It Started With a Meme

It all started with a meme. Of course, I had to teach the team about what memes are first. And we tried working through cartoons that they thought were funny and that I sort of winced at. But it started with a meme.

But let’s back up.

I believe that you bring yourself to work. All of you. The sum total of the bad things and the good things and the article you read in the newspaper last week and your morning coffee and how uncomfortable your shoes are and that great idea you worked through during traffic. We bring all of this with us. And sometimes we try to hide all of that and focus on work. Leave the personal out of it. But it’s not easy. And it makes our collaborations dry and our work dull.

I had been feeling disconnected from my team. I thrive on chatter and relationships and jokes, and my current company isn’t that place. Lovely, smart people, but with a habit of working so hard and so fast that they lost the little moments of joy in the work. The light bulb moments and the unexpected wins.

So I started sending memes. Jokes. Sharing not just the personal stuff but the things that I connected to. I wiggled my way in email by email. Nerdy passion sprinkled into deadlines and deliverables. I brought more of myself, openly gave more of myself, and started connecting more deeply with my team. The very act of reaching out, as humbling and hopeful as it can be, helped me cross emails and departments.

I believe in all of this. And I stand behind this full-self work manifesto.

So when a colleague told me recently that I was too emotional after a fervent discussion about marketing strategy and metrics, I swallowed my frustration and confusion and let it fester. What does it mean to be too emotional at work? At the time, I said I wasn’t afraid to be passionate and if sharing my recommendations backed by data was too much, then so be it. Because I care deeply about my work. Because I bring myself to work every day.

My dad said that I needed to pull back. Sometimes management doesn’t want to hear your ideas, he said. Just do your work and let it go. Don’t cause trouble.

Is it trouble to care about the work that I do? Is that troubling in today’s workplace?

Early in my career, I used to cry in the supplies closet when I got overwhelmed. I was 23 and struggling. I’m almost 30 now. I haven’t cried in a closet in a long time. Even my Devine Inventory results paint a picture of a marketer with high adaptiveness and stress tolerance. So why was I being called emotional?

It’s easy to look at strength in a binary way: you’re either stoic and strong or you’re emotional and weak. But I’d argue something else. Strength doesn’t need to mean being remote. Passion, empathy, and relationship-driven collaboration can also support strength. A lack of emotion indicates a lack of investment to me. If I didn’t care about my marketing strategies, I wouldn’t push myself to speak up and be heard. That’s not emotion, that’s passion and drive. That’s creativity and that spark that we work so hard to suppress at work.

Calling someone emotional is an easy way to dismiss them. To shut out those ideas that aren’t comfortable or easy. Too emotional. Too invested. Too personal. It’s simple to work alone and shut out those around you. To go to ground on your ideas and not engage fully with the results. But that’s not me.

I’ve worked in places that were full of fear. Hard-nosed leadership and demerits for being two minutes late. Big meetings and suits and furtive conversations when things felt wrong. Where disagreement is met with dismissal. Where good marketing goes to whither and die.

I don’t believe in the separation of the personal and the professional. In graduate school I was fascinated by Erving Goffman and his ideas on the performance of the self. Probably because I’m not very good about separating my front stage self and my backstage self. I believe in the power of lunches and memes to connect a team. To create trust and engender collaboration. I believe in jokes and being honest about bad days and diving fully into the work. In a respect for all types of leadership, be it stoic and impersonal or empathetic and creative. In supporting the people doing the work, not just the work itself. In ideas bolstered by metrics and happy hours.

It started with a meme, but it ended with my resignation.