Or anywhere else in business, we’re told. It’s inappropriate behavior for serious people dealing with serious matters.

And yet, crying is the one experience we share with others that can communicate the full emotional impact of both the joy and the tragedy of our human experience.

That serious enough for you?

One of the after-effects of my recent bone marrow stem cell transplant has been graft vs. host disease (GvHD), a war between my donor’s immune system and my own. Fortunately, my symptoms have for the most part been limited to my eyes, where a severe case of dry eye is the result of my eyes’ inability to produce tears. My tear ducts are toast and will be forever.

It’s not that I no longer experience the wide range of emotions – joy, grief, sadness, awe, even anger – that used to bring me to tears. I still experience these powerful emotions fully, but at the very last moment they fail to express.

The result? I feel like an incomplete human being, since emotional connection to others seems to me to be what being human is all about.

When we discourage the full expression of our response to life’s unexpected joyful or distressing events at work, we repress the full expression of our humanity. This includes our creativity, curiosity, compassion, and our capacity to think intelligently about the complexities that ensue when imperfect people try to work together in dysfunctional groups to solve wicked organizational problems.

I’m not advocating for loud, dramatic public displays of uncontrolled emotion. I am advocating for – in fact insisting on – the freedom to shed a few tears discretely with close colleagues with whom we feel safe when life overwhelms us.

We’re under the misimpression that tears at work mean we have lost control of our emotions, that we’re acting irrationally. And of course, as we all know, workplace behavior is nothing if not rational.

Just kidding. My experience has been that workplace behavior is mostly irrational, and that fully expressing our emotions is one of the most rational things we can do to make sense of behavior that, left unprocessed, leaves us at a loss as to how to move forward in life.

The real reason there’s no crying at work is that many of us feel profoundly uncomfortable when others express powerful emotions in our presence. We don’t know how to manage all this messy psychic energy people are throwing our way when they’re brought to tears at the office.

In 2023, Gallup reported that only 33% of US-based employees reported feeling engaged and enthusiastic about their work. That’s a sad commentary on the quality of our work lives. When we insist that others repress their emotions at work, we’ll never know what they’re really thinking, and over time we’ll lose trust in each other. If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last 50 years about optimal organizational performance, it’s that trust is the essential foundation of every high-performing team.