Are Leaders Responsible for Emotional Labor?
I believe a lack of proportional representation at all levels in all American institutions - government, medicine, tech, media/entertainment, etc - left democracy and the economy vulnerable in the seismic demographic shift that is making us more Black, Indigenous, Asian, mixed, and/or Latiné . It continues to leave us vulnerable. So when I started to build Brava, it was because I wanted the institutions that could have shaped this moment differently to have the tools they needed to succeed. We have dived into the work of multiracial and multicultural institution building because we have a point of view on what systems need building, skills need training, and what moves people could be making. Ultimately, I think all of those things are in service of expanding the emotional bandwidth of an institution so that in the most critical moments of moving power or making tough decisions the entire team doesn’t enter into a dysregulated state where everyone is reaching for fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. We help teams learn how to lean into pain instead of avoiding it. How to listen to your body and what it tells you. How to celebrate. How to engage each other across differences. We deliver one hell of a framework for the logical brain to process what your beating heart is trying to tell you.
When I first speak to executives about the work it will take to harness the full power of multiracial and multicultural institutions - institutions we at Brava have been calling MRMC’s - there is both excitement and exhaustion. Excitement that someone may have some better answers than the ones they have been using and from time to time, an almost reflexive worry that they’ll have to start actively managing everyone's feelings. “We are too busy to be in that business” one leader once told me. When I asked how much time their management team was currently using to manage reaction, implosion, or explosion they said to me “safely 60%”. We are managing emotion no matter what we do. Derek Canty, our head of training once told me, “You either pay for it at the beginning or pay for it constantly throughout”. Emotional labor is not often a choice but managing it intentionally can be.
The amygdala is the reaction center of the brain and the destination for all our fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses. Whenever there is fear, whether rational or irrational, information skips the frontal lobe and lands directly in that reaction center. This is important to keep in mind because the segregationist right keeps using the amygdala to control our information ecosystem. Instead of policy the segregationists right has decided it is Cruelty Content Inc. They are a production company and they are working to swaggerjack our reaction center.
If the segregationists have made camp in the amygdala of America, then MRMCs HAVE to be laser focused on how we get folks back into their pre-frontal cortex where all the processing happens. That does not happen with facts and figures, that happens with intentional strategy for our communal emotional body.
Segregation has fooled all of us into believing the only safe spaces in America are segregated ones and that is just not true. Those spaces CAN be comfortable. They give us a false sense of security but identity is not a belief system and it cannot guarantee alignment. Just because I’m Latina does not mean I have a “Latina” set of beliefs nor would I know what “Latina beliefs” would be. Only the work of pushing into my own beliefs, differences with others, and similarities alongside community can do that.
Segregation has a long tail impact on how all of us experience our lives because even if we didn’t experience legal segregation during the Jim Crow era, we have experienced our current apartheid economy. This means if we have not done the work of re-writing social, emotional, and economic contracts together - we are much more vulnerable to making a person across from us into every experience we’ve had with a person in their identity vertical during a conflict. We sit with ghosts surrounding us. An individual will carry the baggage of every person we’ve interacted with of their same gender, race, class, sexual orientation, geography, parental status, etc. until we truly do the work of humanizing each other and creating our rules of engagement for struggle.
So when I am asked if leaders are responsible for emotional labor - I just think it’s a misunderstanding of the landscape at hand. We get to choose whether or not we start to see emotional labor as the winning opportunity for reshaping our country or if we allow the segregationist right to absorb all the space in folks' hearts with fear, anger, and divisiveness.
MRMCs can be so much better than that.
–Karla
