Why Smart Leadership Begins with Emotion
- Dominique Giger
- Jul 3
- 10 min read
What if leaders had no emotions? No nervousness before the investor presentation, no frustration about the failed project, no uncertainty before the next reorganization. At first glance, this image seems appealing: finally rational decisions, free from disruptive emotional outbursts. In reality, however, a leader without emotions would not be a better leader - but rather one missing a central navigation system. Because emotions are not disturbances. They are signals.
Four Words, Four States - Why “Stress” Is the Wrong Diagnosis
In leadership practice, one word frequently appears to explain almost everything: stress. The team is under stress, the leader is stressed, the entire organization is under increased pressure. This language habit is understandable - but scientifically often falls short. Because in everyday language, the term stress combines different psychological and biological states that require different causes and different responses.
Fear describes the reaction to an immediate and concrete threat. The brain evaluates the situation as potentially dangerous and mobilizes the organism for protective responses - typically fight, flight, or freeze.
Stress arises when a situation is evaluated as demanding and one’s own resources appear potentially insufficient. Time pressure, high complexity, or sustained strain can trigger such stress responses.
Anxiety refers to the future: the outcome of a situation is uncertain, possible risks are mentally anticipated, and the brain attempts to reduce uncertainty through cognitive control.
Pressure arises when a situation is evaluated as significant and there is an expectation that a specific outcome must be achieved. Pressure can enhance performance in the short term - however, if it becomes too intense or persists over time, it can narrow attention, increase the probability of errors, and develop into stress.
This four-quadrant model can be traced back to the classic transactional stress model developed by psychologists Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman: according to this model, stress is not an objective feature of a situation but the result of an ongoing appraisal between perceived demands and one’s own coping capacity. Four states, four different responses. Those who label everything as “stress” behave like a patient telling a doctor “something hurts somewhere” - and then hoping for a precise diagnosis. Effective leadership begins with more precise language for one’s own inner world.
The distinction can be observed clearly in the boardroom. Before a quarterly presentation with unexpectedly weak figures, a leader may experience pressure because the outcome matters for their reputation. During the subsequent Q&A with critical investors, worry emerges because the outcome remains uncertain. If shortly before the meeting the person unexpectedly learns that a major client is withdrawing, the body reacts with fear - an immediate threat. And throughout the preparation phase, with too little time for too many topics, there is simply stress. Four situations, four states, four very different options for action - which can only be clearly distinguished if the vocabulary exists in the first place.
From Stimulus to Temperament: The Four Levels of Feeling
This precision can be taken one level deeper - namely to the concepts of emotion, feeling, mood, and temperament, which are often used synonymously in everyday language but describe different timeframes and mechanisms.
An emotion is short-lived. It arises through a stimulus - something that is seen, heard, or thought - and lasts only a few seconds to a few minutes (depending on definitions within emotion research). At its core, it is a biological signal: the nervous system indicates that something relevant is happening, often without conscious awareness. A feeling arises when meaning is assigned to that signal, usually unconsciously and based on previous experience - is this good or bad, do I want more or less of it? If a feeling persists for hours or days, it becomes a mood; if it consolidates over months or years into an emotional baseline, it becomes temperament.
A simple metaphor illustrates the difference: in the cinema, a horror movie creates fear - that is the emotion. Afterwards, one may laugh about one’s own startled reaction - also an emotion. But if someone watches the same film in the evening and then cannot fall asleep for hours, they are already in an anxious mood. In business contexts, a related pattern regularly emerges after critical meetings, difficult personnel decisions, or negotiations under time pressure: many workplace conflicts are reactions to an emotion that would already have faded had people simply waited a moment.
Why Two People React Differently to the Same News
One aspect is regularly underestimated in leadership: how a person expresses emotion is highly individual - and culturally shaped. Two people receive the same good news. One laughs, the other starts crying. Both experience joy, yet from the outside one reaction appears composed, the other almost sad. Without this understanding, situations can easily be misinterpreted - with consequences for employee conversations, promotion decisions, or international negotiations.
Research confirms this pattern: a widely cited meta-analysis by psychologists Hillary Anger Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady examined the accuracy of emotion recognition across cultures and found a robust “in-group advantage”: people recognize emotions in members of their own cultural or ethnic group significantly more reliably than in members of other groups. In other words: our emotional reference system works best with people who were socialized similarly, share similar cultural backgrounds, and communicate in similar ways.
For leaders managing diverse, international, or multigenerational teams, this has a direct implication: one’s own intuition about “how someone feels right now” is structurally insufficient in heterogeneous teams. What is considered dignity and professional restraint in one culture may be perceived elsewhere as coldness - and openly expressed emotion may be interpreted as loss of control even though it simply belongs to a different repertoire of emotional expression. Emotional intelligence therefore does not only mean understanding one’s own emotions but actively learning how others express theirs - without silently assuming one’s own style is the standard.
For German-speaking Europe, this insight has particular relevance. Compared with cultures with more expressive emotional language, restraint is often seen here as a sign of professionalism and competence. Yet when leading a team with employees from Southern European, Latin American, or Middle Eastern cultural backgrounds, that same restraint may be interpreted as disinterest or distance - with measurable consequences for employee engagement and trust. Those who understand this do not automatically interpret a calm face in the next meeting as agreement or lively gesturing as loss of control, but ask instead of assuming.
The Educational Gap Nobody Had on Their Curriculum
A structural reason why emotional competence is distributed so unevenly in organizations lies in the education system itself. Mathematics, languages, history - all of these are part of the curriculum. Practical handling of emotions, however, is rarely taught. Instead, children learn through observation: from parents, siblings, and the social environment. “Stop crying”, “Don’t be so sensitive”, “Be strong” - sentences that sound harmless but convey a clear message: emotions are disruptive, negative emotions should be hidden.
The problem is this: suppressed emotions do not disappear - they accumulate. A widely cited study by psychologists James Gross and Oliver John compared two emotion regulation strategies across five sub-studies - reappraisal (reframing) and suppression. The result: those who habitually suppress emotions experience, on average, more negative and fewer positive emotions, show limitations in social interactions, and report lower overall well-being than individuals who rely on reappraisal. Persistent suppression often becomes visible in leadership contexts only at a late stage - as irritability, cynicism, or exhaustion that seem to appear out of nowhere but are in fact the result of months of accumulation.
These patterns are also shaped by gender, as summarized in a widely discussed review by psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema: women report using emotion regulation strategies more frequently overall, with stronger tendencies towards rumination contributing particularly to increased symptoms of depression and anxiety; among men, a stronger tendency to compensate with alcohol explains part of the higher rates of substance abuse. Both patterns are learned - and both can therefore be unlearned. Some schools are already implementing this today: a teacher who allows a disruptive student thirty seconds to “express joy” before expecting concentration in class again demonstrates how emotional expression and behavioral expectations can be combined instead of excluding one another. This exact principle - acknowledging emotions while simultaneously setting clear expectations - could be transferred seamlessly to team meetings and one-to-one conversations.
For organizations, this educational gap is not a marginal issue but a tangible cost factor: where emotions are systematically suppressed instead of understood, not only does individual well-being decline, but so does the quality of decisions, feedback conversations, and conflict resolution. Organizations that demand psychological safety without providing the necessary vocabulary and routines are essentially expecting a capability that was simply never part of most employees’ educational journey.
Why High Performers Are Particularly at Risk
Ironically, this pattern often intensifies among particularly high-performing individuals. Those who have learned throughout their careers to view resilience as a core competency tend to perfect precisely the suppression strategy that has proven unfavorable in the long term. Time pressure, responsibility, and the expectation to appear consistently composed reward hiding uncertainty or exhaustion in the short term - and that is exactly what delays recognizing early warning signs.
The result often does not appear as a sudden collapse but as a gradual decline in effectiveness: decreasing patience in meetings, cynical remarks, the feeling of constantly functioning without truly being present. In performance cultures, these symptoms are often interpreted as a character issue rather than a regulation issue - with the consequence that the actual cause remains unaddressed. Leaders who learn to identify their own emotional states accurately and early on - rather than trying to hide them - gain an early-warning system that no performance review can ever replace.
Five Tools for Everyday Leadership
These insights lead to five concrete tools that can be applied immediately in everyday leadership.
Precise labelling. If you do not know what you are feeling, you cannot respond appropriately. Tools such as Yale University’s “Mood Meter”, developed at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, organize emotions along two dimensions - energy and pleasantness - making precise emotional labelling significantly easier.
The Meta-Moment. Between stimulus and response lies a tiny but crucial window of time. When you notice that you are becoming internally activated, you can pause briefly, take a conscious breath, and ask yourself: Who do I want to be in this situation - not how do I defend myself or win this conversation, but what kind of leader do I want to show up as? This concept, also developed at Yale, requires practice but becomes more reliable through repetition.
Reframing. The brain interprets situations automatically, often based on old patterns rather than current reality. Reframing means consciously asking whether there may be an equally plausible but more constructive interpretation of the situation - for example, interpreting nervousness before an important appearance not as a sign of an impending blackout but as energy that sharpens focus. The critical distinction from simple positive thinking is this: reframing asks about facts versus interpretation, not wishful thinking.
Lead-by-Example. Those who bear responsibility for others never regulate only themselves. Their own emotional state affects everyone in the room.
A widely cited study by researchers Thomas Sy, Stéphane Côté, and Richard Saavedra, conducted using an experimental design focused on management decisions, showed that when a leader was in a positive mood, this systematically carried over to the individual moods of team members, the group’s overall emotional tone, and the team’s coordination and commitment. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a striking real-world example of this: Leaders who neither downplayed the situation nor succumbed to panic, but instead openly acknowledged that the situation was challenging while also sharing their own coping strategies-such as taking a walk to relieve stress-thereby normalized the team’s emotional experience and demonstrated their ability to take action. One of the most effective forms of leadership arises precisely in this middle ground between denial and dramatization.
Co-regulation. Helping others without making them dependent does not mean giving advice but creating space: asking what is currently occupying the person or what is needed right now to think clearly again helps place a feeling into context without taking ownership of it. When a team is under pressure, leaders always have a choice: amplify uncertainty or create orientation.
RULER: The Navigation System of Emotional Intelligence
These five tools can be embedded into a broader framework developed at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence under the leadership of Marc Brackett: RULER, an acronym for five competencies. Recognize refers to identifying emotions in oneself and others, Understand to understanding their causes, Label to precise naming, Express to context-appropriate expression, and Regulate to consciously and purposefully managing the respective state.
The sequence matters: regulation comes at the end, not at the beginning. Something can only be regulated once it has first been recognized, understood, and labelled - similar to a navigation system that must first determine its current position before calculating a route. In practice, those who jump directly to regulation without going through the preceding steps often regulate the wrong problem. Additional materials on the Mood Meter, Meta-Moment, and the RULER framework are freely available online through the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.
For HR professionals, this model also provides a useful diagnostic framework beyond traditional engagement surveys. Frequent conflicts between team members, noticeably high turnover in certain departments, or a visible loss of trust after restructuring can often be traced back to exactly one missing RULER competency - most commonly the absence of a shared language for what is actually happening within the team. Training programs that begin directly with regulation without first addressing recognition, understanding, and labelling therefore regularly fall short.
A Trainable Competency
Perhaps the most important point at the end: emotional intelligence is not a fixed trait that someone either has or does not have. It is a competency - and competencies can be learned.
For organizations, this means: investments in emotional education are not soft well-being initiatives but development investments just as worthwhile as strategy or negotiation training. For individual leaders, high performers, and HR professionals, it means: the difference between reactive and composed behavior in difficult moments can be trained intentionally - not merely hoped for.
The most obvious first step requires neither training nor budget: in the next challenging situation, pause for a moment and ask what is actually present here - fear, stress, worry, or pressure. Those who begin naming their internal states more precisely gain not only personal clarity but also a leadership tool that is rarely taught in formal programs but applied every single day.
About the Author
Dominique Giger is a transformation expert, coach, and speaker with a Master’s degree in Computer Science from ETH Zurich. She brings more than 18 years of international experience in transformation and change projects and supports organizations and leaders in building resilient, high-performing work cultures.
Her work combines insights from neuroscience with practical leadership experience and places a particular focus on mental strength, sustainable performance, and authentic leadership in complex work environments.
In her podcast “Y-SHIFT: The Next-Level Mindset & Transformation Podcast”, she regularly shares insights into the world of modern psychology, neuroscience, and leadership development.
Learn more about this topic in Episode 36 of her podcast:
Emotional Intelligence - 7 Misconceptions About Stress, Fear and Leadership
References
1. Elfenbein, H. A., & Ambady, N. (2002). On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 128(2), 203-235.
2. Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348-362.
3. Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2012). Emotion regulation and psychopathology: The role of gender. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 8, 161-187.
4. Sy, T., Côté, S., & Saavedra, R. (2005). The contagious leader: Impact of the leader's mood on the mood of group members, group affective tone, and group processes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(2), 295-305.
5. Brackett, M. A., Bailey, C. S., Hoffmann, J. D., & Simmons, D. N. (2019). RULER: A theory-driven, systemic approach to social, emotional, and academic learning. Educational Psychologist, 54(3), 144-161.
6. Folkman, S. (2013). Stress: Appraisal and coping (basierend auf Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S., 1984, Stress, Appraisal, and Coping). In: Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine. Springer.
7. Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Mood Meter, Meta-Moment und RULER-Ansatz.
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