How to Use Your Emotions as a Leader Without Letting Them Control You
TL;DR: In 4 minutes, you'll learn how to stop suppressing emotions at work and start naming them calmly to build trust, improve communication, and turn frustration into actionable feedback.
When you suppress emotions to stay professional, your team picks up on it anyway. The anger leaks out sideways: shorter responses, blame in meetings, teams avoiding each other.
Research from Daniel Goleman shows that emotional intelligence accounts for nearly 25% of leadership performance variability—a massive effect. Yet most leaders still believe hiding emotions is professional. It's not. It creates exactly the problems you're trying to avoid.
I had a manager whose team built games. By the time I got involved, he was complaining about the server team to anyone who would listen, his engineers were doing the same, and the two teams couldn't be in the same room without mocking each other afterward.
They worked together constantly. Had to. The games needed the backend infrastructure. Except the server team kept changing APIs without telling anyone. My manager's team would find out when a game stopped working. Or when the product team asked why they weren't using a new feature that had apparently launched weeks ago. Or when the server team complained the games were late because they had nothing to test against.
Debugging took days. Sometimes his engineers spent a week reverse engineering what changed because there was no documentation. No changelog. No heads up.
My manager was furious. But he never said it to the server lead directly. He said it to me. To his team. He complained about the server team in meetings with other departments. His team picked up on it and did the same. The server team fired back through product management and upper management. Both sides blamed each other for every delay.
They stopped meeting. The only time they were in the same room was when another department forced it. Then they would sit through the meeting and mock each other afterward. Everything became endless email chains that dragged on for weeks until someone just gave up and figured it out themselves.
The relationship was poisoned.
Why Suppressing Emotions at Work Backfires
The old adage says emotions don't belong at work. Stay unflappable. Be composed. Don't let them see you sweat.
It sounds like leadership advice. But research shows it's actually creating three critical problems in your organization.
Your Team Detects Suppressed Emotions Anyway
You think you're hiding frustration or disappointment. You're not. Your tone shifts. Your body language changes. You get quieter in meetings or give shorter responses in Slack. Your team notices immediately. They just don't know why.
Research published in Leader to Leader by Daniel Goleman found that emotions are highly contagious in work groups, particularly from leaders to their teams. When leaders suppress emotions, team members sense the disconnect and fill the gap with their own (usually negative) assumptions.
Suppression Creates Distance and Destroys Psychological Safety
When you refuse to acknowledge what you're feeling, you appear robotic. Disconnected. Your team can't read you accurately, so they start guessing about your emotional state. This guessing game erodes what Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson calls "psychological safety"—the belief that you won't be punished for speaking up.
Google's Project Aristotle, which analyzed over 250 team variables, found psychological safety was the single most important factor in high-performing teams. More important than talent, resources, or structure.
Yet only 47% of employees worldwide describe their workplaces as psychologically safe. Emotional suppression is a major contributor to that gap.
It Blocks Honest Communication Across Your Organization
If you won't name what's bothering you, your team won't either. They learn to suppress their own frustrations. Problems go unspoken. Resentment builds. Teams start avoiding each other instead of solving things together.
As discussed in "Immunity to Change" by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, even professions built on human connection (like social work) often develop cultures of emotional suppression. The irony is that suppressing emotions in work that requires human connection actually undermines the very relationships you need to be effective.
This is how cross-functional collaboration dies. Not because of bad processes, but because leaders model emotional suppression and teams follow suit.
The Difference Between Suppressing and Regulating Emotions
Professionalism is not suppressing emotions. It's regulating them. There's a critical difference that most leadership advice misses.
What Emotional Regulation Actually Looks Like
I coached my manager through a conversation with the server team lead. He was resistant at first. By that point, he figured the relationship couldn't get worse anyway.
The conversation was simple. He said something like: "I need to be honest. I get frustrated when API changes happen without documentation, because my team spends days debugging what turned out to be an undocumented change. Can we set up a notification system before changes go live?"
Calm. Specific. Named the emotion and explained why it mattered.
The server lead adjusted immediately. They set up a Slack channel for API change notifications. Started documenting breaking changes before deployment. It took time, but the next couple projects went more smoothly. The constant anger started fading.
The Three-Part Framework for Using Emotions in Leadership
Here's what made that conversation work, broken down into a framework you can use:
1. Name the emotion calmly "I get frustrated when..." or "I'm disappointed that..." said in a collected tone shows you're aware of your emotional state. You're not hiding it or pretending it doesn't exist. But you're also not yelling or visibly angry.
Research on emotional intelligence in leadership shows that leaders who can identify and articulate their emotions are viewed as more trustworthy and effective by their teams.
2. Explain the specific cause Don't just say "I'm frustrated." Get specific about what behavior or outcome is causing the reaction. "I'm frustrated because API changes are undocumented and my team spends days debugging phantom issues" gives the other person actionable information.
3. Suggest a path forward "Can we set up a notification system?" turns the emotion into a collaborative problem-solving conversation instead of a complaint or attack.
This is using emotion as part of your response, not letting emotion dictate your response.
How to Turn Emotions Into Leadership Data
When you feel upset or frustrated as a leader, that emotion is information. Don't suppress it. Don't react from it. Use it.
The Pause-and-Identify Process
Pause when you feel strong emotion. Do not respond immediately. Ask yourself: Why am I upset specifically?
Not "this situation is bad." Get granular. What exact behavior or outcome is triggering this emotional response?
That specificity transforms emotion into actionable feedback. "I'm frustrated" tells you nothing useful. "I'm frustrated because undocumented API changes are causing my team to waste days on reverse engineering" tells you exactly what needs to change.
Why Emotional Intelligence Matters More Than IQ for Technical Leaders
Research by EQ provider TalentSmart, cited by Harvard Business School, found that emotional intelligence is the strongest predictor of workplace performance. 71% of employers now value emotional intelligence over technical skills when evaluating candidates for leadership roles.
For technical leaders, this creates a unique challenge. You built your career on technical excellence. But as you move into leadership, the problems that matter most are human problems: communication gaps, team dynamics, cross-functional friction.
Your frustration about invisibility, miscommunication, or being misunderstood is data. It's telling you that something in how you're communicating needs to change. Suppressing that frustration means you miss the signal. Exploding from it damages relationships. Naming it calmly and investigating the cause? That's how you identify the actual problem and fix it.
The Real Cost of Emotional Suppression in Organizations
Let's be direct about what happens when leaders suppress emotions instead of regulating them.
Best Case Scenario: Reduced Psychological Safety and Innovation
Your team stops sharing concerns with you because they can't read how you'll react. They see you suppress your own emotions and learn that emotional honesty isn't safe here.
Amy Edmondson's research shows that innovation and problem-solving both require psychological safety. When leaders suppress emotions, teams stop engaging in the interpersonally risky behaviors that drive learning and improvement: voicing concerns, admitting mistakes, asking for help, experimenting with new approaches.
Worst Case Scenario: Bureaucratic Self-Protection
They avoid making decisions. They find ways not to take responsibility. They create processes, approval chains, and red tape to protect themselves from your unpredictable emotional reactions.
This is how businesses get bureaucratic. Not because someone designed bad policies. Because people got afraid of their leader's unspoken emotions and built protective barriers.
If your team can't trust that you'll name what's bothering you instead of letting it simmer and leak out sideways, they'll start managing around you. And you'll wonder why everyone needs three approval levels to make simple decisions.
What Monday Morning Looks Like
Next time you feel frustrated or disappointed about something at work, use this two-step process:
Step 1: Pause and Identify the Specific Cause
Do not respond immediately when you feel strong emotion. Take time to ask yourself: Why am I upset specifically? What exact behavior or outcome is causing this reaction?
Write it down if that helps. Get concrete. Move from "I'm frustrated with the marketing team" to "I'm frustrated because marketing committed to a launch date without checking technical feasibility, and now my team is being blamed for delays we predicted."
Step 2: Name the Emotion Calmly in Your Next Conversation
In your next conversation with the relevant person, say: "I'm frustrated that [specific thing] because [specific impact]."
Stay collected. This is not venting. This is providing clarity about what's not working so you can collaborate on fixing it.
Watch what happens. The person you're talking to won't think you're unprofessional. They'll think you're honest. And your team will learn that naming problems is safe in your organization.
The Line Between Using and Being Ruled By Emotions
Here's the critical distinction that determines whether emotional honesty strengthens or damages your leadership:
Using emotions as part of your response: You can explain what you're feeling and why. "I'm frustrated because [specific behavior] is causing [specific impact]. Can we [specific solution]?"
Being ruled by emotions: You yell, explode, or respond without explanation. Your team can't predict your reactions. They start avoiding situations that might trigger you.
The first builds trust and solves problems. The second destroys psychological safety and creates bureaucratic self-protection.
You're not supposed to be unflappable. You're supposed to be human. The question is whether you're using your emotions as information about what needs to change or letting them make decisions for you.
Additional Resources on Leadership and Emotional Intelligence
For further reading on leadership effectiveness and emotional intelligence:
- Daniel Goleman on Emotional Intelligence and Leadership - Research showing EI's impact on team performance
- Amy Edmondson on Psychological Safety - How psychological safety drives team learning and innovation
- Google's Project Aristotle Findings - Research on what makes teams effective
What emotion are you suppressing right now that your team already knows about?
You're great at the work. Let's build the bridge.
Ready to lead with clarity instead of suppression? Let's work on turning those emotions into actionable feedback together: https://www.jessestaffordcoaching.com/
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