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Toxic Emotions at Work: How Compassionate Managers Handle Pain and Conflict ReviewI picked up this book because I am familiar with the author from days when I, then firmly planted in the academic world, assigned his articles to graduate students learning to do research. I knew his academic credentials are impeccable and I was prepared to trust what he wrote. And that, I think, accounts for the success of Toxic Emotions.
Toxic Emotions covers ground that has been worked before. Workplace pain has been discussed by self-help authors ("working wounded") and academics who have studied burnout and stress. Frost's remedies also remain conventional: get exercise, stay detached, be positive, find space outside work.
The willingness of executives to explore feelings is no longer new either. See Marsha Sinetar's The Mentor's Spirit and Mark Albion's Making a Life, Making a Living. And I once heard a speaker insist that therapy was no longer a taboo topic. "Everybody either has been in therapy or has a family member in therapy," he said.
The book's contribution comes from integrating these topics and putting them together and offering a research rather than a self-help context. The "toxin" medical metaphor offers a creative context to explore workplace pain and make the topic more accessible to those skeptical of new age "woo-woo."
Toxic Emotions seems directed entirely to managers and focuses on what managers can and "should" do --
and that's both the strength and limitation of the book. Employees are depicted as passive victims who need management intervention to survive.
Unfortunately, most people aren't as lucky as the clerk who was "rescued" from a toxic boss. They need to learn to protect themselves and take charge of their own lives.
And some very fine managers will never be able to function effectively as healers. I was surprised to see no reference to outside resources, such as coaches or consultants. I can understand the author's suspicion of the coaching industry (coaching schools tend to be atheoretical, to say the least) but carefully-selected coaches and consultants can often be less costly and more effective than managers whose gifts lie elsewhere. And, while confiding in a manager may bring short-term emotional relief, someday those confidences may backfire. Hiring a coach seems cheap if the only alternative is to risk your career by being too open.
Consultants can also help managers and employees implement Frost's suggestions. For example, they can teach employees to develop positive attitudes and create more balance in their lives. Saying "Just get a grip!" works well with some people but others remain clueless -- and some, temperamentally, cannot just shed their frustrations the way they shake water out of an umbrella. They need to learn to compensate or find a new workplace -- both time-consuming options that call for one-on-one learning experiences.
We also need to consider the bigger picture. All organizations may contain the potential for developing toxins. Even Southwest Airlines has been sued by an employee who felt victimized by an overzealous prank. And some employees are more susceptible to toxicity, just as some sneeze more during allergy season.
I suspect a large amount of workplace pain comes from feeling trapped, a source not mentioned here . We need not just empathetic managers but an infrastructure to support alternatives to corporate employment.
The absence of cultural support and societal infrastructure to support self-employment, discussed by Pink (Free Agent Nation) and Bridges (JobShift), accounts for a large part of workplace pain.
There's a bit of irony in the book's opening anecdote. The author learns he has cancer -- from a call his oncologist makes on a Friday night!
Frost was set up for a weekend of helpless worry. Couldn't the call wait till Monday morning, when he could at least go into action right away or at least get an emergency appointment with a therapist? A reminder that toxic systems exist in every sector -- so taken for granted that the author doesn't even comment.
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