10 Emotions That Are Undervalued in the Workplace

Facebook made “Move fast and break things” an informal company motto. But leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that this belief is deeply flawed — and that it keeps leaders from building a great company.

The best leaders move fast and fix things — they solve hard problems while making their organizations stronger. In their new book Move Fast and Fix Things (Harvard Business Review Press), Frei and Morriss outline five strategies to help leaders tackle their hardest problems and quickly make change:

1. Identify your real problem. [See 10 Signs Your Company Is Resistant to Change]

2. Build — or rebuild — trust with your stakeholders. [See 10 Pitfalls That Destroy Organizational Trust]

3. Create inclusive conditions that allow your whole team to thrive. [See 10 Reasons Why Inclusion Is a Competitive Advantage]

4. Tell a compelling story about the change you need to make.

5. Execute your plan with a sense of urgency.

This month, we’ll be publishing a series of excerpts that correspond to each strategy. This excerpt is focused on developing a clear and compelling narrative about the change you want to make. Change can make a lot of logical sense, but it can also be unsettling and disruptive to the people impacted by it. Emotions are an underdiscussed part of change leadership. Just as anxiety can be highly infectious — so can optimism. Below are 10 powerful emotions that you can channel in your storytelling.

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We believe that emotions, generally, are underrated at the office. If you’re a woman of a certain age, as we are, then you may have been cautioned against letting something as messy as a feeling accompany you to work. And if you’re a man of a certain age, then you may have been rewarded for what appeared to be the absence of emotion.

These messages have conspired to create a missed opportunity. In addition to being powerful tools of persuasion and influence, emotions ground us in our humanity — useful when we’re around other humans — and give us important data about our environments. The trick, of course, is to notice our feelings and put them to work without letting them hijack our brain’s control system. To help illustrate this point, below are some of our favorite emotions that are undervalued in the workplace. Not all of them are technically emotions, but you get the idea:

1. Frustration

Next-level, serial entrepreneur Paul English has tapped into frustration for every one of his breakthrough ideas, including channeling it into the launch of metasearch engine Kayak after he couldn’t believe how much time he was spending going from one airline website to another to try to find the best flight. When English guest lectures to MBA students, he challenges them to come to class with a picture of something that annoys them. More often than not, a legitimate idea for a business is born at some point in the class.

2. Regret

A variation on frustration, regret typically shows up at the boundary of self and other. We regret a careless comment we made to a colleague, for example, or we regret not saying The Thing at the moment The Thing would have made a difference. As uncomfortable as it is to sit with regret, it often shows us what to do differently next time. It may also give us clues to what we may need to clean up. If you’re still regretting that comment three days later, it’s a pretty good signal that you need to apologize.

3. Enthusiasm

This may surprise our global readers, but even Americans are cautioned against being too enthusiastic at work. In fact, one of us was once advised never to use the word excited as a woman, with its suggestion of an unruly, downright feminine lack of control. Call it something else if you want, but don’t forget that the most effective change leaders are evangelical about the world they’re building and reveal their enthusiasm at every turn.

4. Devotion

Humans thrive in a context of high standards and deep devotion, defined as full-bodied, unapologetic commitment to someone else’s success. We sometimes hold back the full extent of our devotion based on the false belief that it will somehow get in the way of the high standards part. In short, it won’t, so please make it very clear how much you want your colleagues to crush it.

5. Happiness

Tony Hsieh, may he rest in deep peace, showed us all the power of sparking joy at work, building his shoe empire Zappos on a foundation of happy employees, customers, and suppliers. And yet. We’re still making each other miserable in the workplace at rates that are far too high. Let Hsieh’s legacy be that we listen more closely to what he came here to tell us.

6. Discomfort

This is one that we all get wrong, at least some of the time, by conflating discomfort with a signal to stop doing what we’re doing. We’re wired to avoid it as human beings, and yet so much of the good stuff happens outside our comfort zone, from learning something new to confronting a problem we don’t yet know how to solve. Take it from Virginia “Ginni” Rometty, former chairperson, president, and CEO of IBM: “Growth and comfort do not coexist.”

7. Anger

Yes, we think there’s a place for anger, too, if for no other reason than suppressing anger will eventually convert it into an internal toxin. Anger is tricky on a bunch of levels, including the truth that we don’t all get equal access to it. For example, Black professionals expressing anger at work are more likely to pay a price for that choice. Anger is often a secondary emotion, a mask for more complicated feelings such as disappointment or sadness. When we coach people through this one, that’s often the place we’ll start. What might be living underneath the anger? What can you learn from that emotion?

8. Joy

Joy is one of legendary NBA coach Steve Kerr’s four core team values (along with mindfulness, compassion, and competition), which he credits with fueling the Golden State Warriors’ extraordinary success. The joy part often surprises people, at least until they see Kerr’s Warriors cheerfully dominate the court. By the way, joy is also not equitably accessed, which is why it’s still an “act of resistance” for some of us.*

9. Fellowship

There’s not a perfect word for what we mean here, so we’ll simply put it this way: Life brings all of us to our knees at some point. We need other people to help us get back up, in big and small ways. Chances are good that you’ll meet some of those people at work.

10 Grace

This is the big one, we believe — the one that’s far too scarce for the moment in which we’re living and working. In our experience, grace starts as an inside job, meaning that we need to make space for our own flawed humanity before we can open up that circle to others. Depending on your circumstances, grace might present as kindness, compassion, or generosity of spirit. It might be a decision to have the difficult conversation or to not have the difficult conversation. However it shows up, grace demands that we practice it on ourselves before we’re credible conduits to others.

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*The breathtaking line “Joy is an act of resistance” first appears as a revolutionary call to Black feminism in Toi Derricotte’s beautiful poem, “The Telly Cycle.”

This excerpt has been lightly edited.

Copyright 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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