Why Great Leaders Aren’t Afraid to Share Emotions at Work
The standard advice about keeping emotions out of business is outdated. Here’s how great leaders leverage their emotions, especially "negative" ones.
Business and emotions don’t mix.
This has been the conventional wisdom for decades. Most leaders and teams think “good leadership” means keeping your emotions out of the equation. Be stoic, keep a straight face, don’t let anyone know how you’re actually feeling.
But that’s not what we see at the highest levels of business.
Why do we see emotion being leveraged repeatedly among the great C-suites of our time? Why do sports coaches and top founders get upset and chew their people out when something doesn’t meet their expectations? Why do we see this repeatedly with history’s greatest military leaders?
Here’s a scenario that plays out all the time among great leaders: A team member doesn’t do good work—or maybe they’re a little lazy or slow—and the leader gets pissed off. Correction: they get really, really, really pissed off. And you better believe that their team feels the consequences of being lazy or not doing good work. Giving less than 100% is not acceptable in these environments.
Surely there must be a reason for this, beyond the assumption these leaders are assholes who get off on bullying people and abusing their power.
I’m interested in accounting for why we see this behavior at innovative and winning companies. I think something is going on here that warrants a deeper look.
So here’s what I’ve found: Great leaders aren’t afraid to express their emotions. In fact, they know how to skillfully leverage “negative” emotions like anger, frustration, and disappointment to communicate important truths, rally and motivate their people, and maintain high standards.
Your Emotional Wiring
Let’s go back to some basics of human psychology.
We are wired to survive (not to be happy), which means that our brains are very good at detecting potential threats. As a result, we’re much more likely to notice information that suggests danger may be present than information that tells us that everything is going well. This negativity bias is our brain’s way of keeping us safe. It also helps us engage more effectively with our environment and any threats that might be present. This also explains why, sadly, the majority of our emotional content is “negative.”
A big supporting player in that process is the brain’s emotional system, a finely-tuned system that’s evolved over hundreds of thousands of years—and it really works. You hear the rustle in the bushes, and you instantly feel a rush of fear and become alert; this thing could kill you. The emotional response of fear is triggered by your autonomic nervous system and shows up instantaneously as a pattern of energy in your body. It’s automatic. And it’s happening before your thinking mind even kicks in.
Now you can start to see that if someone shares negative information wrapped in a package of strong emotion, not only will you notice it, but you are wired to highly prioritize it. For most of human history, if someone was directing strong “negative” emotions towards you, there was a decent chance that you were about to die or become an outcast (and then die). Our evolutionary biology explains why we drop everything and pay attention when someone shares powerful emotions with us.
The word “emotion” comes from the latin root emovēre, which means “to move” or “in motion.” An emotion, at its core, is a movement of energy within our own body and being, and when we share emotions, in turn, we often move people.
Think about it: What does a leader really do? They are responsible for the output of a team. And how do they do that? By inspiring and motivating great work and guiding their team in changing course when they’re off-track or underperforming. Emotions are perfectly designed to do exactly that—that’s why great leaders know how to communicate with emotion.
Emotions create shifts, they generate action, and they trigger breakthrough moments. Expressing emotions—both positive and negative ones—signifies that something is important; it matters to you. This is particularly true when it comes to what we typically consider “negative” emotions like anger, frustration, and disappointment. Those moments of intense emotional upwelling have a deep impact on the people around you. Everyone in the room is clear that something needs to change. The content is prioritized, it’s important, and it’s clear that something needs to happen urgently around it.
Beyond sharing emotions, we can also harness our emotional system to support us in doing great work. Feeling scared, paranoid, or vigilant can help alert you to a change that needs to happen. Anger can motivate you to correct a problem or enforce a boundary that’s been crossed. You can get angry at problems in society, and then use that anger as fuel to do something about it. Feeling sadness can signal that you’re disappointed in something, that there is a loss or hurt that needs to be acknowledged.
There is a utility to feeling and sharing any of our emotions, if we do it wisely.
Delivering a Thunderbolt
Think of yourself as the sky god Zeus. Zeus’s signature weapon, the thunderbolt, was used to intervene for the greater good (like the great entrepreneurs, Zeus did not have a perfect record with that ideal). He used this form of intervention, for the most part, to uphold divine law and order.
Like Zeus, leaders use thunderbolts to uphold the order of their organization and to support their teams in getting back on track with the mission. If the team is off-track, they can expect thunderbolts.
What I call “delivering a thunderbolt” is when you come in and share strong “negative” emotions. Your tone of voice and body language create urgency. The language is designed to charge people up. It’s raw. It’s personal. It’s strong. You’re pissed off with things. You might even walk out of the room to make a point, something you feel isn’t working on the path to achieving your vision. People learn very quickly that not being all-in on the mission is not OK.
Here’s what this looks like when not done properly: it’s personal and it demeans. You pick on the weakest link, bully them, call them names, throw chairs, and abuse them. It’s your untamed dark side unleashing on people in intense ways.
Here’s what delivering a thunderbolt looks like at its best: It’s strong, it’s focused on the problem (not the person), and it’s clear and respectful.
The dosage, the content and context, the nature of the relationship, the cultural norms, and the behavior really do matter here. There is a big difference between throwing a chair in an outburst and sharing your emotions in a measured and productive way. Excessive emotional expression can quickly lead to negative consequences. If there is a thunderstorm every day, it loses its impact. Soon, morale is challenged, and people don’t want to work with you anymore. It’s crucial to channel “negative” emotions constructively.
For those who need proof: Researchers at the Berkeley Haas School of Business analyzed hundreds of halftime speeches and final scores from high school and college basketball games. They demonstrated that basketball coaches delivering a halftime speech with anger actually increased the team's chances of winning. The message was clear: “This is not good enough, go figure it out immediately.” Lo and behold, the teams put their heads together and solved a major problem.
If you look at the stories of great organizations, you’ll often see thunderbolt-style emotional outbursts where you see significant innovation.
When your team is not doing well, you can use a thunderbolt to jumpstart them and get them back on track. A well-placed, well-timed, and respectful thunderbolt can be a game-changer in your life and career. This is how you create necessary shifts in your business.
Use emotion when relaying feedback and things where you want to inspire movement. If wielded responsibly, we can capture the benefit without the damaging components.
Leaders need to learn how to productively share emotions to communicate with strength, impact, and respect.
The Difference Between Productive Emotion-Sharing, Being Emotional, and Emotional Decision-Making
When I discuss this with my clients, the first point of confusion that arises is the difference between sharing your emotions productively, on the one hand, and being hijacked by emotions and making emotional decisions, on the other.
These are not the same thing—let me explain.
Emotional hijacking is when you’re experiencing an emotion so strongly that it’s taking over your psyche and running the show. This is most certainly problematic for a leader. If you’re overwhelmed by fear, anger, or sadness, that will be all you see. It will seep out into your interactions and decision-making. We want to avoid this at all costs. When emotions arise and take over, we want to process them, learn from them, share them if necessary, and move on. Experiencing emotions is healthy and normal— letting those emotions drive the bus is not.
Sharing emotions to make something happen when something needs to happen is not the same as being emotional.
A great leader will share emotions if they deem it necessary to get the team to where they need to be. But they’re not doing it because they’ve lost control of their emotions, and it doesn’t mean that they will turn around and make emotional decisions for the rest of the day or week.
Can you identify what you’re feeling and share it with your team in a way that is respectful and productive? That’s effective emotion-sharing.
We can also leverage emotions to make the right decisions. I think we can all agree that when it comes to decision-making, we want to make the absolute best decisions for the organization without our ego or emotions influencing the decisions. To make great decisions, we need relevant data. Emotions give us good raw data that we can check out with our intellect—so yes, they may have some credible things to say about the problem you’re trying to solve.
Emotions are messengers. We want to mine them for a healthy message, let the emotion go, and then, when you are balanced, decide with that message in mind. If we can bring the healthy message of us and our team's emotions, we can make better decisions. Often, emotions can shortcut you right to the heart of the matter.
When it comes to emotions and leadership, it’s really balance that we’re looking for. On one hand, you want to feel emotions and share them where needed, and on the other side, you want to compartmentalize like a pro and be balanced in your decision-making.
If you want to be a great leader, start by befriending your emotions—and learning how to harness them for the good of your organization.