true with happiness. And a couple of the things that sort of connect with happiness, you know, have been talked about in books like "Flow" and things which is feeling engaged and kind of immersed in the work that you're doing.

KREAMERHaving that sense of kind of flow and, you know, process and contentment and deep connectedness with and that can be as true with somebody working in, you know, engineering as it is with somebody inventing the next "Simpsons" show. I mean, it isn't a universe of just purely creative jobs on the kind of surface.

KREAMERAnd they can be encouraged that there are, you know, ways that you can sort of help people have innovation, and that's by sort of creating surprising environments around things, or it's not just having the ping pong table in the corner, or the pool table in the corner. It is about sort of a brainstorming environment, an environment that accepts risk taking, an environment that will embrace failure. All these things contribute to things that ultimately lead to kind of a sense of happiness and connectedness.

NNAMDIHoward, office celebrations can run the gamut from the truly enjoyable to mandatory fun.

ROSSMm-hmm.

NNAMDIBut it's important to keep morale up, especially in tough times. What works and what doesn't?

ROSSWell, there are a lot -- we just recently installed a chief happiness officer at our company. So every month somebody takes that role and finds random things to do, you know, there's random acts of kindness, we've got random acts of happiness I guess. But there -- but it's not just the planned occasions, it's the things that happen in a moment, and that's where the notion of being in that energy at some point.

ROSSYou know, just for example, when Taylor and I, the -- your assistant producer who was preparing -- we were preparing on a phone call, and we had a fire alarm in our building. And so we all -- we're standing outside, and I said, let's all get some ice cream. So we walked down two blocks to the Ben & Jerry's, and while the fire alarm was going, we took over a corner of the Ben & Jerry's and had an ice cream party together for 15 minutes.

ROSSAnd, you know, it's little things that don't cost a lot of money, but that say to people we recognize that we're human beings. It's fine to have fun, it's fine to enjoy each other, and those I think have every bit as much, or more, impact than these planned celebrations.

NNAMDIHint, hint.

KREAMERI agree. And a generosity of spirit.

NNAMDITo the management of this station, fire drill, ice cream, fire drill, ice cream. Go ahead, please, Anne.

KREAMERI was just saying a generosity of spirit is what Howard has described, which is that, you know, a kind of sense of playfulness and that we don't always have to be kind of keeping our nose to the grindstone and that celebration is good.

NNAMDIOn to -- I think we have time for one more call. Here is Chris in Silver Spring. Chris, you're on the air. Go ahead, please. Hi, Chris. Oh, Chris dropped off. So let's go to Leesi (sp?) is Ashburn, Va. Leesi, your turn.

LEESIThank you, Kojo, for having this program on this subject. Such a crucial subject for today's companies. I've worked in Washington D.C. for over now almost 20 years. I worked on Capitol Hill to -- and then onto big and small non-profit organizations, and even to the public sector. And one thing I've observed over these last 20 years is that in hiring, particularly for positions that require you to manage someone, we place, especially in this area, a high value on someone's ability to manage content.

LEESIAnd we place an equally deficient value on the person's ability to manage people, or have in the terms of this space, the emotional intelligence as well as the added intelligence to work with someone, and...

NNAMDILeesi, you make a good point, and because we're running out of time very quickly, I'm going to ask Howard Ross to respond. How do you measure the potential candidate's ability to manage people?

ROSSWell, it's very challenging. One of the things that we know, getting back to this sense of where we make decisions from, we know that -- I was just reading a study this week that showed that if you take the ten most frequently asked questions in an interview for example, only one of them has been shown to have any relationship at all to behavioral performance. So we need to start asking people, you know, how would you handle a particular circumstance?

ROSSWhat would you do if this came up and that came up? Now, there's never going to be a sure thing, but at least you begin to get a better sense of where people are thinking from and how they're emotional reaction affects the way the decisions that they're making, whether or not they show compassion in their decision making, and all those kinds of things which are critical factors in getting to the kind of world that Anne's advocating for in her book where people can bring that emotionality into making more valuable and constructive decisions.

NNAMDIAnne's book is called "It's Always Personal: Emotion in the New Workplace." Anne is Anne Kreamer, spelled K-R-E-A-M-E-R. Anne Kreamer, thank you so much for joining us.

KREAMEROh, thank you, Kojo. And thank you, Howard. It was a lovely conversation.

ROSSThanks, Anne.

NNAMDIHoward's new book, "Reinventing Diversity: Transforming Organizational Community to Strengthen People, Purpose, and Performance" will be coming out on August 15. Howard Ross is a diversity consultant and a principal at Cook Ross. Howard, always a pleasure.

ROSSThanks, Kojo. Great to be with you.

NNAMDIThank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.