We should allow sad days, not just sick days (Transcript)

DeMar DeRozan:
So all star weekend in Los Angeles. I was a part of all star team, a starter on the team actually.

Adam Grant:
This is NBA player DeMar DeRozan.

DeMar DeRozan:
And it had just been a tough couple of weeks leading into the all-star weekend. And I was just looking forward to it, just looking at it like, I got a break. I could go back home. I could see my kids. I could see my family, kind of just let my hair down a little bit and relax.

Adam Grant:
Over that All-Star weekend in 2018, DeMar didn’t get the calm and rest he expected.

DeMar DeRozan:
Everybody was pulling at me, needing something, coming home and seeing yourself on the side of buildings.

Adam Grant:
He felt overwhelmed and alone.

DeMar DeRozan:
Every ounce of emotion in a negative way you could, you could feel, I think I felt it in, in that moment.

I hit a wall. I just felt like I needed to get something off my chest.

Adam Grant:
So one night, DeMar decided to share how he was feeling… in a tweet. It was a lyric from the song “Tomorrow” by Kevin Gates. DeMar wrote “This depression get the best of me.”

NBA players don’t typically talk about their mental health in the locker room, let alone in public. But here was DeMar telling the whole world he was feeling depressed!

DeMar DeRozan:
And I tweeted that and I went to sleep and I woke up. I woke up to like, it was crazy. I just woke up to a bunch of mess and that next morning, we had media day and practice before the all star game. So I'm in front of all of all media having to answer to my tweet and I wasn't ready for it cause I didn't expect what to come next, but it was probably one of the greatest things that I did and you know, to this day, I'm glad I did it.

Adam Grant:
Finally sharing his depression gave DeMar a sense of RELIEF. And it also empowered him to focus on a bigger mission...

DeMar DeRozan:
Breaking the stigma of mental health, depression, you know, all these things that, all these things that people go through that we overlook that could just really save people’s lives. Just to really have people feel like they're being seen.

Adam Grant:
DeMar started a conversation about mental health in the NBA. What if that conversation happened in every workplace?

I’m Adam Grant, and this is WorkLife, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective. I’m an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck. In this show, I take you inside the minds of fascinating people to rethink how we work, lead, and live.
Today: What we get wrong about mental health at work, and what we can do to start getting it right....
Thanks to SAP for sponsoring this episode.

Before the pandemic, about one in ten Americans were experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety. During COVID, the rate of mental illness quadrupled.

Of course, clinical depression and anxiety often require professional help.
But we’ve all felt stress and sadness, loneliness and languishing, anxiety about losing a job or our kids getting sick.

And we’ve all had moments of feeling overwhelmed or disconnected-- from other people, from our own values, or from hope about the future.

These emotions affect us in our jobs. And people are finally starting to pay serious attention to mental health at work.

Many people want to do something about it. But there are a lot of misconceptions...

If we want to make real progress, we need to bust three big myths.

The first myth is that leaders and high performers are somehow immune to struggling with mental health. Like DeMar -- an NBA All-Star!

DeMar DeRozan:
Especially being an athlete, you’re viewed as being the terminator. You have no emotions, you have everything in the world, what is there to cry about? Like that there shows the denial you could be in from hiding from whatever it is you're going through.

Adam Grant:
Mental health challenges can affect anyone. Feeling dejected, stressed, or anxious doesn’t mean you’re weak.

DeMar DeRozan:
Depression don't discriminate, you know, it’ll attack anything and anybody.

Adam Grant:
Recognizing that ANYBODY on a team can struggle with mental health problems helps to destigmatize them.

It signals that being vulnerable doesn’t prevent us from being strong leaders or strong performers.

Which brings us to the second myth: that if you try hard enough, you can just turn off whatever’s going on in your life when you get to work.

Be professional -- whatever your personal issues are, check them at the office door.

News flash: people aren’t robots!

Consider a study of call center employees. When they start the day upset, distressed, or anxious, their performance quality suffers.
They have lower verbal fluency-- more fumbles, more fillers, more awkward pauses, more vocal tics. And if they finish a call feeling upset, distressed, or anxious, they’re less productive the rest of the day.

Of course, some people learn to manage those emotions unusually well.

DeMar DeRozan:
Some of my greatest performances in my career came out when, when I'd been at my lowest.

Adam Grant:
Really?

DeMar DeRozan:
Yeah. That's what it was for me growing up, survival instinct mindset that I have of knowing that, you know, it's not a safe environment that you in, but you gotta make the best out of it, understand whatever you gotta do from the time you leave out the house, you gotta make sure you walk back in the house, that train, train me to withstand a lot of my dark thoughts and dark moments, to be able to do whatever needs to be done.

Adam Grant:
But even if you’re like DeMar and you rise to the occasion in the moment, mental health challenges take a toll over time.

Over 100 studies have shown that when we have low psychological well-being, or face depression or general anxiety, our job performance suffers.

Which brings us to the third myth. Many people believe that whatever their mental health challenges are, they don’t belong in the workplace.

That it’s a distraction -- something leaders should try to keep out and employees should suppress. But when we don’t address our emotional baggage, we bring it with us to work and spread it to other people.

Research reveals that depression and anxiety can be contagious. Our coworkers pick up on it, and it can affect their performance and well-being.

So the known problem of “presenteeism” — where employees show up to work sick and infect others — also applies to mental health.

Mental health shows up in your workplace whether it’s welcome there or not. And NOT addressing it leaves people suffering in silence. DeMar knows from experience.

DeMar DeRozan:
I fell into a deep, darker place that, um, this time it just went completely dark. You know, I couldn't see nothing. Couldn't feel nothing.

Adam Grant:
What goes on in your brain when you're feeling like that?

DeMar DeRozan:
Feeling lost, being around a bunch of people, but feel like you're in the middle of the ocean in a little kayak by yourself at times.

Adam Grant:
If he broke his leg or got the flu, his teammates would notice-- just like your coworkers would notice if you came to work in a cast or coughed and sniffled your way through a video call.

But mental illness is often invisible. And DeMar made a brave choice not to conceal it.

When he opened up about feeling depressed, it didn’t damage his performance or drag his team down. It had a positive ripple effect across the league.

When fellow NBA player Kevin Love had a panic attack during a game, he credited DeMar for giving him the courage to talk about what happened.

DeMar DeRozan:
You know, just to see guys share their story was even more inspirational and motivating to me because we all got a story to tell so to see guys speak about it and be more vulnerable that's what it's about.

Adam Grant:
You said it felt like you were on a kayak alone in the ocean before you spoke up, uh, after you got that off your, off your chest, what was different?

DeMar DeRozan:
Man, um, everything, you know, I remember being out to eat somewhere and, um, you know, older gentleman came up to me and said, you know, I saved his son’s life because he was suicidal...and to hear something like that, it gave me the chills because, in that moment I was expressing how I felt, but to hear a story like that, it's all about saving lives, you know, giving people hope, and when you can have hope to lean on that go a long way.

Adam Grant:
That's beautiful. And it's also the best response I've ever heard to “shut up and dribble.”

DeMar DeRozan:
Yeah, exactly.

Adam Grant:
Being open about mental health, bringing it into HIS team -- allowed important conversations to happen throughout DeMar’s workplace.

DeMar DeRozan:
You know, one of my closest friends in the NBA is Kyle Lowery and, you know, he had known firsthand, it used to be some games where he know what I was going through. And after the game we would sit next to each other in the locker room. And sometimes he'll put his hand on my shoulder and say, you know, you’re the strongest person I've ever been around. Like, I, I, I don't understand how you could just go out there and do what you just did and, you know, deal with reality two hours after you been on the court.

Adam Grant:
That ripple effect can happen in your team-- whether you work with accountants or mechanics or call center staff.

ANY team that's trying to better support people needs to normalize struggle. To make it acceptable to face emotional challenges-- and to talk about them.

DeMar DeRozan:
I've had a younger teammate, you know, and he, he, um, opened up to me in a way that definitely helped, you know, but I felt like he wouldn't have did it if he didn't see me being vulnerable. It goes a long way because a lot of these young guys, we all go through a lot of things. I went from being an 18 year old at Compton high school to going to college for one year, not even a full year, to being drafted to the NBA and thrown out there. I had a bank account that my first check. I remember my Bank of America thought it was a fraud. Like, you know, getting so much money and it's like, what to do next? You got so many people trying to take advantage of you tell you what's right. And that becomes a challenge because a lot of us are scared to ask for help.

Adam Grant:
DeMar puts a lot of effort into creating a team culture that’s open and accepting of mental health struggles. He wants new players to know they can share pain and suffering, just like he does.

DeMar DeRozan:
It was always hard for me to talk to certain people because if I look at you and feel like you don't know what it is, what I come from, how, how do you expect me to open up fully? You know, I'm from Compton, California.

Like, I wasn't around, you know, white people until I was in college. You know? So how you expect me to talk to this white, older man that probably never been in a situation of hearing gunshots every night or being inside the house that was raided because they thought it was a drug house, you know, so many of those instances to where it's like, you know, I'm not, I'm not going to talk about, about this, cause I'm not sure if you’re gonna judge me.

Adam Grant:
I don't want to make any predictions about your future careers, but if you were an owner or a GM or a head coach, how would you address mental health?

DeMar DeRozan:
The same way I address nutrition, the same way I address, how to run a play, same way I address how to be a professional. If you address what's in you mentally first, everything else will carry over physically, emotionally to get the best out of that player. You may do something that they get all these guys together to open up the kind of get out of their comfort zones, talk to each other. to make guys feel safe.

Adam Grant:
But that responsibility shouldn’t just fall to one player -- or one employee. It’s not enough to just have a few compassionate coworkers. We need to scale it, and build compassionate organizations.

More on that after the break…

......

As the pandemic raged in full force, I kept seeing calls for more empathy at work. People wanted empathy from their coworkers, their clients, their bosses, and especially their bosses’ bosses.

Whenever people talk about mental health at work, empathy is a big theme.

But there’s a psychologist at the University of Toronto who has challenged us to rethink our responses to empathy.

His name is Paul Bloom. And his work suggests that if we’re not careful, empathy can lead us astray.

Paul Bloom:
Empathy has the power to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling putting yourself in another person's shoes. So psychologists make a distinction between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. Cognitive empathy is understanding what another person thinks or what another person feels and emotional empathy is feeling it. So if I know you're anxious and I say, oh, this guy's anxious, that's cognitive empathy. If I feel your anxiety and become anxious with you, that's emotional.

Adam Grant:
So Paul, we've never met before, but by all accounts, you seem to be a caring person. Why are you against emotional empathy then?

Paul Bloom:
Yeah, it's uh, it's uh, Twitter has had his opinion about that too. You read a book against empathy. It's like writing a book against kittens. Um, and, I'm not a monster. I'm a guy who's very interested as individually and also as a scientist and how we can be a moral, how it could be good people

Adam Grant:
Paul finds that we need to be thoughtful about how we handle emotional empathy, because it can lead us into a few traps that actually prevent us from caring about others.

The first trap is that we tend to feel empathy for individuals, not groups.

Paul Bloom:
Uh, there's study after study finding very weirdly that we care more about the one than about the 10 or about a hundred. And it's very human, but it leads to terrible policies and terrible choices.

Adam Grant:
A manager who empathizes with one employee’s stress is at risk for giving him time off but not extending the same benefits to the rest of the team… let alone to other teams.

Which leads us to the second trap: empathy is biased.

Paul Bloom:
It's terribly biased. It's, it's, it's much more, um, it's much easier for me to become empathic for you. A guy who looks like me and has a similar job than me and speaks my language and, and maybe a similar background then for me to feel empathy for someone whose skin is of a different color. Or it lives in a far away land or who I'm frightened of. And when we make decisions based on empathy, we find ourselves diverting our care and our love to people a lot like us.

Adam Grant:
And the third trap is that empathy can drain us.

Paul Bloom:
There were studies suggesting that nurses who are higher empathy spend less time with their patients.

Adam Grant:
Feeling another person’s pain can be overwhelming. We get so overloaded that we end up focusing on managing our own emotions instead of showing care to others.

Paul Bloom:
Doctors and nurses work with people who are in real pain and they talk about how their empathy gets in the way and that they would like to have less of that.

Adam Grant:
That, that also reminds me of the long standing, I think misnomer that, you know, in healthcare, especially people feel compassion, fatigue, and my read of the evidence there. Yeah. It's not showing compassion that exhausts us and drains us. It's empathic distress.It's feeling concerned for a person and being unable to help them are unable to alleviate their pain. That really hurts.

Paul Bloom:
You're exactly right, the neuroscientist, Tanya Singer, done some lovely work distinguishing exactly the things you're talking about. Distinguishing compassion, like love caring and empathy, which leads to empathic distress. The stress and study after study, she finds compassion invigorates you and makes you a better help or makes you more caring, empathy leads to distress, which brings you down.

Adam Grant:
What we need more than empathy is compassion.

In his research, Paul finds that you don’t have to feel other people’s feelings to CARE about their feelings.

Regardless of how much you empathize with someone’s pain, the question is whether you respond by taking action to alleviate their pain.

That’s compassion.

Paul Bloom:
And I've come to be persuaded that the best way to do good in the world, both at an individual level and also in a more global level is to care a lot about people. To think rationally about, about how to, how to do good. And I call it rational compassion.

Adam Grant:
Even before COVID, research revealed that employees expected their managers to care about their emotional well-being-- to listen, show concern, and offer help.
Those expectations have only risen over the past year.

Compassion is no longer above and beyond — it’s an organizational imperative for attracting and retaining talented people.
But some leaders are still struggling to warm up to the idea of compassion at work.

Sally Maitlis:
The big fear is if we start doing all this nicey nice, sort of back rubbing cozying up, which is how people may construe compassion, then we're going to be taken advantage of.

Adam Grant:
Sally Maitlis is an organizational behavior professor at Oxford-- and a therapist. One of her specialties is compassion at work, and she finds that many managers are afraid of the idea.

Sally Maitlis:
And the whole place is going to go to hell, because what about people's performance? You know, in our organization, we need to get things done. And if we're sitting around singing kumbaya and holding people's hands, how's that going to help anything?

Adam Grant:
Compassion is not about singing kumbaya. It’s more than just showing warmth-- it takes competence too.

Sally Maitlis:
Compassion competence consists of a sort of emergent pattern of collective noticing in this generous way, collective feeling and collective acting to alleviate someone's someone's suffering and to do this in a customized way. I would start by showing it to my team and by encouraging in my team people to listen to each other, to notice when someone's suffering to interpret that suffering generously and to bring to a conversation, how could we help this person?

Adam Grant:
But it isn’t easy. It requires having your emotional antenna up-- being attuned to other people’s mental health, not just their performance or productivity.

In cultures that lack compassion, a few people end up carrying that burden. Researchers call them Toxin Handlers!

Sally Maitlis:
And they become the sounding board and the ear for people who are really struggling and in distress and people always feel better when they've. Spent time with the toxin handler because that person creates a holding space for them and sort of contains the difficult emotions and takes actions to try to actually alleviate what's causing that suffering.

Adam Grant:
But this isn’t sustainable for those individuals-- or for the organization.

Sally Maitlis:
Over time, that toxin handler gets sort of filled with the toxicity themselves, they can end up burning out or really becoming quite ill with all that they're absorbing. And they're not a substitute for really weaving into the roles and the routines and the culture of an organization, ways of responding more constructively to people's suffering.

Adam Grant:
Yes, please. So we need to think about this as an organizational culture problem, not just, we're gonna put it in. We're gonna parachute in a person who's going to solve it all.

Sally Maitlis:
Start by making it really clear that this is what you believe in. We believe in looking after our employees and we believe that people's mental health and people's humanity is really of central importance here.

Adam Grant:
So what does a compassionate organization look like?
At the policy level, I’d love to see every workplace offer paid time off for mental health, the same way it exists for physical health.
They should cover support for mental health care the same way they pay medical bills. But policy is not enough, because compassion is about action.

Sally Maitlis:
Compassion can be very small acts that can make an enormous difference to somebody.

Adam Grant:
For several months, we’ve scoured the globe for examples of compassionate organizations.

We’ve talked to leaders who are celebrated for unusual compassion and workplaces that have won awards for extraordinary compassion. And most of what we heard was surprisingly ordinary.

The basics of compassion at work are common sense, but they aren’t common practice.

In one survey in the spring of 2020, over a third of employees said that not a single person at their company had asked them how they were doing since the pandemic had started.

So what does everyday compassion look like at work?

It’s about noticing and responding to pain.

It’s all the workplaces that gave people Fridays off to “recharge and spend time with loved ones.” It’s the organizations that offered employees free, private counseling sessions.

It’s the CEO who was so worried about burnout that he invited all of his employees-- over 3500 people!-- to email their vacation plans to him.

It’s the manager I heard about recently who said, “It’s ok to call in sick. It’s ok to call in sad too.” Sad days, not just sick days. Yes!

And it’s the leader I heard about in the spring of 2020, who was working to build a culture of compassion inside the Canadian government.

Darlene Upton:
My name is Darlene Upton and I'm the vice-president of protected areas, establishment and conservation with parks, Canada. we're working with nature for nature, for people connecting Canadians to nature.

Adam Grant:
How many people do you manage?

Darlene Upton:
I think there's about 200 on the team now, but, , the organization as a whole is probably around 7,000 so interact with a lot of people.

Adam Grant:
As lockdowns extended from a few days to indefinite, Darlene started to worry about mental health on her team.

Darlene Upton:
You always have a boundary between kind of. Work and home and the pandemic kind of blew that up. So all of a sudden, I could see who had kids at home, you could see right into people's bedrooms in some cases. And you could see people struggling more.

Adam Grant:
You probably felt that too. Trying to keep up with every video meeting. Working onsite and worrying about protecting yourself and your loved ones from COVID. Navigating a new virtual workflow while confronting the uncertainty of the pandemic. Taking care of older parents or younger kids.

Darlene didn’t want her team to feel isolated or overwhelmed...she wanted to send a message of compassion.

One day, she was scrolling on social media when she stumbled across a list of principles -- for Working Remotely during Covid. They were created by Jonathan Lundberg, an engineering director in Ireland!

Darlene Upton:
The first one that I really liked that caught my eye is, you are not working from home. You are at home during a crisis trying to work.

Adam Grant:
Another was: your personal physical, mental, and emotional health is far more important than anything else right now.

Darlene Upton:
The other one I really liked is that you should not try and compensate for lost productivity by working longer hours.
I think there was a sense that people are going to have to work, you know, forever to make up for that, for dealing with their family or their kids or whatever happened to be going on in their lives. So that idea of being more flexible in how we treated people and not expecting people to make up all the time, like till midnight or, or whatever, like people still needed a life.

And then there were two more that kind of a bit later on in the pandemic that seemed to resonate a lot. And that was, you'll be kind to yourself and not judge how you were coping based on how you see others coping and you will be kind to others and not judge how they are coping based on how you are coping.

Adam Grant:
And the last principle said: your team's success will not be measured the same way it was when things were normal.

Darlene Upton:
I think these principles start you from a place of, of trust you, you trust your employees are working and they're productive I mean, cause I find myself at times, you know, you're under pressure and you've got deadlines and things like that. There are times where. You know, I want to kind of go, where is it? And then you kind of stop yourself and go, well, wait a second. Especially now, like you really don't know what people are dealing with necessarily.

Adam Grant:
So Darlene shared the principles with her team of 200 -- and then they went viral. First across the Canadian government and then around the world. The principles helped pave the way for Darlene to create a more compassionate workplace when her team needed it most.

Darlene Upton:
They resonated with me. They really resonated with people. And I think, I would say like, some people got a bit of comfort knowing that management would kind of share something like that.

Adam Grant:
That’s the first step for building a culture of compassion: You make it legitimate to share struggles. It’s what DeMar did in his NBA team… and it’s what Darlene did at Parks Canada.

Darlene Upton:
So I think the principles gave those people working in offices a little bit of legitimacy that their life was not like normal and rosy

Adam Grant:
Her team realized their struggles mattered to leaders and slowly gained the confidence to share how they were coping with remote work and all the stress of COVID.

Soon Darlene was leading weekly calls with her team and asking them how they were all doing...

Darlene Upton:
I used to ask around as to who was doing some neat things to cope with the pandemic. So one of the team members, her and her husband, were big avid hikers and climbers. So they had developed the system, they had measured the staircase going down to the basement and they started tracking how much they were going up and down it and calculating their elevation gains that they were doing. And then they would attach that, you know, they would liken that to a mountain peak in a national park. And they would pretend they were climbing it. And once they hit the elevation, that would take a photo with the family and post a picture on the wall and head for the next peak. So, you know, after this call, everybody's shared all the positive stuff.
I thought it was great.

Adam Grant:
But for the rest of the team members listening to the story, it was not great at all!
It’s good to open up the conversation about struggle, but you have to be careful about the tone you set when you do it.
Darlene’s team call was veering dangerously toward toxic positivity: the pressure to be upbeat and enthusiastic at all times.

DARLENE:
A couple days later I started hearing people saying that they actually felt worse after the call, not the intention. So I had on the, on the next call, I said, you know, I thanked, again, everybody that had shared what they were doing, but I acknowledged that, I had heard that some people were not feeling that they were coping as well. And, and as a result of that call, they felt a little bit worse about themselves. People were judging themselves based on how others were coping.
And that just opened the floodgates up.
…
It was a very, very emotional call. There were people in tears saying they were lonely, sharing some of their struggles and some people saying like I don't have the energy to bake sourdough or climb mountains. I'm exhausted.

Adam Grant:
This is where Darlene took a second step toward building a culture of compassion.

She challenged toxic positivity by setting up a call for people to be candid about their struggles at work. In your team, that might be dedicating a portion of your weekly huddle to emotional support, or scheduling a monthly team check-in to see how people are doing. This opens the door for what’s called emotional acknowledgement.

It’s the simple act of noticing and mentioning another person’s emotional state, and research reveals that it builds trust. It starts with paying attention when a coworker’s responsiveness dips or an employee’s mood lags.

For example, let’s say your colleague was frowning during a meeting that went poorly. Instead of just commenting on the situation-- “that meeting was a dud”-- you can acknowledge the emotion itself by saying: “You seemed upset during the meeting. How are you doing?”

I’ve found in my research that making space for compassion doesn’t just benefit the people who receive it. It also fosters feelings of pride and gratitude in people who show compassion-- they appreciate the opportunity to give support to others. And Sally finds that the benefits extend even further:

Sally Maitlis:
And we also know that people who hear about compassion organizations or who witnessed compassion also feel better, feel more loyal, , more committed to their organization. So just, that in itself, I think is a very, joyful set of findings.

Adam Grant:
A final step for building a culture of compassion is for leaders to show their own vulnerability. When leaders model that it’s ok to struggle, that makes it easier for others to ask for help. Which was something Darlene got more comfortable doing.

Darlene Upton:
For me, Finding the balance of sharing enough, but not too much, and maybe get a sense of, You know, it's okay to have a down day. The boss has a down day. Um, and, and, and also trying to be inspirational in a sense as well.

Adam Grant:
It's so powerful that you said it's okay to have a down day, which is something that a lot of leaders don't have. They don't feel they have the luxury to do. What, what emotions did you share with your team?

Darlene Upton:
I remember coming back at Christmas and I thought Christmas was going to be such a great break. and I, I came back, I came back angry, like, it was such a weird feeling. Like this anger at being in this. State of like, not happiness, not, you know, nothing to be particularly sad about, but also nothing to be super joyous about either that sort of just existence. And, and so I've seen that. With the team

Adam Grant:
Well, I imagine that's a big part of why those principles you shared were so resonant for people who were saying, look, all of these things that are incredibly difficult, they're normal, they're human. You don't have to be completely invulnerable or invincible to them.

Darlene Upton:
I would say you've got to show a little vulnerability. you need to be able to sort of create a space where people can. Feel safe enough to kind of share how they're feeling and not be judged for it, but also know that the result of doing that is actually going to be support is that people will colleagues may step in and say, Hey, I got your back. Or, you know, the boss may say, okay, let's find another way to get this done.

Adam Grant:
As people grapple with mental health challenges, we need more managers giving permission to call in sad, not just sick. We need more workplaces to be flexible and support mental health. We need more leaders to show that it’s ok to not be ok all the time.

I hope these moments don’t end with the pandemic.

We all have struggles, and pretending they don’t exist doesn’t help people or organizations.

Normalizing struggle reveals our humanity. And responding with care elevates our humanity.

WorkLife is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Gretta Cohn, Dan O’Donnell, JoAnn DeLuna, Grace Rubenstein, Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng and Anna Phelan. This episode was produced by Camille Petersen and Constanza Gallardo. Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Hsu and Allison Leyton-Brown. Ad stories produced by Pineapple Street Studios.

Heartfelt gratitude this season to Ama Adidako, Nicole Bode, Valentina Bojanini, Sammy Case, Micah Eames, Nicole Edine, Will Hennessy, Sarah Lee, Jen Michalski, Alex Segell, Sarah Jane Souther, and Emma Taubner.

Special thanks to our sponsors: LinkedIn, Logitech, Morgan Stanley, SAP and Verizon.

Gratitude to the following researchers: Nancy Rothbard and Steffanie Wilk on mood and performance, Michael Ford and colleagues on well-being and performance, Sigal Barsade on emotional contagion, Gary Johns on presenteeism, Nancy Eisenberg, Andy Molinsky, and Joshua Margolis on emotional overload, Ginka Toegel and colleagues on emotion helping, Alisa Yu and colleagues on emotional acknowledgement, and Jane dutton, Monica Worline, Jacoba Lilius, Jason Kanov, and Peter Frost on compassion at work.

Adam Grant:
I've been waiting for you to return to the dunk contest. What would it take?

DeMar DeRozan:
It would take a time machine for me to be 25 years old, to do the dunk contest. Again