No Hard Feelings ― Emotions at Work - and How They Help Us Succeed

A visual exploration of how to embrace emotion at work and become more authentic and fulfilled while staying professional.

When it comes to emotions at work, there's rarely a happy medium. In some offices, your boss might send snaps of her weekend getaway in Vegas, or your coworker might send twenty texts about how Susan ate his clearly labeled lunch...again. Other offices are buttoned-up emotional deserts, where crying is only allowed in the bathroom and you suspect your coworkers might be robots. Either extreme hurts employee health and productivity.

Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy take a charming and deeply researched look at how emotions affect our professional lives and how we can navigate emotions at work. The modern workplace can be an emotional minefield (Do I shake my boss's hand or give her a hug? Did I forget to mute my phone on the conference call?) filled with unwritten rules. As our jobs become more collaborative, complex, and stressful, effectively embracing emotion is more important than ever.

The book combines practical advice and scientific research to give you the tools you need. A sample:

* Forget "unemotional" decisions; there are none. In fact, rational decisions require you to acknowledge and examine your emotions. For instance, fear often indicates anticipated future regret.

* Real, valuable feedback is not going to feel like a gift. Realize that negative feedback often means the criticizer cares about helping you improve and is willing to bear the awkwardness of a difficult conversation.

* Stop letting someone else's bad mood ruin your day. Emotions are viral-- we catch the feelings of those around us. If you're stuck next to a constant complainer, mentally remove yourself from the situation.

* Learn to communicate and interpret digital messages. That "totally normal" email you sent may be seen as hostile because you didn't explicitly state your positive emotions (e.g., "I love what you did here!").

Thanks to Fosslien's sharply funny two-color illustrations, No Hard Feelings is a romp through behavioral economics, psychology, and organizational design.

Liz Fosslien is a marketing and design consultant who illustrates the webcomic Out of the Office, which lovingly pokes fun at the tech industry. Liz's work has been featured on or by the Economist, Life Hacker, the Freakonomics blog, and NPR.

Mollie West Duffy is an organizational designer at IDEO New York. She has helped companies and start-ups such as Casper develop good workplace culture. She writes a blog about start-up culture, and has written for Quartz and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.