What To Do (and What NOT To Do!) When One of Your Employees Starts Crying (part 2)

Here is part one of this series.

In this post, we’re going to talk about one of the most important things NOT to do when an employee cries:

Don’t let crying, in itself, affect your thinking. Don’t let it change your opinion of the employee, don’t let it alter your judgment about the situation being discussed, and don’t let it affect your decision-making.

Remember, in this series of posts we’re talking about the simplest workplace crying scenario: an employee starts crying while talking with you in the privacy of your office or a meeting room. The employee is either upset about a performance problem you’re discussing or about a personal or workplace issue. Trickier situations like uncontrolled crying in an open work area or an employee who cries frequently will be discussed in future posts.

Before going on, we might as well acknowledge that the crying employee is likely to be a woman. In truth, I can’t recall ever having a male employee cry in my office. So in these posts I will refer to the crying employee as “she” and “her” because that’s what my experience has been. I’ve talked to a number of other managers and they confirmed that has been their experience as well, other than isolated instances of male employees getting a bit teary-eyed.

At this point I’d like to provide you with a link to the definitive study defining the differences between men and women when it comes to crying and what causes those differences. But I can’t, because as far as I can tell that study doesn’t exist. It appears this stuff is still pretty much a mystery as far as science is concerned.

However, I think a few basic facts are clear:

• Everyone cries sometimes, but some people cry more easily than others.
• A higher percentage of women cry easily while a higher percentage of men cry rarely.
• To put it another way, some women hardly ever cry and some men cry easily, but on average women tend to cry more easily than men.

I suspect this is largely genetic. It’s similar to the fact that some women are tall and some men are short, but on average women tend to be shorter than men.

The genetic difference is then reinforced with social conditioning. Because boys are given stronger social messages that it’s not okay to cry, by the time they become men they’ve learned how to control the impulse to cry. Plus for most men the impulse is not very strong.

On the other hand, it’s more socially acceptable for girls to cry, so many women enter adulthood without having learned how to control the impulse to cry. Plus, for many women it’s just about impossible for them to control it no matter what they do. It’s simply an involuntary biological response.

However, as a society we don’t see crying as an involuntary biological response, we load all kinds of negative cultural prejudices onto it. These prejudices boil down to this idea:

crying = weakness

Managers who have this belief react to crying employees in one of two ways, both of which are misguided and ineffective.

The first way is for managers to see a crying employee as a pathetic damsel in distress who needs to be babied and rescued. These managers are often so uncomfortable in the presence of a crying employee that they will do or say almost anything to make the employee feel better and stop crying. So basically they cave in. They might give the employee what she wants or take her side in a dispute. Or they might take back the critical comments they were making about the employee’s performance or quality of work, and assure the employee that “everything’s fine, don’t worry.”

The second way is for managers to react with contempt. These managers are also very uncomfortable in the presence of tears and they deal with their own emotional discomfort by judging the employee harshly. They often rule out the employee as a candidate for promotion into management. They also tend to dismiss what the employee tells them, or to assume that the underlying problem is caused by the employee’s own hysterical behavior. 

These are both bad outcomes. In both cases, the manager has overreacted to the crying and as a result has reached a bad decision or an inaccurate conclusion.

One of the recurring themes of this blog is that you can become a better manager by learning to look past prejudices, conventional wisdom, and all the other filters that cloud our ability to perceive situations clearly. If you can learn to see things clearly for what they are, you’ll understand them better and manage more effectively.

So when an employee starts crying in your office, the main thing to keep in mind is that nothing much has changed. Whatever issue you were discussing – a performance issue, a personal issue, a workplace conflict – is still there. It still needs to be addressed and resolved. If you can see crying as an involuntary biological response and remain perfectly comfortable and composed in the presence of the tears, then you’ll be able to compassionately help the employee get past the crying so the two of you can successfully complete your meeting.

We’ll go into greater detail about how to do that in the next post.

Here are parts three and four of this series.

Comments

[Napolean21]

Thank you so much for this! I am a natural cry-er, and have been my entire life. Nothing I do seems to affect whether or not I will cry. Knowing that some managers view this as you do is a great relief.

[Reagan]

Napolean, I've been hearing this same message from many women who I spoke with before writing this post, some of whom are highly successful professionals and managers. We could avoid a lot of unnecessary worry and trouble by changing our cultural attitudes toward crying. I hope this is an example of "making the world a better place, one office at a time."