Many organizational leaders are proud and use a performance strategy that works against them.
It looks like a calm, steady hand under pressure. Exactly what it looks like for us to promote people.
But the research isn’t clear: This is not working.
It’s called strategy suppression– control your emotions, keep your face neutral, don’t let them see your skin. We built completely leadership archetype around him. I named him The myth of the indestructible leaderTrue strength means never being affected by what is happening around you.
A systematic review of 101 studies shows that: on leadership style, leader well-being and leader performance, feeling correlates negative with efficiency.
Top performing leaders don’t feel inferior. They are regulates otherwise.
In a recent article leaders who can’t erase, I’ve written about executives who check their phones in the middle of the night not because it’s urgent, but because it’s dangerous to stop. Hook under this pattern person synthesis, control worryand a deep conviction that personal value equals production. What I haven’t fully addressed is what happens when emotions arise. When stress sets in, when frustration builds, when something comes up that threatens your sense of control. The question is, what do you do with that discomfort when it comes?
Most high performers, when pressed, say, “Shut it down, get over it, and get on with it.”
Research shows that this approach has real costs.
How Much Does Suppression Really Cost?
The seminal work was done by psychologists James Gross and Oliver John, and their 2003 study became one of the most cited papers. emotional regulation science. Their finding was both intuitive and specific: people who usually suppress their emotions don’t feel less. They feel otherwise: more negative emotions, less positive emotions, all of which appear to be externally constructed (Gross & John, 2003).
Suppression does not make the emotion go away. Suppression locks it in while consuming cognitive resources to maintain a facade.
We’ve all been there, when stress and anxiety build up inside us, but we don’t feel like we’re allowed to release them.
It’s like putting a rock in a house of cards. And weight is done using the same cognitive budget that you use to think clearly, focus properly, and make good decisions.
In the end, you can’t handle it all.
Neurology adds the next layer. Important comment Nature Neuroscience Reviews (2009) showed that even mild, acute, uncontrollable stress causes a rapid loss of prefrontal cortex (PFC) function. The PFC is responsible for the region behind your forehead decision making, attentionand complex thinking is the part of the brain most sensitive to stress. Under threat, the high-level thinking you need most is critically impaired. This is where fighting, flying, freezing and mud live.
Now put stack compression on top of that. When stress activates the fight-or-flight system and you try to suppress the process rather than suppress it, the activation continues and so does the demand on your cognitive resources. In specific conditions where cognitive resources are depleted, you have added a second cognitive task (suppressing the emotion) on top of the first one (do the leadership task).
Keeping a poker face requires effort, and that effort must be stolen from other tasks.
Hook of Stoicism
Suppression for many highly effective leaders hook– a long-standing behavioral driver that has served them well by enabling them to perform better in a chaotic home, demanding environment, or at work. traumatic experience.
The old saying “I’ll give you something to cry about” teaches many future leaders how to bury the emotions that may arise.
Many leaders, at the beginning of their careers, appear irredeemable, even rewarded. Perhaps this happened at school, in the field, and eventually at work. Encouragement has arrived. The form is reinforced.
By the time they reach the C-suite, suppression has been so consistently rewarded that it no longer feels like a choice. Like this feature: I’m the one who keeps it together.
Attachment doesn’t mean being unemotional. It means choosing how you react to your emotions rather than following an automatic response pattern that was set 20 years ago and has never been checked since then.
Essential Readings in Leadership
Three actions that change the regulatory framework
I used to work with a CFO at a mid-sized healthcare company, I’ll call him Dana, and he built it. career to be calm. His board loved him for it. But because it always is emphasized He was seriously considering quitting his job. He was proud of what he had achieved, but once he got to the top, he wasn’t sure if he could keep up the stress.
He discovered that his composure was not protecting him; it would hurt him. He not only experienced more tiredness the more successful he was, the more careless mistakes he made and the more his staff tried to imitate his cool, calm and collected approach, which led to crises.
His regulatory strategy and the impact on his leadership and thinking skills were the problem.
The process of changing your regulatory strategy involves three steps:
1. Give a more specific name. Not just “I’m stressed,” but “I’m frustrated because I don’t have the information I need yet.” Research on affective cues shows that naming emotions clearly reduces amygdala activation (Lieberman et al., 2007). In order to name a feeling internally, you don’t have to express it publicly, but the name gives your brain comfort and a foundation.
2. Reconsider the signal, not the situation. Emotional activation is a signal, not noise. “This urgency tells me that something important is unclear.” Functional reappraisal of stress arousal –My body is preparing to perform –switches activation from threat to challenge. In fact, employees with a “stress-increasing” mindset performed higher enduranceless anxiety and more adaptive cortisol responses than those who behaved differently.
3. Use it, don’t control it. Recent studies using fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) have shown that cooperative neuronal synchronization between humans. increased under severe stress. Connecting under pressure is a real resource.
Leaders who are approachable, disciplined, and present enable their teams to think with them. Dana didn’t need to emote at council meetings; he had to show that the feeling was present, recognized and accepted.
Reframe
Executives who are constantly under pressure do not have the most emotional control, but they have a more complex relationship with their emotions. They can quickly name an emotion, accurately read its signals (in themselves and others), revise its meaning in real time, and at the same time communicate with the people around them.
And time emotional intelligence often referred to as “soft skills,” I would argue that they provide good leaders with clarity. These 101 studies have been found to be positive predictors of leadership performance.
If the previous part about always-on leaders helped you identify the hook under your existence, this is the next question: When stress arises, when activity increases, what do you do with it?
The answer is not to suppress it. The answer is to understand it, recognize it, process it and use it.
This leadership is clearly positioned.
