Girl Bosses

At the risk of sounding sexist, or worse, I present the latest reflections on Girl Power. Or better, on Girl Bosses. I assume this risk because the theories are not mine. They come to us from one Charlotte Cowles, via a site called Bustle.

Cowles argues persuasively that when women are in charge, when they are managers, their staff tends to consider them as either therapists or mothers or both. Staff members, especially those who have XX chromosomes, tend to confide in their female managers. They share their feelings and request, if not require, emotional support.

Female staff tend not to be quite so emotionally needy when they work for male managers, and we can extrapolate to say that certain female managers, think Margaret Thatcher, did not have female staff whining about their emotions.

Perhaps this is why Thatcher notably surrounded herself with male staff. She did not want to risk having young women take her for a mother figure or a therapist.

Cowles reports the case of Alice, a manager who does not live in Wonderland:

Since Alice became a manager over a decade ago, she has frequently struggled with the emotional investment that her direct reports — particularly some of the younger ones — seem to expect from her. “I often wonder whether it’s because I’m a woman, and a Millennial, or both,” she said. “I’ve thought about saying, ‘This is not the time or place to talk about these matters.’ But there’s a risk with that, especially as a woman, of being labeled as an insensitive bitch.”

Cowles is nothing if not fair and balanced. She points out that a Girl Boss can produce considerable loyalty by allowing herself to be used as a therapist-mother:

Conversely, Alice knows that her approachability can be a strength. “I think it made my team loyal to me,” she said. “And they may have been willing to work harder because they felt a personal bond and connection.” Still, it was exhausting to be everyone’s dumping ground. “Especially when I became a mom, dealing with so many emotional dynamics with my team was particularly draining,” she said. “On some days, I felt like I had a toddler at home, and eight more at work.”

And yet, private feelings, not to mention private parts, have no place in the workplace. Sharing them distracts from the task at hand. 

So, Alice chose to quit her job, and found another where she only manages one person:

She recently quit for a job where she only manages one person. "It's a big relief," she said.

In a strange way, companies now have a more therapeutic workplace, and perhaps, given the psychological deformities that characterize Gen Z, this is necessary. Anyway, therapy culture is invading the workplace.

Now mostly in their 30s and the largest generation in the American labor force, Millennials have developed a reputation for bringing sensitivity and compassion to the workplace, a stark contrast to the more authoritarian bosses of the Gen X or Boomer eras. It’s a byproduct of the “bring your whole self to work” ethos that many corporate cultures have tried to adopt in recent years, and that Gen-Z workers have come to embrace. (On TikTok, they extol the benefits of Millennial bosses as “the mom and dad we wish we had.”)

Respondents also said that their managers have just as much influence on their mental health as their spouse, and even more than their therapist or doctor. 

Of course, this is mostly limited to Girl Bosses. No one really expects an aspiring alpha male to be willing to sit around listening to you whine about your boyfriend’s bad behavior, or even his good behavior.

What’s more, the emotional labor of tending to employees’ mental well-being often goes unrecognized, especially from women. A 2022 report by McKinsey found that female leaders “are doing more to support employee well-being but face higher stress levels as a result.” That extra work has a cost: Women leaders reported higher levels of burnout, and were 1.5 times more likely than men to have switched jobs because their workload was unmanageable. To that end, the UKG survey found that 70 percent of managers would take a pay cut right now for a job that “better supports their mental wellness.”

Of course, corporate managers are not trained to deal with such situations. And they find it difficult to function or to respect their staff when they have been brought into staff’s more personal private matters. Again, sharing your private thoughts is one step toward sharing your private parts, and there is already far too much of that in most workplaces.

Then there’s the problem of getting emotionally enmeshed with her employees. “I’ve learned to not directly ask about people’s feelings, because sometimes that isn’t received well,” she said. 

“For example, I once asked a direct report if she was okay, because she seemed angry. And she told me that she didn’t want to be characterized as an angry person. That was a real learning moment for me — I was trying to be sensitive, but I needed to observe people’s boundaries, too.”

Like Alice, Girl Bosses who feel distracted by everyone’s emotional needs tend to abandon their managerial roles. 

This type of overwhelm, and the resulting exodus from managerial roles, is inevitable in organizations that don’t have clear boundaries, said Holly Howard, a business consultant who helps companies navigate management challenges as they grow. “It’s great that workplaces are acknowledging that mental well-being is important,” she explained. “But there’s been a pendulum swing towards managers assuming the role of therapist for their employees, and that's not healthy either. Most managers are not qualified for that, nor should they feel like they need to be.”

She sometimes fantasizes about going back to the days when people weren’t expected to be so emotionally present at work. “I know that there are upsides to being authentic with our teams, but it puts a lot of pressure on everyone to be transparent even when they don’t want to be, and that takes a tremendous amount of bandwidth.”

For now it’s an open question. Or perhaps it’s an open wound, designed to provide emotional support to GenZ, a group of people that has suffered from therapy culture and that cannot function in a workplace environment without having emotional support animals.

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