How I hold space for crying in the workplace

From ScienceMag:

As my colleague stood there crying in my office, telling me the details of how he had just been forced to retire, I was mortified. I was an assistant professor a year into my tenure, and he was “a name”—someone well known in the field. I felt bad for him. But as a noncrier, I was unsure where to look as he sobbed, or what to say to “fix” it. Like most men of my generation, I was socialized early on to stay composed and just deal with a problem; crying was not acceptable, because it would be perceived as weak and vulnerable. I was shocked that my colleague was allowing his tears to fall in front of me, and the panic and confusion I felt stayed with me long after.

The experience with the retiring faculty member was 2 decades ago. But I found myself in similar situations years later, in the context of mentoring conversations where I was the more senior person. In one, an early-career colleague asked about a possible career pivot. I offered what I thought was practical advice: She wasn’t ready yet. The conversation moved on. But 40 minutes later she became visibly upset and began to cry. As I sat there trying to resume the conversation, I felt the same flicker of discomfort and uncertainty about how to respond that I had experienced years earlier.

Around the same time, a colleague injured his hand in a door after a meeting in my office. He was in pain and visibly upset. This time, the tears did not unsettle me at all; they made sense as part of a problem I knew how to address. I checked he was OK and moved directly to the institutional safety procedures I had been trained to follow. Afterward, though, I faced an unsettling question: Why was my response so different when the tears reflected physical pain, not emotional distress?

Thinking about the two situations, I realized I needed to allow more space for emotional crying, and to be open to what it signaled. The cues that my early-career colleague was upset had been there—hesitation, small shifts in tone, moments of uncertainty. The crying simply made visible what had already been building. I began to wonder whether I had delivered my message too directly and what I might have done differently to lessen the emotional impact it had on her. And instead of seeing her crying as a problem, I could have taken it as an opportunity to better understand her as a person.

In academia we are rarely trained for moments when a colleague becomes upset in front of us. But this is no less important than knowing how to deal with cries of physical pain. Now, when someone I work with starts to cry, I know not to brush it aside or immediately move toward making the problem go away. I try to slow the conversation and allow space for the reaction. I pay closer attention to what led up to that moment, including what I said and how I said it. Only afterward do I return to the issue that prompted it.

I still feel traces of my earlier discomfort. But I no longer see it as something to eliminate, because the stakes are high during these moments. They can lead to a more open and honest exchange and signal an important shift in the conversation—from routine discussion to something more consequential. Tears can mark the points in work life where decisions matter most: whether to stay or leave, whether progress is enough, whether a path still feels viable.

I sometimes think back to that early encounter in my office. Today, I would tell my junior self that I don’t need to fix the person who is crying, or to run away from the emotional reaction. The tears should remind me that my job as a faculty member and colleague is not just about leading for better performance, but also about embracing the whole person behind the moment.

Sometimes, the most useful thing to do is not to stop the tears, but to notice what they might be telling us about a person—and about the work lives we share.

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