Leading Authentically

The term “emotional labor” was coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in 1983,¹ in a study of flight attendants and bill collectors — people paid not only to perform tasks but to manage their own emotions in the service of producing a desired experience in others. A flight attendant who remains warm and reassuring through turbulence, a bill collector who stays unmoved through a client’s distress — both are doing emotional work that does not appear in a job description yet is central to the job. Think about how that maps onto a leader who must project confidence to an uneasy workforce while privately rattled themselves. Or a CFO on an earnings call when the numbers are bad. In each instance, something is being managed — invisible, unacknowledged, and cumulative in its effect.

Take Astrid — the museum director who had to maintain composure when her deputy walked in and announced — to the room, without warning her — that he had already met with the donor and effectively redirected the strategic conversation she had been leading. Her leadership was too new, her position not yet established, to afford the luxury of venting her fury and embarrassment. She managed. No one saw the heat rising to her face. That management was its own kind of labor. (See: What Women Leaders Carry)

The dilemma

The tension is real. A leader who lives in a fishbowl must project a positive and strong image — critically so when crises hit or things are not going well. At the same time, it is authenticity in a leader that provides real reassurance to those around them and leads to real trust. Too buttoned up and careful, and a leader fails to provide the emotional connection that is a critical function of leadership. But the opposite error is equally costly: a leader who processes their uncertainty publicly is not only being authentic — they are transferring their own emotional burden onto the people they are supposed to be steadying. Finding the middle path between being real and being strong is hard at the best of times, and particularly so when a leader’s very human personal feelings, life circumstances, or fluctuating mental states are at variance with what they feel is required of them.

This tension is not unique to leaders. Every teacher, every doctor, every person in a position of care knows some version of it. But the expectations and pressure felt by a CEO charged with the material well-being and livelihoods of scores of people are of a different order. Jeremy — a CEO loved for his informal, transparent style — returned to work after a hospitalization and faced something that didn’t come naturally to him. In the eyes of everyone from the cafeteria worker to his senior team, he could see the anxious unspoken question. He had to find a way to respond that neither revealed too much about his private worries nor abandoned the openness that had made people trust him. There was no script for it. He improvised, as leaders usually must.

What nobody talks about

The standard version of this story is about projecting strength: leaders must hide their doubt, appear confident, not show the strain. But the emotional labor of leadership is more varied and more interesting than that. Sometimes what is required is not strength but grief — a leader standing in front of a company that has suffered a significant loss, expected to model the right kind of sorrow at the right pitch. Sometimes it is optimism — performing conviction in a direction not yet privately settled. Sometimes it is calm — the measured, unhurried demeanor required in a crisis while the internal state is something quite different. In each case the required performance may bear little relation to what is actually felt. And the management of that gap, day after day, accumulates.

Jeremy knew he could not afford to let people see how genuinely worried he was. He constructed a story that minimized the risks, acted confident, and held the line. But occasionally a colleague would catch an unaccustomed look of distraction on his face and ask about it — and then Jeremy had to redouble his efforts, managing the management. By the end of the day he was coping not only with whatever he was privately carrying, but with the additional exhaustion of emotional work he wasn’t used to.

The hazard of invulnerability

At the far end of this spectrum sits a particular hazard: the illusion of invulnerability. Many leaders favor projecting strength over exposing anything that might read as weakness — understandable, given the scrutiny they operate under. The trouble comes when this preference hardens into conviction: that a leader must appear invulnerable, and therefore that any crack in the façade represents failure. A leader in this position may labor so effectively to suppress their own uncertainty that they begin to buy into their own public persona. The façade grows more costly to maintain than it is worth, consuming resources that could go elsewhere. Worse, the leader loses access to the honest feedback, the experienced risk, the felt sense of the room that suppressed uncertainty used to carry. The organization around such a leader begins to manage the performance rather than the problem. Everyone walks on eggshells to protect an image that has quietly become untenable. Serge is a case in point. The relief he felt when the thing that could not be named was finally named openly — in a room, in front of his team — was not his alone. The emotional labor of collective pretense had been exhausting everyone, including him. Its release did not weaken the organization. It freed it.

What it costs

The cost of sustained emotional labor rarely presents as open breakdown so much as depletion — a gradual narrowing of range, a flatness where there used to be responsiveness. The leader’s feelings are not eliminated by the performance: they are driven underground, where they continue to operate, generating additional stress, emotional distancing, or behavioral defenses, such as avoidance. The performance continues but something behind it goes underground. The people around the leader feel this before they can name it. Meetings become efficient but airless. Feedback stops being honest. The organization begins to mirror the leader’s managed surface.

Joelle was the chief editor of a news magazine known for sharp, in-depth commentary. Her newsroom hummed with open energy — a crew of writers, journalists, and editors who were sharp, creative, and professionally close. A year earlier, her soldier son had deployed in an engineering role to a region that had been described as semi-stable. The fixed term stretched out. The region grew intermittently volatile. Gradually, Joelle’s worry etched itself into her face and settled into a rigidity in her shoulders that hadn’t been there before. She grew quieter. Her crew began to feel her distance. No one raised her son’s situation with her directly. Journalists found themselves steering away from stories about that region. The newsroom, sensing something, toned itself down — the way children lower their voices when they know their mother is carrying something heavy.

What helps

If the job involves managing what you show others, it does not mean you should hide it from yourself. More often than not, a leader is not deliberately concealing their feelings — they are simply propelled by the daily tide of action and reaction that leaves no time to recognize or process them. Instinct takes over. The gap between the interior and the exterior widens not by design but by default.

What might help is not better management of the performance but the temporary suspension of it. A space outside the system, outside the scrutiny, where the labor can be set down. Not in order to act on every private doubt, but to know what is actually felt — rather than only what has been learned to project.