Boss demands employee 'evaluate' whether leading people is for him after getting too emotional in a meeting, employee is left wondering if he still has time to flip the script: 'Everything doesn’t scream trust. We have lost this trust in you.'

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  A group of six models representing all the people who have lost trust in this employee

• My boss just gave me a devastating 1:1, involved HR, and told me to evaluate if leadership is for me. How do I handle this?

  
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  via Getty Images

  A tense meeting representing the one where the incident occured.

• Not exactly sure if companies really benefit from having emotionless leaders, or if that’s just what they think they would benefit from. In my mind, a good leader connects with the people he is in charge of, is stable but has emotional bandwidth and fluctuations, and is human enough to spark empathy in his crew.

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• To play devil’s advocate here, yes, of course, crying in front of your colleagues in a call because somebody got kicked out, especially as a team leader, can “derail the team’s emotional stability’’ and leave everyone wondering if they’re next. But can’t we be given a chance to evolve? Ok, I might be taking things way too personally here because this happened to me. I cried at a meeting once, and my tears seemed to be the drop that overflowed the glass, so I got kicked out shortly after that, and they had to find another employee. This always confused me because I was, and still am, very good friends with all my team from back then, and we worked very well together. I was honestly just having a bad day, but I came to the conclusion afterwards that tears can be scary for some people in the wrong contexts.

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• Commentators in this story agree that ‘the writing is on the wall’ and that this employee’s reputation is now set, and also that this one-on-one wasn’t an honest attempt at making him evaluate what had happened. It was most likely an effort to let him know in advance and allow him to emotionally process a later layoff.

• We probably can’t change rules that are so set in stone, and shouldn’t try to make bosses or HR more merciful. We should, like this worker, from now on, focus on the gold, unspoken rule of leadership: Never, EVER lose your cool.

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