Emotional Labor
This is a new phrase I just made up. TM pending, lol. *
With every project, client, task, and internal review comes the hard work, the rewards, and the unspoken emotional toll. I’m calling this toll the “Emotional Labor.” We don’t talk about this one enough, but we really should.
First, what is Emotional Labor? For me, this is that drain of a project that no matter what you do, it’s never done, never right, never enough. It can be that client that just never listens to you, never trusts you, and is always out to undermine your expertise at every turn.
Funny story, well, maybe not funny. One summer, we had this client, an expert, a pro athlete in his day, and played on the world level. We were building a very robust e-commerce system with memberships, online learning/courses, a community, etc. At the end of the day, we were in our expert seat for this project as we had built and managed dozens of high-performing projects just like this. Now this client liked to second guess everything, not in a curious way, but in a pixel counting, move this 5px left, try 32 shades of yellow sort of way. I was at my wit’s end. It had been a long day on a long week, and this client would never listen no matter the data, the research, the expertise of our team.
An ironic part of his training system emphasized unlearning what you know and listening to him as your new expert coach. So I called him out on it. On a conference call, he explicitly said, “You guys are the experts, we’ll trust you,” followed up by 5 new ways to try the design his way ignoring us. I called it out. “Client, if you want to win, you need to trust us, and if you won’t, just make up your mind, and tell us what buttons to push so we can all be on our way with this project.” He responded, “You don’t think we trust you?”. I said no, not at all. His last response had me floored. “I’ll meditate on that.” I fell out of my chair. Literally, we were on a call, not video, and I slid out of my chair to the floor. We laugh now, but I was out of gas. The Emotional Labor of this client broke me.
Emotional Labor in our industry is fueled by our passion for building something unique. And when we are battling the competition, the elements, we are strong together. But when we fight our partners, the client, we get drained. It costs us emotionally.
Just one client here and there, you’ll get through. But client after client, project after project, you’ll surely die. I know creatives that have left, not just their companies, but the entire industry. Exceptional leaders in our community were just done off to pursue something safe, like making dog toys or paintings. And honestly, kudos to them, honoring their true selves to protect their passions.
But how do you stop the emotional leaches? I’m still working on this myself, but early on, we are asking client interview questions on what happened with their last relationship, how long some of their employees have been on the team, how they prefer to deal with conflict, what causes them to take over a project. The sales process of a new client is 50% you selling your skills and services to them, but also 50% you vetting them as a client you’ll work with that can either reward your team with a great partner client or one that will suck your team dry.
What happened to that client, you ask? We tried to get things to a great place, to ship something that would work, and it took a few more months. He’s happy. We are not. We parted ways once the contract was complete, and the site is up and running, but so far, as of this writing, it has only billed about 5% of the investment a year later. It will be years before it’s profitable, if ever. The client still tinkers with his design ideas, and the site looks worse every time I look at it. Our name has been quietly removed from the site credit, and we removed it from our portfolio. Sad really.
In a follow up discussion, I’m wrong. This is not new, just not well discussed.
In an overall follow-up, In the business world, we don’t talk about emotional labor with our teams, but it’s been pointed out to me that it’s NOT new, and is very well discussed in therapy and more specifically with moms and postpartum depression. So while I said this out loud to a friend who instantly thought it was genius, it’s more highlighting the issue that its simply not talked about enough. So much so we collectively agreed it was new.
Here is a great article from Vouge that has some amazing takeaways and we should all give it some thought. https://www.vogue.com/article/what-is-emotional-labor
One big quote for me: “emotional labor” gets at the heart of a complex symptom of capitalism wherein workers are made unable to separate their unique, personal feelings from their work lives.
