Virtual Book Tour with Anne Kreamer

Readers, we're delighted you're here at our Virtual Book Tour and we give a hearty welcome to author Anne Kreamer. We first featured Anne and her book, Going Gray, in 2007. We think that you'll find what she has to say about her new and thought provoking book, It's Always Personal, very interesting. So let's get started:

Nourishing Relationships:
What motivated you to initiate the investigation to do this book and is there a personal story behind your desire to do this project?

Anne Kreamer:
My interest in the subject of emotion in the workplace crept up on me, starting from a very personal point of view, then growing in gradual concentric circles to include statistical research and neuroscience. A few years ago I was chatting with my former colleague, Sara Levinson, who has been a top executive within both deeply male (MTV, the NFL) and deeply female (Club Mom, the women’s group at Rodale publishing) professional environments. She asked me a funny question: Did I know any woman who had never cried at work? While I’d obviously never conducted a crying-on-the-job poll of my friends, I realized that no, I probably didn’t. And certainly I had cried, years earlier, when I was a senior vice president at Viacom’s Nickelodeon, the children’s network, and my uber-boss, Sumner Redstone, called me for the first time -- and screamed at me.

With that one cocktail-party question, I set off on a two-year journey exploring emotion -- negative emotions, positive emotions, all emotions -- in the modern workplace. The timing of Sara’s question was also interesting. It came during the recession in America which led to the tectonic plate-shifting fact that women were the majority of the workforce for the first time in history. Secondly, developments in the field of neuroscience meant that also for the first time in history we had the ability to observe living, working brains in action. Those two major new facts led me to wonder if this moment presented a unique opportunity to reassess traditional emotional workplace norms.

N R:
What are the main differences you noticed between men and women in the work place?

A K:
There is not one easy answer to this question -- in fact, the answer to this is woven throughout my book and involves both inherent neurobiological as well as socially conditioned differences. But I’ll try and address a few differences.

When equal employment laws were passed in the United States during the 1960s, men overwhelmingly controlled the style and protocols of the workplace, which de facto meant that equality for women meant that they had to adapt and adopt male standards for professional behavior – and really the blandest versions of male behavior at that. As they entered the workforce and for most of the almost half century since, women have been instructed to “man up” and “whatever you do, don’t let them see you cry.” To be successful, many women had to deny and suppress distinctly female parts of themselves -- their nurturing impulses, their essential femininity and, as I discovered, aspects of their intrinsic biology. So right off the bat the rules for women were different because women in significant ways weren't permitted to be themselves.

Let’s look an anger, for instance. In 2007, Victoria Brescoll, who teaches at the Yale School of Management, conducted three studies in which people watched videos of male and female actors pretending to apply for jobs, and sometimes showing anger. Whether the angry female in the experiments was described as a trainee or an executive, both men and women rated the angry woman lower than a comparable man if she showed anger. Additionally, the women’s anger was blamed on her -- “she is an angry person,” “she is out of control” -- whereas men’s emotional reactions were ascribed to some external factor that seemed to justify anger -- “the work was shoddy” or “the report sucked.” In real life angry women at work cry, with tears and blubbering as the unintended, rechanneled byproducts of anger.

One of the fascinating things I discovered through two national polls I conducted, and which academic research corroborates, is that women consider people who cry at work “unstable,” which sounds like a chronic and serious character flaw… whereas men see crying at work as at worst “unprofessional” behavior, more suggestive of a forgivable circumstantial lapse. Men in our survey said that after crying their minds felt sharper, the future brighter, and they felt more physically relaxed and “in control” than before the incident. Women? Women felt the exact opposite.

N R:
Are the reasons why people cry, or explode emotionally, at work mainly due to situations experienced in the office or events in their personal lives that are carried to the work place? Of this two, which one is more "frowned upon"?

A K:
I don’t think there is one that is more “frowned upon.” What I do think is that we are very, very confused about the boundaries between the two realms. In the old days -- pre-Internet, pre-cell phones -- it was a lot easier to believe that work = rational and home = emotional. But now that work and home life bleed into each other constantly, that distinction has become anachronistic and probably self-defeating. People text and e-mail their friends and family members throughout the workday, and they receive messages from colleagues and clients on nights and weekends and during vacations.

The membranes between private life and work, especially office work, have always been porous, but today employers and employees expect accessibility and accountability pretty much round-the-clock. And whereas old-school office memos and business letters generally weren’t expected to be friendly or candid -- that is, human -- business e-mails most definitely are.

Conversely, what used to be considered private behavior can instantly reverberate at work through social networking. People fire off e-mails late at night only to regret their tone and intent in the cold light of day. Facebook friends from work can stumble on wild-and-crazy pictures from a bachelorette party. Tweets and anonymous mobile video uploads can instantly broadcast unflattering emotional displays by surly customer service employees or misbehaving CEOs.

The conventional wisdom used to be that we brought home the emotions we were unable to express while at work - snapping (or worse) at unsuspecting partners and children. Which is as true as ever. What’s new is that home life — with all its messy, complicated emotional currents, has become inextricably and undeniably woven into the workplace.

N R:
Your study suggests that men cry more than we’d assumed in the workplace; could you explain that in depth?

A K:
I think the conventional wisdom was that men simply didn’t cry in the workplace. That 9% of American men admitted that they did struck me as significant – and with men like John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House, or Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader for the U. S. Senate, crying visibly and frequently in public, it strikes me that we’ve reached a turning point in our culture where it is acceptable for men to express emotion. In fact, research reveals that those who “lead from the heart” are viewed as more trustworthy.

N R:
Is crying a good therapy to release stress and maintain productive?

A K:
Tears are nature’s natural emotional reset valve. Tears are not an emotion, but rather are our bodies way to express that an individual has experienced an intense emotion. Psychic tears (as opposed to irritant tears, the kind we release when cutting an onion) happen in response to strong experiences – of joy, sadness, anger, anxiety, fear. Tears help us release hormones that flood our bodies during those times of intense feeling and help us re-establish our baseline equilibrium. Tears also increase our dopamine production, thereby helping to return our bodies to equilibrium – and they are also something akin to the warning lights on our car dashboards. You should pay attention to them – they are a signal communicating that something may be not quite right under the hood. There are many, many different kinds of tears – those of happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, pain, and joy and it’s important, as with warning lights on the dashboard, to figure out which kind you are experiencing and then understand what they are telling you – are you overwhelmed, underappreciated, angry? Then figure out how you want to address those issues. In the book I offer a variety of strategies for how one can do that.

N R:
Why do women feel so guilty after crying after an incident at work while men don’t?

A K:
Once again this is really complicated and I believe social conditioning is one of the primary reasons women feel ashamed after crying at work. And social conditioning fails to take into consideration basic biological differences between the genders. Women produce 6 times the amount of prolactin that men do and prolactin is the hormone that causes tear production. Women also have smaller tear ducts, that’s right, they are anatomically different from men’s so that when women do cry, tears most often will stream down their face, whereas men’s ears merely “tear up.” I think if we were all more educated about our neurobiology, women would feel less regret after crying – acknowledging their tears for the biological impulse, like breathing or a muscle reflex, that they are.

N R:
What are the different personality types you recognized in an ordinary office?

A K:
Based on the responses to over 1,000 regular working Americans in all 50 states, we identified four different primary types of emotion styles. I’ve named these Spouters, Accepters, Believers, and Solvers. Women and men were equally represented in all four groups. There were minimal differences among the four types between income and management levels which means that there is no one “right” type to be. If your reader’s would like to take a very simplified version of the survey they may do so here.

NR:
Can you give us a few tips for controlling our emotions in the work place?

A K:
I offer lots of what I call “emotion management toolkit” suggestions in the book, but if I had to select just one it would be to get outside and walk. If I’m walking in a city, the rich diversity of shops, people or street smells wafting out of restaurants stimulates me in ways that connect interesting new creative dots for me and if I’m walking in nature the rich loaminess of the soil, the chittering birds, frogs and insects calm me and connect me to my spiritual side. I find if I’m cranky or anxious, just walking out my door almost always lifts my mood. Changing perspective helps change your brain chemistry.

Thanks, Anne, for insight into your work and such thorough responses. Now, readers, it's your turn to share your thoughts and ask Anne your questions. Just click on 'comments' at the bottom of this post and follow the prompts. You can even sign in as 'anonymous' - it's as easy as that. And if you want to learn more about Anne and her books, spend some time on her website.

Thinking of Going Gray?

We are pleased to be hosting Anne Kreamer here on the blog on Wednesday, October 19 to talk with us about her latest book, It's Always Personal. Our readers were fascinated by her last visit here when she shared her personal story about Going Gray, so we thought we'd share some excerpts of our last chat with Anne. If you've ever considered going gray yourself, here's some of what Anne shared with us at that time:

NR: What were the issues that you’d uncovered while your hair was growing out?

Anne: I discovered that I was worried about whether I could ever be attractive to men in the same way with gray hair as I thought I had been with my dyed brown hair. And when I began to talk with other women about my experience I uncovered that worry about their loss of attractiveness is perhaps the single greatest fear almost all women feel as they get older since gray hair is our most visible signal of age. Women were also terrified that they would lose professional opportunity if they were perceived as old.

NR: How did you go about getting at the underlying truth or issues behind those fears?

Anne: I did several different things. I talked to as many different kinds of men and women as I could – from well-known people like Emmylou Harris, Anna Quindlen, Frances McDormand, Mireille Guiliano (French Women Don’t Get Fat), Nora Ephron and Governor Ann Richards to regular people I met across the country. I conducted a national survey of 500 people probing all sorts of issues around aging and the things that we do to mask the signs of aging. I used myself as a guinea pig in a variety of situations – I pseudo-dated on-line, went out to bars, interviewed headhunters and met in cognito with image consultants. And I read everything I could get my hands on.

NR: What surprised you the most?

Anne: You mean after I figured out that I had spent $65,000 on hair color alone during the 25 years I dyed my hair? (That $65,000 would today be worth $300,000 after adjusting for inflation!)

NR: Wow! But yes, beyond that statistic.

Anne: What most surprised me was discovering that when it comes to letting their hair be its natural gray, or not, I think a lot of women tend to be worried about the wrong thing. I certainly was. More women are more worried that men won’t find them attractive with gray hair, and yet believe that gray hair is acceptable professionally. My research revealed that the truth is the opposite.

NR: What do you mean?

Anne: Well, for instance, I tried to really get at whether gray hair was unattractive to men on Match.com. I figured if I was honest about my age and interests and posted an image of myself with gray hair that I’d naturally get fewer “dates” (or “winks” as overtures are called on Match.com) than I would when I posted the same information but instead used an image of myself with my hair Photo-shopped brown. And shockingly, after I did the experiment three times in three different cities, three times as many men in New York, Chicago and L.A. were interested in going out with me when my hair was gray. This blew my mind. When I was on Good Morning America, they replicated the experiment with a 61-year-old widow in Florida and she had the exact same results! Maybe men figured that if we were being honest about the color of our hair that perhaps our lack of pretence would make us more accessible and easier to date. Or maybe the gray made me stand out from the overwhelming majority of Match-com women my age who color their hair. I honestly don’t know. But I do know the results were inspiring. We should give men a lot more credit.

NR: Did you test this theory in the real world?

Anne: Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. I went out to a variety of New York bars (from places where Wall Street guys would hang out to the kinds where locals went to watch sports) and once again I was really surprised by how it seemed that my gray hair color did nothing to prevent me from meeting and talking with nice-looking younger guys. Most women I talked with during research for my book were convinced that if a woman had gray hair and then got divorced that it was absolutely essential that she dye her hair if she were ever going to date again. I strongly believe that that is not the case. And moreover, I would suggest to most women that if the guy they’re interested in will only like them if they dye their hair, then maybe he’s not Mr. Right.

NR: Was there anything else that supports your contrarian point of view?

Anne: The results from my survey were compelling. There is a huge double standard. Through a Photo shopped experiment I also tested precisely how much gray hair aged a person and what I discovered is that if a person is in their 40s or 50s, gray hair allows others to accurately guess a person’s age. When I Photo shopped the gray hair out with brown, the person was guessed to be about two or three years younger. Which seems like a modest difference to work so hard to achieve. I think the reality is we are only fooling ourselves about our age through the use of hair color.

NR: So what was the story professionally?

Anne: I interviewed different media headhunters – one in New York, the other based in Colorado and both said that they had neither a female client nor a prospective job candidate with gray hair. They went into real detail about how gray hair was consistently viewed as a signal that a person would not be “right” for most company cultures. And they suggested that if a woman were in sales or marketing allowing herself to go gray on the job would be the kiss of death.

NR: You didn’t expect this?

Anne: I met with these women assuming they’d tell me that if I wanted to get back into the corporate arena then I’d have to update my image and dye my hair. But I didn’t expect them to be so emphatic about how damaging gray hair could be to a woman’s career. What I’ve come to believe is that we need women in prominent positions (say, Hillary Clinton) to have their natural hair color in order to give other women the choice or option to dye or not to dye. In my mind it’s like baldness was for men before professional athletes like Michael Jordan or actors like Bruce Willis made baldness seem sexy and masculine. If there were more Emmylou Harris’ the choice would be easier.

NR: What about the image consultants?

Anne: I was completely taken aback by the image consultants. I met with three very different people and firms and in each instance they believed that my gray hair could be a professional asset – something along the lines of the way Meryl Streep looked playing the character, Miranda Priestly in the Devil Wears Prada. The main thing I learned from the consultants is that if you change any one aspect of your look, then it is important to modify everything else to bring out your best features. I needed to update my style and color palette.

NR: Where did you end up? Do you disapprove of people who dye their hair?

Anne: I certainly don’t disapprove of people who dye their hair – after all, I’m a very recent convert to my natural color. And I no longer work in a corporate environment so I have the luxury of feeling safe and comfortable writing at home by myself with my gray hair and I’ve been married to the same man for 30 years. But I did come through on the other side happier and more at home in my body than when I dyed my hair. It feels liberating to walk down the street and know that as much as possible I’m projecting pretty much who I am to the world. I love not spending the time at the beauty shop and I really love not spending the money.

I feel like I’m a better role model for my daughters and it seems like my husband finds me as sexy with my natural hair.

I also discovered through my research and reading that acknowledgement of your real age is one of the most important tools we have to increase the odds that we’ll age healthfully and happily. Several studies have clearly indicated that people who accept their age actually live longer. So I love that by choosing to give up one little piece of artifice I might actually be helping myself stick around longer for the grandchildren I long to know.

NR: If you'd like to hear more from this dynamite woman, join us again on Wednesday for another sit-down with Anne Kreamer. You'll learn about her take on the new realities of emotions in the workplace as Anne talks about her new book, It's Always Personal.

Labor Day and the End of Summer

Labor Day has been celebrated in the U.S. on the first Monday in September for over 125 years. While it began in recognition of workers in labor unions, most people today consider today as the symbolic end to summer and the beginning of the school year. For many women, both work and children going back to school are significant issues that come together this Labor Day.

Today, 60% of women work outside the home, that figure rising to over 75% among women ages 25 to 44, the average child-bearing years. Most of these women are employed by others yet over 9 million own their own businesses. Women who have returned to work after having children often say that their greatest difficulty is finding the time to do everything else they need to do during non-business hours. At the same time, they believe that the perspective they gain from having a family and setting priorities makes the stressful issues at work easier to manage. On our website, Her Mentor Center, you'll find practical ideas about grappling with tough times and gaining greater resiliency yourself.

So enjoy the holiday and your day off - let someone else man the barbeque - and check back in later this week for some tips to help you handle the challenges of your job while you are balancing it with your roles as partner and mother.

Families in Financial Flux

As Leo Tolstoy put it in Anna Karenina, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." And what about other family traits? Are families who are flexible all flexible in the same way? And are rigid families each set in their own ways?

Today, families are being shaken up in record numbers as financial turmoil hits home. With all the job-related uncertainties facing them, families must be able to make changes in order to adjust to the current economic climate. They may even need to adapt to role reversals when a husband experiences a job loss. But how can they bend without breaking?

Even before the current recession, women have made up 46% of the workforce. This percentage will likely increase since men held 82% of the 2.5 million jobs that have already been lost since November. With more and more companies faltering and failing, the jobless rate continues to rise. As more men lose their jobs, the financial responsibilities of families are increasingly falling on the already burdened shoulders of women. When a woman becomes the sole breadwinner, the dynamics of the relationship change for everyone - husband/father, wife/mother and children. And as the family deals with the job loss, domestic stability may crumble and tensions climb. But it doesn't have to be that way. You can make adjustments at home that will help you all adapt to the turbulent changes in our society.

Tune in all this week as we give you some tips to help you combat the reorganization your family life may be facing as the economy continues to impact everyone. And click on the title above to take you to our website and an article, Five Ways Sandwiched Boomers Can Think Positive in Tough Times, with more suggestions to help you cope.