On Belonging and Boundaries: Time-Outs, Team Meetings, and Emotional Maturity
We want more support, compassion, and belonging at work. This requires expressing and respecting emotions. But it can backfire if one or both parties are emotionally immature or if it is not done properly. It takes time and care to ensure that team members feel valued and integrated into the workplace community — and not experience unfairness or manipulation.
The 2018 book Compassionate Management of Mental Health in the Modern Workplace (Knoop & Quelch) foresaw a new form of management needed to harness the talent of workers increasingly burdened by mental health conditions. We also predicted that middle managers would be the ones at the center of this shift. They are central to employee well-being and engagement and, in turn, productivity and profitability.
At the time, pairing “compassion” and “leadership” still seemed novel. Prior transformational leadership models focused on leaders as stoic visionaries. Since then, with the shock of COVID-19, leadership researchers and consultants favor more empathetic leadership.
It is very difficult to be an effective compassionate, supportive, or empathetic leader — one who displays emotional intelligence and self-awareness and manages their emotions and those of others.
In doing so, they need to consider the whole person, not just as professionals, and help employees balance work and personal life. This often requires providing accommodations and options for leaves without knowing more about and considering employee circumstances — which means needing to trust. (For more guidance on leaves and occupational medicine, please see our post).
These efforts hopefully emphasize employees’ comfort and well-being while understanding the value of different perspectives and backgrounds. It also means fostering an environment in which feedback is valued and acted upon, and differences are welcome and respected by all.
Throughout it all, leaders and managers need to adapt and be resilient, as digital transformation and social movements rewrite the rules of work. They must nevertheless set behavior boundaries and ensure that decisions reflect the organization’s core values and principles — while working within financial constraints.
Put another way, they share traits of “good parents.”
Of course, there are fundamental differences. There is no unconditional love in business, and emotional involvement should be treated as an asset, but it is also a business risk that must be addressed.
There have always been strong parallels between the two critical functions along the more rational and logical aspects (e.g., guidance, goal and boundary setting, communication, reward, and sanction).
Management during and since COVID-19—which coincided with GenZers' entry into the workplace—seems to require more of the emotional side of parenting (e.g., providing warmth and comfort; engaging with health conditions, especially mental health; and managing emotions on global, political, and social issues). See here for a post on mental health.
This combination of skills is nearly impossible to deploy well. Corporate goals remain ambitious, the competitive, economic, and political landscape is chaotic, and employees demand personalized management.
In this post, we explore these parallels between the roles of parents and managers, and show how bringing our emotional side to work as managers but also as employees can be a source of solace but also a source of risk if either party are emotionally immature, and we suggest ways for both parties to mitigate these risks.
The “rational” aspects of leading kids and teams
Shape but don’t break: Guide, support, and develop
In a perfect world, parents should be able to provide guidance and support to help children navigate life’s challenges, gain essential life skills, knowledge, and values, learn to deal with adversity, and develop into well-rounded individuals.
Ideally, managers can also guide their employees through projects and career development, offering support, coaching, and training to help them achieve their professional goals. Both provide encouragement for people in their charge to pursue interests and reach their potential while still operating within a specific context, be it a family unit or organization.
Finally, parents and managers usually have a vision of where the one under their care should go — especially parents who tend to plan around the long-term vision for their children’s growth and prospects. But managers can also support individuals, whether in their own organizations or beyond.
Set limits: Boundaries, expectations, and conflict resolution
A central job of parenting used to be setting boundaries and expectations to help children learn discipline and understand acceptable behavior. Knowing what is required of us to maintain order in the family unit, team, or community is imparted by parents and managers.
Even though permissive child-first parenting ebbs and flows with alternate generations, children, just like employees, seem to do better when they have clear rules and understand the rationale for them. Setting expectations and rules — and holding others accountable — usually brings conflict, which needs to be remediated via effective communication. It allows to get things done (be it chores or PowerPoint presentations), reinforce norms, and develop relationships.
The more emotional dimension.
Provide comfort and warmth.
Effective parents offer emotional support and a safe environment where children feel loved and secure. Researchers and psychologists believe this foundation is crucial for children’s mental and emotional development. Parents often use empathy to understand their children’s emotions, helping them navigate complex feelings and build emotional intelligence. The notion of feeling secure at work has become associated with psychological safety, which actually refers to an environment where risks can be taken, mistakes can be made, and opinions can be voiced without undue sanction.
Cultivate healthy attachment.
Parents who are responsive and sufficiently attuned to their children’s needs foster secure attachment, leading to better emotional regulation and social relationships. They make them feel seen, safe, and secure. A 13-year-old shared that a parent’s core trait should be “willingness to help.” Similarly, managers who are dependable and responsive to their employees’ needs foster a sense of security and trust within the team.
With security comes autonomy. By providing support and then gradually allowing more independence, parents and managers help kids and employees develop confidence, a sense of ownership, and pride over their work and achievements — and take appropriate risks.
Create a sense of belonging and shared purpose.
When they are able to do so, parents create a sense of family identity and belonging, making children feel they are part of a supportive community. Families also engage in rituals and traditions that reinforce bonds, provide a sense of stability and predictability, which is important for our nervous system, and create positive emotions.
Cultivating a sense of belonging has become more important in the workplace, especially as younger generations demand more emotional connection to their work. Managers who can cultivate a positive team culture where employees feel they belong and are part of a collective mission are the gold standard of the moment.
What risks need to be mitigated
Today, we seek from parents and bosses a set of skills and talents that only very few possess — to be present but not hovering, reactive but thoughtful, vulnerable and heroic — and expectations have increased dramatically for both roles.
What has not changed is that it remains challenging for parents to share with children that they feel stressed, lost their temper, or made a mistake. Like leaders, parents still pretend to be superheroes, while their behavior might reveal their darker side. That is a problem for everyone.
In a way, good managers now have two jobs — the rational one and the emotional one. Managing has joined the caring professions, but unlike professional caregivers and educators, managers do not get any psychological training nor are they screened for emotional maturity.
Having managers operating on the more emotional and caring dimensions without self-reflection or organizational guidance can create counterproductive outcomes for employees.
The feeling that things are unfair or arbitrary.
Implementing and consistently applying fair policies helps maintain order and trust within the team and increases psychological safety.
Treating each individual differently makes it impossible—and undoubtedly challenging—to seem fair. This approach can lead to perceptions of preferential treatment, which can create divisions and resentment within the team. When some employees are seen as receiving more care or attention than others, it can foster feelings of inequity and favoritism, damaging team cohesion and trust. Employees might also be concerned that their emotions could be used against them.
Providing leave or accommodation for an employee might require the rest of the team to take up the slack, which can lead to resentment. Often, managers cannot reveal why an accommodation has been made — that would constitute a HIPAA violation in the U.S. if the issue is health-related, for example. This can lead to resentment and gossip.
Just as parents do, managers often bond, accommodate, or choose to capitulate to individuals they like better—or let them get away with more.
The impression that some belong more than others.
The need to belong is deep in human nature. When we feel isolated or estranged from a community, we often become sad, angry, despondent, or negative. Alienation and rejections feel painful and can lead to feelings of separation and detachment. An employee seeking belonging and “love” from a manager will feel rejected when she has to make a business decision that might run counter to the employee’s expectations of and projections onto that manager. The decision is not personal to the employee, but in an emotionally bonded dyad, it will often feel emotional. In such responses, passion at work can quickly turn to pathos.
A missed opportunity for development.
Driving inclusion, compassion, and belonging in the workplace is essential for fostering a positive and productive environment. However, treating employees like children to be protected and cared for can lead to unintended consequences. By overprotecting employees, leaders might inadvertently discourage them from taking initiative, making decisions, and developing the resilience needed to navigate challenges independently.
This approach risks creating an atmosphere of dependency, where employees may feel they are not trusted or respected as capable adults. Such a dynamic can undermine their confidence and sense of autonomy, stifling their professional growth and innovation.
An attraction to narcissistic leaders or leaders who feel familiar.
When we seek love and attention at work, some of us might tend to gravitate toward those who are usually best at showing it — not necessarily the best at being actually supportive — namely people with narcissistic tendencies. (Part II of the article is here). Many can be very charming — which is why we seek them when we feel lost — but can also present in more stealth and manipulative forms that mask fake humility and caring. Narcissists are excellent at detecting what people want to hear, and they know how to promote themselves and their skills, which can be very beneficial for a company.
Others of us might seek managers who feel familiar — if a person had an absent parent, they might do better with an absent manager.
The risk of becoming victims of emotional immaturity.
Psychologically healthy adults often benefited from good parenting for their circumstances. However, it is also possible to develop emotional maturity over time with intentional self-reflection. Emotional maturity is the ability to comprehend, manage, and express emotions in a way that fosters growth and healthy relationships. Emotional immaturity, a milder form of narcissism, is just the opposite.
Emotionally immature adults have what Dr. Lindsay Gibson calls an “adversarial relationship with reality.” They cannot accept reality as it is and will deny, distort, dismiss, or oversimplify matters to their liking. These individuals are self-centered with limited capacity for empathy, expect others to conform to their expectations, bolster their self-esteem, and often engage in power struggles.
There are four main types of emotionally immature parents, and we might recognize ourselves as supervisors or our own bosses and leaders in these:
· The emotional type that instills feelings of instability and anxiety
· The driven type that stays busy trying to perfect everything and everyone
· The passive type that avoids dealing with anything upsetting
· The rejecting type that is withdrawn, dismissive and derogatory
An exercise that helps identify this pattern available here.
The boundaries between empathetic concern and absorption.
Say one of your reports has shared about their struggle with a difficult divorce, something with which you might have personal experience, which enables us to connect to them differently. Soon, it might be hard to distinguish between our relationship as colleagues and as friends. Empathetic concern is considered healthy — you understand and try to help but maintain a healthy emotional boundary. This is context-dependent; however, at home or with friends, when I am mad at my boss or politics, I want my partner and friend to be mad, too, even if they are not really. At work, it might be misplaced to expect such mirroring.
Empathetic absorption means taking on those concerns and becoming deeply immersed in another person’s emotional experience, to the point of absorbing and mirroring those emotions. This can lead to emotional contagion, which means that the empathetic person may start to feel the same emotions — such as distress, anxiety, or pain — as the person with whom they are empathizing. When we are anxious, we usually are not helped by interlocutors underlining how terrible the situation is. We might be best helped by someone who can distinguish the best way to help — in this latest example, it might be to remain calmly positive.
For managers, being too empathetic can lead to over-extension and managers neglecting their own health and family. It might be harder to say no and set priorities for the team and for ourselves.
In Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, Yale researcher Paul Bloom argues that empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices. The fairest and most equitable decisions are made through rational decision-making with some compassion, which may be more in the head than in the heart.
Managing others who are emotionally immature
In our current context, it is not just managers, of course, who can display traits of emotional immaturity. Some young professionals might have missed out on social experience and maturation because of the COVID-19 lockdowns during their college years. Or they might have grown up in households led by overworked and financially insecure parents. Other might have been parented by helicopter parents and received a good medal just for showing up, as the quip goes.
Even the best managers will struggle to motivate, guide, deploy, and support employees who are emotionally immature. They often lack self-awareness, have only surface-level interest, if any, in personal growth, and have a hard time with accountability. This tends to create conflicts and disruptions, and since they are self-centered and unaware, these employees are very demanding of their manager’s time and constantly expect praise and positive attention for simply doing the job that they are paid to do.
Another hallmark of emotional immaturity is difficulty in managing emotions. Employees lacking in emotional maturity are easily overwhelmed by anger, sadness, or frustration, leading to impulsive actions that can negatively impact team dynamics and create a permanent emotional minefield that everyone around them has to navigate. The reaction is that of a distressed child who only plays with those she/he likes.
While empathy is crucial for effective teamwork and communication, emotionally immature employees struggle to understand and resonate with the emotions and needs of others and will put their own above anyone else’s. “It is my way or the highway.” This leads to misunderstandings and complications in professional relationships.
Finally, emotionally immature employees have low stress tolerance and inflexible mindsets. They point fingers, blaming external factors for their emotional states, lack of delivery, and more. They project their unresolved emotions onto colleagues and supervisors, which can create a toxic work environment and lead to power struggles. They rely on others to provide emotional stability and bolster self-esteem.
Finding the right balance: Towards utility-based management
If companies are serious about employee well-being and want to avoid the type of backlash we have seen around the diversity efforts, they might reconsider the nature of training that they are providing managers — to help them gain more emotional maturity and better understand the risks of modern empathetic management.
It is said that managers and reports cannot be friends. But perhaps there is a version of friendship that might feel modern. Aristotle broke friendship down into three subtypes: pleasure-based, character-based, and utility-based friendships.
Utility-based friendship is based on what the two people involved can do for one another, and often does not have much to do with the other individual as a person at all.
As managers and employees, we can do a great deal for one another by promoting a culture of mutual respect, where employees and managers are valued as and trained to be competent professionals, encouraging a healthy, inclusive, and dynamic workplace.
Susanna Sjoberg and Carin-Isabel Knoop welcome pushback, feedback… and thoughts that are off the beaten track! ;-) We are grateful to Carver Wolfe and Mel Martin for their input.
