Kathleen Kelley Reardon

When you’ve been around for a while, especially studying communication and leadership, you know that the topic of crying at work isn’t about to go away any time soon.  It’s a form of emotional expression that worries women in particular because we know that leadership is generally associated with strength.  Many natural emotions, however, are associated with weakness.  Yet, emotionless leadership is an oxymoron.  If you don’t truly care about who and what you’re leading, enough to occasionally become emotional, then you’re likely not an effective leader.

In response to the question posed on the Linkedin Wholehearted Leadership site, I posted the following.  It’s short, but to the point.  An occasional cry is not the end of the world. There are other things we repeatedly do at work that can be more costly.  A few of them are mentioned here.  You’re welcome to stop by the “Categories” section in the right column of this site to locate discussions about others.

Emotional expression is natural, but there is a time and a place for everything and crying is no exception. If it happens rarely, hopefully with one colleague in the room who won’t interpret your expression as weakness, then it’s no worse than occasionally expressing most other emotions. Caution is important, though. Some people will interpret crying as weakness. The same can be said for letting people interrupt you on a regular basis, always letting public put-downs pass, never sharing your accomplishments because you think it’s bragging, taking on worthless projects, and a host of other ways we communicate that can be turned into signs of lacking leadership potential — especially for women. John Boehner, U.S. Speaker of the House, cries regularly. He is still Speaker. Betty Friedan, who changed so many women’s lives with her words, determination, and leadership of the modern woman’s movement, cried in my office one day. I thought more of her, not less. It happens. Sometimes for the better — physically, mentally and emotionally. Just watch who you let use it against you. If you must cry, do so alone or with someone you trust. 

(This blog was posted today at Huffington Post.  It’s amazing how little most of us know about mental illness.  Until it hits our families, and from the statistics the likelihood is reasonably high, we turn the other way.  Perhaps that’s natural.  We can’t worry all the time about every illness we read about.  Even as a professor of preventive medicine for part of my career, I had a lot to learn about mental illnesses.  It’s worth taking some time, even if your life has not been touched by any form, to learn more about mental health issues and to perhaps find it in your hearts to help others living with them everyday, to support families struggling to find the best solutions, to recognize onset in someone you love earlier than you might otherwise, or to consider it part of your challenge to bring about change.)

Ask Virginia State Senator Creigh Deedsabout his son Austin. He’ll tell you of a “beautiful child” who was “full of love.” Yet Austin (Gus), age 24, stabbed his father multiple times before taking his own life. “Whatever illness took him was so contrary to his nature,” Deeds told CNN.

Onset of serious mental illness in late teens and early twenties is very common and often shocking to the families that experience it. The medical community knows this; researchers know this; millions of families know this and yet we wait for the topic to find its time while millions try to cope. Surely we can do better.

Over 13.5 million adults in the United States suffer from serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, major depression and bi-polar disorder. Approximately 20% of American youth between 13 and 18 years of age experience severe mental illness in a given year, 2.6 million people live with schizophrenia and 6.1 million with bi-polar disorder. The problem is worldwide. Then there are the families who often suffer in silence under a heavy cloud of stigma and fear.

Recent research indicates the rate of medication noncompliance for serious mental illness is upwards of 74 percent soon after initiation, especially among patients withschizophrenia. University of Pennsylvania research indicates that if schizophrenia patients prematurely discontinue the first prescription of antipsychotic medication, then the chances are reduced of them sticking to a medication regimen later.

Of course, many people take medication as prescribed and do well. These are not the patients Xavior Amador, Ph.D., writes about in I Am Not Sick. I Don’t Need Help. Amador describes a neurological condition called anosognosia that prevents many patients with serious mental illness from believing they are ill. He argues that it is not stubbornness or denial in the more common sense that keeps these patients from taking medication. In their heart of hearts, they believe that they are not ill. Rejection of illness is essentially a symptom of their illness.

It would be immoral to allow someone in insulin shock to go untreated. Why is it that we insist on letting people who are so sick that they don’t know they’re sick go untreated? Yet that is what we do in civilized countries around the world. We tell ourselves that if a mentally ill person thinks he is well and doesn’t at the moment appear to present a danger to himself or others, no matter how delusional or fractured his or her grasp on reality, it’s okay to let conditions get worse. If drugs are involved, especially accompanying symptoms like delusions and medicine noncompliance, research indicates that the chances of violence are significantly increased.

Try to get help under these circumstances for someone you love: It’s a nightmare. “Has he threatened to kill himself?” and “Has he threatened to harm someone else?” are two questions to expect. Yet patients who have been hospitalized before after discontinuing medication for serious psychotic disorders, whose conditions deteriorate in predictable ways, especially ones who have become violent, shouldn’t be required to express an explicit threat to self or others before being admitted to a hospital for treatment. It defies common sense to ignore a patient’s history. No wonder so many mentally ill people are homeless or in jail. Such negligence would be grounds for malpractice with other diseases.

Deeds, who is working to help mental health patients and families, puts it this way: “When…it’s been determined that that person is in crisis and needs service, there should not be a possibility that they are streeted.” He added, “That person should receive the treatment they need. It’s absolutely essential.”

As if that struggle isn’t enough for families to deal with, try to find post-hospital assisted living for a stabilized patient when support is needed. Finding such support is an endless nightmare for families and often prohibitively expensive.

Legal efforts at mental health parity with other illnesses and insurance coverage are steps in the right direction. We need more understanding of serious mental illness, greater awareness of its prevalence and a system of hospitalization and after care that does not have as a prerequisite expressed threat to someone’s life. As a society, we need to do the hard work of sorting out what constitutes a pattern of worsening mental health.

It’s time to stop passing the buck. Let’s do the math. The data are in. Look at the statistics. Look at the families in pain struggling to find help. The buck stops at our front doors. It’s time to get up off the cushy sofa of willful neglect and answer the door.

@kathreardon

This morning I was reminded by a tweet from Nantucket blACKbook that some things you need to be a bear about repeating.  When it comes to women knowing more about politics at work, that’s definitely the case.  So, my thanks for that reminder.

Below is a re- blog from December that I hope you’ll read and share with women.  We need to know more about politics at work.  I’ve spent years learning the hard way and by studying this subject and I’d like all women to benefit from the experience.  You’re never too young or too old to get a handle on the political culture where you work.

Nantucket blACKbook
@ACKblACKbook

1 of the best articles I’ve ever read. Ask better questions. Get better relationships bit.ly/1jEeBwm ~ @HuffingtonPost @kathreardon

Are We Asking The Right Questions About Women’s Advancement At Work?

The Sunday New York Times front-page story “Wall Street Mothers, Stay-Home Fathers” is a look at how women can make it to the top by engaging in an increasingly popular form of “marrying well” — having a stay-at-home husband.

An interesting article, it nonetheless points to yet another avenue women may take to get ahead that is nearly impossible to find. Where does one look for a spouse who aspires to stay at home with the children? Sure, they’re out there. But is this a viable path for women wishing to reach the top? Or is it another intriguing, rare-as-hen’s-teeth option that opens doors for a very few?

The NYT article is about wealthy women of Wall Street and so it was not intended to be representative of the majority of women working in corporate America. How couples work out “who buys the wife’s jewelry when she makes upward of a million dollars a year and the husband earns little or nothing” is interesting. But it’s difficult to feel too sorry for their dilemma. Similarly, when the husband won’t or can’t host parties for his wife’s clients, limiting as that might be, it’s hardly an unsolvable problem when you’re bringing home a bundle of money each week.

Women need solutions that can actually be applied if they are to advance in organizations dominated by men. Those come from good questions about the inner workings of such organizations. Women need to learn what makes organizations tick and that usually means politics. Yet, as a rule, women come late to taking an interest in and understanding politics.

The dearth of female mentors is one reason. Another is the tendency for women to be mentored by men when they’re “cute-and-little” and a threat to no one. They become comfortable with this, often thinking those feminists had it wrong. When they start going for the big jobs, however, competing against often similarly competent males, they often find advice is not so readily available.

By the time most women reach the point where promoting them to senior levels means not promoting a man, they have offended someone. Who hasn’t by then? Wells are easily poisoned with comments like, “She’s brilliant and everyone loves her, but is she a good fit?” When women don’t know this sort of seemingly nebulous way of judging them is in the works, they are blindsided.

Political purists don’t survive in highly and pathologically political organizations. You have to be on your toes, know what goes on behind the scenes, read the tealeaves, and position yourself for promotion by establishing as irrefutable a case as possible. You need to find comfort with power and learn how it’s obtained and used by those who get ahead.

That’s a tall order. But it’s not as tough as finding a future spouse, or converting a current one, who’ll stay at home with the kids when you need to fight the good fight at work. It’s one way forward on Wall Street, but it’s not the solution to women’s low representation at high levels and lower salaries across the board.

Front-page articles like the one by Jodi Kantor and Jessica Silver-Greenberg in The New York Times are important to the goal of discussing and grappling with why women lag behind their male peers in so many fields. But when the rubber hits the road, what women need to do for starters aside from make themselves valuable, if not in some way indispensable, is to know why highly competent women who came before them didn’t make it to the top and why others did.

You have to ask yourself if you’re in an organization where your preferred style of politics is suited to the prevailing one and whether you’re willing and able to adapt. Are you where what you have to offer adds value, where what you have to say is heard, and where your management/leadership skills have been duly noted?

If the answer is “no” to any of these questions, then the task before you is not to find a stay-at-home spouse to care for the kids, although a possible asset, it’s to begin teaching yourself more about politics and to stay far away from full-fledged “leaning in” until you’re sure where you are is where you’re likely to thrive.

(More by clicking on the category “Tutorials for Women” in the right column of this page) and @kathreardon