How to make your crybaby boss melt down
Tough as nails and scary as hell. That’s the way bosses used to be. Terminators in pinstripes, they ruled the executive suite with an iron hand. They didn’t want you to like them. They wanted you to be scared of them. Not today.
Today’s bosses don’t want you to fear them. They want you to feel sorry for them. They are not made of steel; they are made of marshmallow. If you hurt, they hurt worse. If you cry, they cry harder.
Sure, they make a ton more money than you, and, yes, they have a whole lot more power than you, but what they really want you to know is that bosses are people, too. They have feelings. And they want to share.
This surprising and rather unsettling situation is the subject of “When Your Boss Is Crying, but You’re the One Being Laid Off,” a recent article by Emma Goldberg in The New York Times.
“Executives are racing to let employees know they’re not just empty suits,” Ms. Goldberg writes. “They’re humans, with emotions, which they’re now sharing more broadly.”
It’s not exactly clear what has caused this change in the executive genome. Perhaps it was the suffering we all experienced during the worst of our covid-19 days, though one could argue that isolating in your fifth-floor walkup studio apartment and isolating in your 500-foot superyacht, cruising the Mediterranean, may not represent an equal level of suffering.
Technology also plays a part. Now that we are all interconnected 24/7 in the endless chatroom of life, with everyone exposing everything to everyone else in emails, zooms, tweets and TikToks, holding back on your deepest emotions at work is rather selfish. After all, if the rawest recruit in IT can spill their guts to the greenest intern in HR, why shouldn’t the big boss do the same?
For old-school bosses, gut-spilling doesn’t come easily. They can spill blood, especially when it comes to firing whichever innocent employee crosses their path, but they balk at sharing their profound sadness at the changing of the leaves from summer to fall, or the deep melancholy they feel when the price of caviar takes a jump.
For the formerly unfeeling, there are courses to take, like “the most popular elective course” at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, “Interpersonal Dynamics,” or, as it is known to the present and future CEOs who rush to sign up, “TouchyFeely 101.”
There are also books to read and TED Talks to listen to, all designed to encourage bosses to be “authentic, transparent and vulnerable,” the exact attributes that once were attached to the position of total loser.
While some bosses are dipping their toes in the emotional morass by sharing their relationship woes in meetings, certain overachievers are exercising their inner human by actually crying in front of their employees.
If your boss is struggling with expressing his or her emotions, here are two steps you can take to produce an emotional meltdown of Nicolas Cage magnitude, and wouldn’t making your boss feel that bad make everyone else on the team feel really, really good?
No. 1: Let’s get this pity party started.
Dealing with an emotional upset of your own? Feel free to express your inner crybaby at the next staff meeting. And if you feel strange about expressing your lingering shame at not being chosen for the Mathletes Club in junior high, don’t think twice.
Under the new rules, nothing could be more businesslike.
On the other hand, if your life is going along swimmingly and you have no inner pain to share, feel free to borrow. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are great sources of emotional turmoil. I’m sure you’ll elicit tears from your boss when you confess you have discovered an evil twin who has fallen in love with an alien con artist they met while exploring the secret world you just discovered in your backyard.
Heck, I’m tearing up already.
No. 2: Give ’em something to cry about.
Heaven knows you’ve made plenty of mistakes in your career and no one has shed a tear. This is your opportunity to make a major blunder. When your boss hears you’ve routed that urgent shipment to Antarctica instead of Atlanta, or peppered the corporate mission statement on the company website with cute cat videos, their sobs will be heard from one end of the org chart to the other.
Just don’t make the mistake of trying to get your boss to cry by telling them you’re going to quit.
It will only make them smile.