If your boss has the tendency to say “everything’s fine” at work and brush things under the rug, they might be “glossing.”
Glossing is a form of toxic positivity — in which people suppress and deny their negative emotions — and it could be holding both companies and employees back.
Leena Rinne, a business consultant who is the global head of coaching at the training platform Skillsoft, told Business Insider that she found glossing to be quite common in the workplace and that it particularly tended to occur during periods of stressful change and when people want to “fly under the radar.”
“I think it’s a natural response to anxiety or fear,” Rinne said.
Rinne said this behavior is usually imprinted on a workforce from the top down, with reports following a boss’s lead.
“Leaders create culture,” Rinne said. “If I show up to a meeting with big feelings and my leader’s like, ‘Hi, everybody,’ and just glosses, then the signal to me is that that’s what we need to do here.”
When the workforce is guarded, everyone loses out, Rinne said.
“I’m less willing to evaluate the problems for better solutions. I’m less willing to take risks and be innovative,” she said. “So I think senior leaders and all leaders should be concerned about this.”
Tackling the problem
Rinne said some signs of a glossing workforce are people not talking about tough issues at all or talking only behind their manager’s back. They might also not be turning on their cameras for remote meetings anymore.
If that’s happening, Rinne said, managers could be guilty of glossing.
Glossing over one’s real feelings in response to a culture of toxic positivity can have harmful consequences. Angela Amias, a workplace therapist, told Refinery29 that if people feel compelled to hide their feelings at work, it can lead to them feeling overly tired and burned out.
One irony here is that managers might be tempted to gloss as a way of keeping morale up by not dwelling on negatives, particularly temporary ones like a tough quarter. Rinne argues that glossing produces the opposite effect on morale and that managers should find a way to pause and acknowledge the harder times.
“Hey, we are in a period of disruption, and disruption is hard,” she said as an example of what a manager might say. “We know it’s hard, and we’re so grateful you’re on this ride with us. There’s no one we’d rather have than you.”
Rinne said managers can create their own culture of calm within their teams, regardless of the company’s wider culture.
“I can create a subculture in the larger culture of calm — people feeling seen, people feeling heard, people feeling focused,” she said.
One manager Rinne worked with said they had begun starting meetings by getting everyone to stand up and stretch for 60 seconds.
“It’s no time at all,” Rinne said. “And everyone shows up just a little differently for the meeting.”
Framing bad news
This skill isn’t intuitive to many leaders, Rinne added. Some go too far the other way and are far too blunt and harsh when difficulties arise.
“Hearing from a leader how the disruptive change on the horizon is going to be so difficult,” Rinne said. “There’s a way to frame that eases anxiety, and there’s a way to frame it that probably amps it up.”
Leaders need to be taught the skills to be transparent in a way that builds trust, “not transparent in a way that scares people,” she said.
Ultimately, people appreciate honesty, even when the news isn’t wholly positive.
Rinne said employees would much rather not be shocked when layoffs are announced or a restructure breaks up their team. If they aren’t kept in the dark, they are more likely to be engaged after periods of disruption.
“You get more when people feel safe and feel engaged than if they’re punching that clock and glossing for hours,” Rinne said.
Work friendships are dying out
Direct management cues aren’t the only issue. Rinne pointed to other recent trends, such as fewer people making friends at work (or the outright death of office friendships, depending whom you ask), the rise of remote working, and a spate of layoffs in many industries.
She argued that these factors had formed a culture in which employees believe they are treated transactionally and are showing up to do a job and little else, which has made them more likely to go with the flow and less likely to speak up about problems.
“There’s a reason why we show up this way at work, and I think that senior leaders in particular need to take a pretty hard look to say, what are we creating, and how are we motivating people to show up in this way?” Rinne said. “Because it’s not random, it’s not laziness.”
Correction: September 19, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated the year the Leadership IQ survey took place. It was 2017, not last year. The survey has been removed from the story.
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