Why Morra Aarons-Mele Wants You to Talk About Collective Anxiety at Work

Expert Interview for Sharehold’s Redesigning Belonging Research

Published in

Sharehold

7 min readAug 26, 2020

This post is part of an ongoing series in which Sharehold is publicly sharing our in-progress research that seeks to explore and answer the question: What does it mean to belong at work in a time of uncertainty? Are you interested in receiving our research insights when they’re released? Sign up here.

Meet Morra Aarons-Mele

The first thing you should know about Morra Aarons-Mele is that she is very introverted. The second thing you should know about Morra is that she experiences anxiety. As the host of Harvard Business Review’s podcast The Anxious Achiever, Morra chronicles leaders’ stories about the intersection of mental health and work. She’s also the author of Hiding in the Bathroom: How to Get Out There When You’d Rather Stay Home and the founder of the award-winning social impact agency Women Online and the database of women change-makers The Mission List. It will suffice to say that her introversion and anxiety has fueled her work and accomplishments.

As part of Sharehold’s research on redesigning belonging at work for uncertainty, we interviewed Morra as a thought leader on how mental health impacts work. Her interview highlighted a few themes:

The difference between the transactional level of belonging and fully belonging
How anxiety may impact one’s sense of belonging and how this time of uncertainty heightens anxiety at work
What we can do as leaders and managers to create space for processing collective trauma

Read on for a few selections from our interview with Morra:

What does belonging mean to you?

“Belonging is two-fold. Belonging is when we feel that we can be ourselves, as we define ourselves, where people accept us and value us. From another perspective, belonging is when we walk into a system of other people, we know our role, we feel that we have value to bring, and we’re clear on what that value is.

For some people, belonging is an inherent thing. I’m a big fan of adult development theory. Some people would argue that once you reach a certain level of your development, you belong no matter where you are because you understand who you are. You understand your sense of self and the value that you believe you bring. Both are equally valid. Depending on where we are in our lives and what role we’re in, one might be more important than the other.”

How does belonging relate to authenticity and inclusion?

“Inclusion and belonging are almost like sisters. To create a truly inclusive culture, people have to feel that they belong and they have to understand the value that they bring to the table, why they’re there, and feel good about it.

Diversity is not about belonging. Diversity is an external measure that someone puts on the team. Inclusion, authenticity, and equity are about belonging.

Authenticity at work is really important. But I have been around long enough to know that it’s also a little bit of a ruse because as authentic as we all are at work, we’re always playing a role. Most of us would be crazy to bring 100% of our authentic self to work.”

“It’s sort of that difference of being the exhausted new parent and saying, ‘oh, my gosh, I’m so tired. My kid isn’t sleeping. Maybe I’m gonna leave early today because I don’t have any meetings.’ But, they’re also executing what they need to do.

That’s belonging. It’s being able to share what is happening in your life that’s relevant to work. That’s the very basic transactional level of belonging. But it’s also being able to bring all the shades of yourself from your own personal history: your family story, your cultural, ethnic, and racial story, your gender story, and bring it to inform your tasks and feeling good about that.”

What’s the value of belonging at work?

“Most employers think that their people are driven by salary, by title, by all the external validations. In truth, people feel best at work when they are engaged, when they know what their role is, and when they have independence and the trust of their manager to execute that role. That’s belonging. That’s like, I’m here to be X piece of this puzzle.

We feel better when we know in a work context why we’re at the table and that we’re valued for it, and when we understand why the other people are at the table too.”

Morra, you’ve written and spoken extensively about your introversion and anxiety. How does this impact your personal sense of belonging?

“The older I get, I feel like I belong in a lot of places professionally because I know my value and I understand my role… But still I have a lot of anxiety. If I’m feeling socially anxious, then I have to work through that to understand how I belong. I’ve developed almost like a rubric to get through that and figure out what is my piece of the puzzle in this room.”

“I hate social distancing work. Everyone would think that if you’re an introvert or you have social anxiety that you would love this but I actually think that’s not true. I find it very hard to read people [on Zoom]. It amps up my anxiety when I can’t see people and read their body language easily. I have a harder time figuring out the inter-dynamics. One of the things that is really hard in distance work is we just take the old models of meetings and slap them on to distance work and Zoom.”

How might COVID-19 and this moment of growing uncertainty with COVID-19, increase awareness of systemic racism, and civil unrest and protests impact one’s sense of belonging at work?

“Uncertainty can hugely impact belonging. In addition to COVID-19, the recent protests are also a piece of this. As a white person, this is different for me. I’m privileged. Many people aren’t. I would imagine that there’s a lot of struggle internally about feeling like ‘I need to go to work, I need to pretend like everything’s okay.’ And it’s just not okay.

I imagine there is a lot of internal conflict between teams about belonging because we’re realizing that the spaces that we come from are so different, and we can’t sweep all that under the rug anymore. That fantasy has been exploded forever, which is good.”

“Anxiety at work right now is just a given… When we don’t talk about it, every action is going to be infected with the anxiety and we’re all going to make each other more anxious. That’s really dangerous. It’s really hard to have to keep working and producing through all this. I just want to sit on the couch and stare out the window in my anxiety, but I have to work.”

I just want to sit on the couch and stare out the window in my anxiety, but I have to work.

What can we do as leaders to increase the sense of belonging at work during this time, especially for team members struggling with mental health?

“Managers can acknowledge the collective trauma. If they have the means, I would love every manager to hold space and bring in someone to help people work through it — acknowledge it, hold space for it, and totally normalize it. That’s where anyone can start. Any leader can just say, I’m anxious. You don’t need to show them the mess. But it is incredibly powerful to just acknowledge that this is hard.

As the manager, you can’t be like ‘I understand you, we’re all feeling the same thing.’ That’s not true. We’re feeling different things. As my father would say, nobody comes from a radish. Not only do we bring our experiences, our race, our ethnicity, our financial status, but we all also bring our emotional mindset about feelings, weakness, and vulnerability to the table. We’ve got to peel through that.”