The Slightest Misalignment

What a room does with the slightest misalignment of expectations

Hanna’s misalignments were small and completely natural. Everyone has a right to their personal skeletons and everyone has their personal pain point. While this is natural and socially common, they take a disproportionate weight in how a woman leader is perceived — not to mention their consequences to her.

Research on impression formation is unambiguous on this point: negative information — or information that deviates from expectation — is processed more deeply, encoded more durably, and proves far more resistant to revision than equivalent positive information. This is called lasting impression asymmetry — the well-documented tendency for a single negative signal to anchor perception with a weight that accumulated positive evidence struggles to counterbalance. That single, tiny moment of visible strain in Hanna likely anchored the perceptions of her staff in exactly this way. It isn’t a conscious bias as much as a feature of how human cognition works.

The effect is compounded for a woman leader. The leadership role carries implicitly masculine expectations — decisiveness, emotional stability, command. In a woman, behavior that deviates from these expectations is read not as a situational response but as a personal characteristic. The same behavior from a man would have signaled social boundaries — something he didn’t want to talk about, something he had a right to privacy about. In a woman, Hanna’s difficulty is likely to be attributed to something more durable: loss of composure, uncertain footing under pressure, the perception of an undesirable fragility.

In other words, men have psychological vulnerabilities just like women. But ambiguous signals in men are given the benefit of presumption of competence. There was something complex he was managing. He was appropriately measured in what he chose to share. In a woman, they are more readily read as permanent deficits. Her tension is emotional vulnerability, fragility. His is restraint, choice.

The cost of the double job

For women leaders, such small moments accumulate into the expectation that she has not only a job as mayor, but the job of managing how she is perceived doing it. The problem of course is the extra emotional labor — the hidden second job described throughout this cluster — that this exacts. And in unfortunate ways, counterproductive — because it requires her to manage her image, which effort runs directly against the equally stringent expectation of genuine presence. To be fully in a room, responsive, honest, emotionally available to what is actually happening, a leader must at times set down the management of image that is imposed on her. And it is a hazardous choice, as illustrated. Either suppression or spontaneity can easily become lose-lose.

What we can name is what happens after the moment of misalignment. After Hanna’s response, something was felt rather than articulated in the room. Yet that quickly gets processed into judgment and reaction, even if subliminal. Staff become more careful around similar situations; colleagues jump in a beat earlier. Rajah instinctively offered Hanna cover, and it was genuinely intended as support — but it can also lead eventually to diminishment, a quiet reduction of her authority.

Two paths

Hanna likely reviews the event with dissatisfaction. Not only that she was forced into an encounter with a vulnerable topic, but now has to review her own handling of it. She now has a new job — to anticipate such situations and train herself into a different reaction, something smoother. But the labor of that new job, the tension of getting it right, monitoring herself, has a psychological toll. She had already, without consciously deciding, chosen a strategy to cope with her particular skeleton — suppress, avoid. So with this new, heightened challenge, she does what many people do: redoubles on a known coping strategy. The suppression deepens. The split between her competent self — the self she works to exclusively present — and her personal, emotionally authentic self, widens.

It’s a loop, pertinent to the asymmetry inherent in being a woman leader. What we’re calling a misalignment in Hanna’s reaction should not really, not fairly, be called a misalignment. It is only called that because it is perceived as such. The split between what is acceptable to show and what she does not really want to dwell on is a stable feature of human psychology. Everyone has some form of it. Personal development is an ongoing journey of resolving it. But a third dimension is brought in when that split triggers asymmetric perception. However subtle the reaction to Hanna’s discomfort, it communicates back to her — and most likely reinforces the necessity of more aggressive management: a tighter lid, more vigilant preparation. The asymmetry of external bias and the internal labor of suppression feed each other.

There is another path, but it usually requires facilitation and grace. People change when they’re ready to change.
A minor blip in a social conversation hardly qualifies as a crisis. Yet for Hanna this moment was, or had the potential to be one, in a good sense. When one is habituated, has arranged for inner life and outer life to click along like a train on tracks, new paths are seldom found. The unexpected situation not only forced Hanna to confront the old discomfort of an imperfect childhood, but forced her, in a modest way, into revealing it. She was exposed. The discomfort of that exposure, the newness of it, gives Hanna the opportunity to come to that old clatter-and-clack relationship in a different way. The sheer discomfort forces her into honesty. She’s had an experience of something she strives to avoid. Her striving to avoid was witnessed. What is it she’s striving to avoid?

When she opens herself to this question, and its answer — when she discovers that what she was afraid of seeing has now been seen by others — and that she is still standing — something can loosen.

The loosening can start a process, where she discovers that the energy she had been spending to maintain this “split” within herself becomes available for other things. It doesn’t happen immediately, or without discomfort. She contends with three arrows. The first arrow is her imperfect childhood, the shadows from it that she had not yet worked through. The second arrow is her chagrin and embarrassment with herself when she loses control of concealing the first arrow. Then there is the third arrow. Not only is she doing her usual job of managing her first two arrows, she is likely to be confronted with whatever versions of asymmetric readings and reactions that ensue in the life of a woman leader.
But she may find, if the timing is right, that the pain of the third set of arrows is nothing compared with the ones she had been living with, embedded in her all along.

See also: What Women Leaders Carry — the cluster article that frames this territory.
See also: The Cost of Not Being Seen — the capstone that puts this in a wider frame.