3 Emotional Truths Leaders Cannot Ignore

Keys to Lead Well in Complexity 

In a recent webinar with the NeuroLeadership Institute, David Rock and Matt Levinger explored how leaders work with emotion amid evolving complexity so people can stay adaptive, think clearly, and collaborate, especially in high-stakes, fast-changing environments. It is almost obvious to say that the landscape of work and life is moving faster, with more change and ambiguity than in the past. We can wonder whether this is just a moment in time or our own personal experience, but I would challenge that it is more universal and global than our individual ecosystems.

The conversation about emotions is not new. What is changing is the intolerance and reaction when emotions are not handled well. The call for leaders to be more empathetic, transparent, and human-centric has been present for some time. The ongoing question for leaders is how to do this. Does it mean sharing personal feelings? Does it mean sitting in counseling-style conversations where people are crying and processing emotions at work? Is there time and space for that? Is that what people need to do their jobs well? What does emotional awareness mean for both the leader and the follower? The challenge to continue increasing emotional intelligence is not easing. It is intensifying. There is a reason for that. 

When emotions are ignored or minimized, work slows down, drama increases, and traction is reduced. One way to think about this is through the analogy of a car. A dashboard provides clear indicators. Lights come on when oil needs changing, tire pressure is low, or a system needs attention. These are measurable signals. Leadership has similar indicators: meetings, reports, dashboards, and metrics that tell us whether we are on or off track. What a seasoned driver also pays attention to, often at a subconscious level, is how the car sounds and feels. If it pulls to one side, makes an unfamiliar noise, feels sluggish, or accelerates differently, we notice. We adjust. We investigate. These cues often show up before a dashboard light turns on. That is parallel to emotions. They are less visible, but they can be felt and sensed if we are paying attention. They function as early warning signals, often before more obvious problems appear. This is the value of emotional awareness for leaders at work.

This is not about people being emotional or leadership becoming emotional. It is about the state of humans in engagement and their ability to operate “above,” in a clear and productive brain state, or “below,” in a distracted or regressive state due to emotional triggers or undercurrents. When leaders minimize or invalidate the role of emotion in interactions, it is like ignoring the feel or sound of the car until a warning light appears. That is a blind spot. However, when leaders are aware enough to see the emotional landscape that is already operating around them, they can get better results, have less emotional backlash and move exponential faster with better results. 

Check these three keys for your leadership: 
1. Ignoring emotion makes the space unsafe

When emotion is ignored or mishandled, the space does not stay neutral. It becomes unsafe. Not because people are being dramatic, but because something important is happening in the nervous system that is not being accounted for.

The SCARF model helps explain why this matters. SCARF is essentially a framework for what helps the brain feel safe enough to stay in an executive, problem-solving state versus dropping into a limbic fight, flight, or freeze response. When people feel threatened around Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, or Fairness (SCARF), they lose access to their best thinking.

This is not about leaders needing to acknowledge or process emotions explicitly. It is about understanding that when emotion is activated, people are no longer operating from a neutral place. If leaders ignore that reality, they unintentionally create conditions where people protect themselves, conflict increases, conversations lose clarity, the wrong issues get addressed, or people withdraw and react sideways.

It is a leader’s job to pay attention to where people are at, both tactically and emotionally, because it is directly connected to their ability to receive and act on information. Just like a car’s performance. It is not the car’s fault if it is pulling left. That is information telling you the tire pressure is off. A wise driver pauses to understand and realign. The same is true in leadership. This happens not by making someone wrong for their emotions or bluntly calling emotion out, but by noticing the message of the emotion (i.e. fear, anxiety, excitement, protection) and meeting the person where they are. This is not about coddling emotion. It is about acknowledging, normalizing, and accepting it, and then navigating forward from there.
 
Proactively, leaders create safety by paying attention to the emotions they create and elicit through their messages. That is why a leader’s communication deserves intention and preparation. Messages, conversations, and decisions benefit from being run through a SCARF filter. Does this preserve status? Provide as much certainty as possible? Clarify where autonomy exists? Reinforce relatedness? Demonstrate fairness? When leaders do this work, they reduce unnecessary emotional triggers and create space for people to stay engaged and move forward. The opposite is also true. When someone brings emotion and it is minimized, dismissed, or judged, safety drops further. Being told to “get emotions in check” or treated as if emotion is a personal flaw compounds threat rather than reducing it.  Ignoring or minimizing emotion does not make it go away. It magnifies and escalates it, making situations and people harder to manage. And when safety drops, progress slows. As leaders, there is not time to be unskillful with emotional navigation. High EI and emotional attunement allow teams to thrive and help leaders catch and course-correct issues early before things go off track.

2. Emotional Suppression Limits What Leaders Are Able to See

Many leaders learn early to minimize their own emotions to stay functional, steady, and decisive. For a long time, this works. It allows leaders to perform under pressure, make hard calls, and keep moving forward when things are uncertain or difficult.

A common leadership reflex when emotion shows up is to move people out of it as quickly as possible. Sometimes this looks like reassurance. Sometimes it looks like logic. Sometimes it shows up as a push to stay focused, professional, or productive.

What often gets missed is that trying to shut emotion down tends to increase threat rather than reduce it. It can signal that certain experiences are not welcome or that people need to regulate themselves before they can be taken seriously.

Working with emotion looks quieter. It is not about amplifying or indulging it. It is the leader’s ability to stay steady in the presence of emotion long enough for the intensity to come down so thinking can return. When people feel understood enough to reorient, they are far more able to engage constructively and move forward.

Additionally, when leaders disconnect from their own emotional signals, they often lose the ability to hear what is happening underneath the surface of interactions. Over time, what narrows is not capability, but attunement. The tension beneath the topic or transaction. The hesitation behind resistance, explanation, or silence. The anxiety that has not yet turned into words. These dynamics are rarely visible on the surface, but they are present when a leader allows awareness and listening at the “third level.” Beyond words (level one). Beyond expression and obvious energy (level two). At the essence and invisible emotional layer (level three).

For years, leaders were asked to set emotions aside and were often championed for not responding from emotion. Decisions still get made. Progress still happens. But when leaders become tone deaf to this third level of emotion, they lose visibility into what is shaping behavior and, ultimately, outcomes in the room. This layer is tied to motivation, energy, resilience, empathy, understanding, feeling seen and heard, feeling valued, respected, and more. When conversations stay purely transactional, they often land flat and inhuman. Personal emotional suppression does not eliminate emotion from the system. It limits the leader’s ability to read it. People begin to feel used, more like a tool than a person. Leaders miss early indicators that people are hurt, confused, disengaged, or quietly resisting. Awareness at this level starts with leaders being conscious of their own internal signals so they can sense and pick up on those of others. This is not about emotional dumping or excessive expression. It is about emotional awareness, which becomes the gateway to noticing what is happening. When leaders sharpen awareness of their own emotional signals, they are better able to recognize those of their followers and respond with empathy, compassion, and appropriate acknowledgment, paired with artful navigation that honors people while still supporting forward movement and alignment.

3. Leaders Trigger Emotion More Than They Realize

Many emotional reactions at work are not about personality. They are responses to conditions leaders create, often unintentionally.
Change without context. Ambiguity around roles or decisions. Speed that outpaces people’s ability to orient.

Leaders may feel calm and focused internally while activating fear, status threat, or uncertainty in others. This is not about bad intent. It is about impact. Emotional reactions are often signals that something in the environment needs clarification, reassurance, or redesign. When leaders understand this, they stop personalizing reactions and start reading them as information about the system. The challenge is that leaders can end up co-creating emotion and shutdown rather than co-creating solutions and positive movement. People do not think well from a threatened state. When emotional threat is high, thinking narrows, creativity drops, and collaboration becomes harder. When safety is present, people process more clearly, stay open, and engage more fully.

Safety is not comfort. It is the absence of unnecessary threat. It is the condition that allows people to contribute without needing to protect themselves first. This is why emotional awareness is not a soft add-on. It is a prerequisite for problem solving and forward progress.

Looping back to the first point, when leaders use tools like SCARF, they can check their own thinking to ensure they are communicating in a way that builds safety rather than accidentally challenging or threatening it. Often leaders are focused on many things at once, see more layers and complexity, and miss providing messages that support the person they are communicating with.

This is like parenting. A parent may be aware of bills due, a sick family member, and an upcoming challenge, and is communicating urgency to a child to gather things to go to the hospital. In that moment, the leader can influence whether the situation goes better or worse based on how they act in the moment. As leaders, we do not control everything. However, messaging matters. It can provide safety and build alignment so people move together, or it can trigger anxiety, fear, and questions that create the exact resistance leaders often have zero tolerance for in that moment. Leadership is an art. It is a responsibility. It is not easy. But it can be better when done with greater awareness and deliberate intention to be thoughtful, caring, and human centric.

Closing Reflection

Emotion is part of the human condition and therefore always part of leadership. It is not something leaders can ignore and still expect clarity, shared meaning, and coherence to emerge. As the fog increases from speed, change, and ambiguity, emotional clarity is needed more than ever. Emotional attunement does not mean leaders need to become more emotional or express everything they feel. It means learning to notice the emotional dynamics that are already shaping the environment.

When leaders can see what is rising beneath the surface and respond in ways that preserve safety, people remain cognitively available rather than emotionally hijacked. That awareness supports clearer thinking, stronger collaboration, and more adaptive leadership in complexity. Leaders do not need to be “emotionally led,” but they do need to be present enough to see and sense more, providing a productive and healthy environment for everyone to thrive.