Before nine o’clock in the morning, a member of your leadership team calls about an unhappy customer.
They are worried. You listen, lower the temperature, and help them see the next step. They leave the conversation calmer than they entered it.
Later, you explain a difficult decision to someone disappointed by it. You acknowledge what it means for them without reopening a decision the business needs you to hold.
At lunchtime, two colleagues bring you the tension that has been building between them. In the afternoon, someone asks for reassurance about the future. You offer as much certainty as you honestly can, while keeping the uncertainty you still carry from spilling into the room.
Each conversation asks something different from you.
Patience. Empathy. Restraint. Confidence. Judgement.
By the end of the day, several people feel clearer because they have spoken to you.
Then someone asks how your day was.
‘Fine,’ you say. ‘Busy.’
Nothing about that answer is untrue. It simply does not describe the work you have been doing beneath the work everyone can see.
The work behind a steady leader
Senior leadership involves a considerable amount of emotional labour.
We tend to associate leadership with decisions, strategy, and results. We give less attention to the emotional work involved in creating the conditions in which other people can perform.
A leader absorbs disappointment without becoming defensive. They remain thoughtful when someone else becomes anxious. They anticipate how a decision will affect people, communicate tough messages, and take responsibility for the emotional consequences of choices the organisation still needs to make.
This does not make their steadiness artificial. The opposite is true. Steadiness is often the result of considerable emotional awareness and self-regulation.
Nitin Nohria, the former dean of Harvard Business School, describes this as the emotional labour of leadership. Senior leaders must manage their own emotional responses and also help shape the emotional climate around them. Much of that work is necessary. Almost all of it is invisible.
The difficulty is not that leaders remain steady for others. It is that they may have nowhere appropriate to process what that steadiness requires of them.
The role creates the labour. the mask can deepen the isolation.
It is important not to confuse the demands of the role with the patterns a leader brings to it.
The role creates the emotional labour. A difficult decision still has to be communicated well. Other people’s reactions still need to be heard. The leader cannot make the organisation’s anxiety the team’s problem simply because they are experiencing it too.
But the Mask can influence what the leader does with the emotional weight they carry away.
We all have automatic ways of responding to situations that leave us feeling exposed. In my Leading Unmasked approach to coaching senior leaders, I call this response the Mask. It scans what is happening around us for ‘danger’. Not life-threatening danger, but psychological danger: being seen as uncertain, incapable of coping.
The Mask already carries the painful belief, ‘I am not enough.’ It is alert to anything that might expose that belief to other people or bring it more fully into our own awareness.
When the emotional demands of leadership accumulate, its instructions can sound entirely reasonable: You should be able to handle this. Other people have enough to deal with. Do not become another problem. Sort it by yourself.
The Mask is not who we are. But because it offers its thoughts in our own voice, isolation can feel like professionalism rather than an automatic response to the possibility of being exposed.
Somewhere the leader does not have to manage the room
The answer is not indiscriminate disclosure. A leadership team should not have to reassure its leader before it can deal with the issue in front of it.
Senior leaders do, however, need relationships in which they are not responsible for managing the emotional climate of the conversation. Somewhere they can think aloud, acknowledge what a situation is asking of them and receive candid challenge without first having to reassure everyone else.
Without that space, emotional labour can quietly become emotional isolation. Pressure accumulates. Perspective narrows. Decisions remain inside one person’s thinking for longer than they should.
What begins as a private cost can eventually become an organisational one.
What are you carrying?
Think about the past week.
Whose disappointment have you absorbed? Whose anxiety have you helped settle? Which reaction did you anticipate before making a decision? What have you contained so that somebody else could think more clearly?
Then ask yourself two different questions:
What am I carrying because leadership genuinely requires it?
What am I carrying alone because something in me insists that I should?
The distinction may not be immediately obvious. But one honest conversation can help reveal it.
‘I do not need you to solve this, but I need somewhere to think it through.’
Being the person others rely on does not remove your need for somewhere reliable to take what the role asks you to carry.
Experience the forum
That is the reason I created The Forum. It gives business owners and senior leaders a confidential place where they do not have to manage the emotional climate of the conversation. They can think openly, test their assumptions, and talk about the things they cannot easily discuss elsewhere.
On 2 September, I am hosting Experience the Forum, an online opportunity to experience that kind of conversation for yourself.
If this edition has resonated with you, you can learn more and reserve your place here.
Until next week,
Gavin
Source: Harvard Business Review, How CEOs Can Navigate the Emotional Labor of Leadership (2023). Harvard Business Review