When I first became a manager, I was twenty-three years old and naive to the inner workings of what happened with employees and leadership. I thought people just came to work, did their job, went home, and that was it.
One day, a woman named Gwen came into my office for a weekly one-on-one. Gwen was in her mid-fifties, and her mood and output operated on the zodiac calendar. I remember receiving a call one morning where she told me she couldn't work because Mercury was in retrograde. I was apparently too naive to understand whatever she was referring to, so I just said, 'No problem,' and went about my day.
But on this particular day, within about five minutes of our one-on-one, she was crying hysterically. Not because I was a jerk — I'd barely gotten a few words out. Being the empathetic leader I was, I sat and listened to her explain what was going on in her personal life, her frustrations with her sales, and probably what was happening with Capricorn.
When she walked out of my office, I sat and stared out the window for a minute. I had never cried at work before. I couldn't even think of anything that would've caused me to come to tears around co-workers. It was a foreign concept. But I would come to learn as a manager that people cried at work a lot — far more than I ever anticipated. To the point where I bought boxes of Kleenex to keep in my office, because tears were inevitable.
Most of the time, tears were not about the organization. They were usually the result of personal life issues or hardship. But tears also flow as a result of bad leadership, terrible processes, and toxic environments. In my opinion, it's a data point that shouldn't be overlooked. If your team or co-workers are constantly in tears, it's not because they're emotional — it's because the environment doesn't serve them.
If you find yourself in a place where the tears keep coming and the weight feels constant instead of occasional, it is worth asking whether the problem is you or the environment you are operating in. Chronic emotional exhaustion is often a signal that something around you is misaligned, unmanaged, or broken, and no amount of personal resilience will fix a system that continues to grind people down.
Good leaders pay attention to those signals, not to manage emotions, but to understand what is happening beneath the surface of performance. Tears are feedback, just like missed numbers or disengagement. Ignoring that data does not make you strong; it just delays the inevitable cost.
And if you are the one sitting across from a desk wondering why work feels heavier than it should, remember: your job is not supposed to regularly reduce you to tears just to survive it. There is a line between challenge and harm. Pay attention to where you are breaking down, because over time, the environment you stay in will shape you whether you intend it to or not.