There is a role that gets created in most organisations and never appears in any job description. It accumulates through track record, through the crises you handled, through having been the person who worked it out when nobody else could. Once you hold it, leaving it is remarkably difficult.
This is about what the role costs. Not the professional arithmetic, which most senior people have done. The other kind.
Being Strong and Performing Strength Are Different Jobs
Being strong means having the resources to handle what arrives. Performing strength means projecting that regardless of what is happening internally.
Most senior people spend considerably more time on the second than the first. The board meeting where you hold a steady face while running three bad scenarios. The all-hands where you deliver a confident plan while privately unsure about the runway. The conversation where you are someone’s steady anchor on a week when you have none yourself.
None of that is dishonesty. Much of it is the job. It is also work, and there is a name for it.
The Concept, and the Caution Its Author Attached
Hochschild introduced emotional labour in 1983 in The Managed Heart, studying flight attendants. She defined it as “the act of managing one’s own emotions and the emotions of others to meet job expectations”.
The distinction that matters here is between two ways of doing it. Surface acting is when “employees display the emotions required for a job without changing how they actually feel”. Deep acting is “an effortful process through which employees change their internal feelings to align with organizational expectations”.
Surface acting is the more costly of the two. The literature reports that it “is more harmful to employee health”, and that a higher degree of emotion regulation on the job relates to higher emotional exhaustion.
Hochschild has since been sceptical of how far her term has travelled, describing its current usage as concept creep that made the idea blurrier and sometimes applied it to things that were simply labour. Worth repeating, because an executive maintaining composure in a board meeting is not obviously the same phenomenon as a flight attendant required to smile for eleven hours. The parallel is useful and it is a parallel.
What Suppression Actually Does, Corrected
An earlier version of this article claimed that suppressing emotion lowers heart rate variability, raises cortisol and degrades decision quality. Those three sentences had no source, and the first one points the wrong way.
What the emotion regulation literature reports about expressive suppression is that it “has been shown to effectively reduce facial expressivity, subjective feelings of positive emotion, heart rate, and sympathetic activation”. So it works, in the narrow sense, and part of what it reduces is the positive feeling. On whether it helps with negative emotion, “the research findings are mixed”.
The finding that matters for this article is a different one, and it is the one that was missing. Expressive suppression “may have negative social consequences, correlating with reduced personal connections and greater difficulties forming relationships”. Compared with reappraisal, it is associated with worse interpersonal outcomes and is negatively related to well-being.
Not a physiological cost, then. A relational one. Which is exactly the cost this role actually imposes.
The Isolation Is Structural
You cannot simultaneously be the person everyone looks to for steadiness and the person who says out loud that they are uncertain. That is a genuine constraint, not a failing. A leader who shares every doubt downward can destabilise an organisation for no gain.
The cost arrives anyway. The same performance that makes someone effective in the room makes them unreadable in it, and a person who is never seen in difficulty is also not reachable. Connection runs on exposure; the performance exists to prevent exposure. The suppression research points the same way, which is the part worth taking seriously: this is not an abstract trade-off but a documented association with fewer close connections.
The Evidence on Teams, Handled Carefully
The usual move here is to invoke Google’s Project Aristotle, which examined more than 180 teams over two years from 2012 and identified psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, as the most critical of five factors.
Two things about how that gets quoted. An earlier version of this article called it the single most important factor in team performance, which is more than the work supports. And it is worth naming what the study is: Google published it itself rather than in a journal, and it observed teams at one company. Observation across one unusual employer identifies associations; it does not establish that safety produced the performance rather than the other way around.
The peer-reviewed version of the claim is narrower and holds up better. Edmondson’s 1999 study across 51 teams found that psychological safety predicted whether teams engaged in learning behaviour, and that the learning behaviour carried the effect through to performance. A mechanism, with a step in the middle, rather than a ranking.
Either way, the implication for the role is the same. Safety is not produced by someone who is never wrong. It is produced by someone who can be questioned.
Where the Word Burnout Belongs
Maslach and Jackson identified three dimensions of burnout in 1981: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. The World Health Organization includes burn-out in the ICD-11 under code QD85 and states that it is “not classified as a medical condition”, describing it as an occupational phenomenon and restricting the term to work.
An earlier version of this article also listed inflammation markers, immune function and cardiovascular risk as consequences of sustained suppression. There was no source for any of it, and claims about disease risk are not this publication’s to make. They have been removed.
Three Questions Worth Sitting With
- Who sees you when you are not performing? Not the role, not the title. If the answer is nobody, that is information about what the role is costing.
- When did you last tell anyone you did not know what to do? Not rhetorically. If you cannot remember, consider how long the certainty has been carried alone.
- What are you protecting people from? Sometimes the answer is legitimate: panic, instability. Sometimes it is the discomfort of being seen as fallible, which is a different thing and worth naming as such.
And if the exhaustion has moved past a question about work and is affecting how you function, that belongs with a licensed professional. Nothing here substitutes for one, including the assessment below.
The Paradox, Stated Without Overreach
What follows is a reading rather than a finding.
Constant performance of strength may itself indicate that the underlying footing is thinner than it looks. Someone whose sense of being adequate does not depend on the next quarter can afford to not know in front of people, because the admission costs them less.
An earlier version of this article claimed that making this shift produces a more effective leader “in almost every documented case”. There are no documented cases. That sentence invented an evidence base for a plausible idea, which is the specific thing this publication tries not to do.
What can be said is narrower. The goal is not to stop being strong. It is to need the performance less, and the honest reason to want that is the relational cost, which is the one the evidence actually describes.
What the Performance Is Holding Up
If the performance cannot be relaxed, it is usually holding something up. The Executive Identity Profile is a confidential assessment of where your sense of worth currently rests across five dimensions, and which of them is carrying more than it should. It takes about ten minutes, and it opens a conversation rather than closing one. Begin your profile here.
If this was worth your time, there is a letter. One short piece a week on identity, self-worth and the arithmetic of senior work. It costs nothing, and leaving takes one click. See what arrives.
References
- Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. https://doi.org/10.2307/3324333
- Grandey, A. A., et al. (2005), on emotion regulation at work and emotional exhaustion.
- Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
- Google, Project Aristotle, begun in 2012, published by the company rather than in a peer-reviewed journal.
- Maslach, C., & Jackson, S. E. (1981). The measurement of experienced burnout. Journal of Occupational Behavior, 2(2), 99–113. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030020205
- World Health Organization (2019). Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”: International Classification of Diseases.
Further Reading
If this resonated, these go deeper. You can also browse the full Research Library for all recommendations.
- Daring Greatly by Brené Brown. On vulnerability and shame resilience; essential reading for leaders who want to lead with authentic strength rather than projected invulnerability.
- Emotional Agility by Susan David. On how to stop struggling with your inner world and start using it as information; particularly useful for high performers who’ve learned to override their feelings.
- The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson. The practical companion to her research on psychological safety, with concrete guidance for leaders building teams that can surface hard truths.
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