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“We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.” — Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio
For over a century, workplace leadership has rested on a deeply ingrained belief that human beings are fundamentally rational. That assumption can be traced back to René Descartes, who over 300 years ago declared, “I think, therefore I am,” and made reason the defining feature of human behavior while marginalizing feelings and emotions.
From this worldview emerged the conclusion that the most effective leaders should rely on intellect alone and suppress their own emotions. In turn, organizations prioritized analytical brilliance and sought to engineer employee performance through incentives, metrics, and systems, while readily dismissing any notion that people’s emotional experience could elevate their judgment, motivation, creativity, or performance. For as long as people have worked in offices, emotions have been treated as an unwelcome friction that directly undermines productivity.
The Rational Leadership Playbook
Once leadership fully embraced the premise that humans are primarily rational beings, a clear set of practices emerged—shaping work for as long as most of us have been alive. Leaders were directed to make decisions based on data and analysis alone, to prioritize efficiency and standardization, to enforce hierarchical structure, and to focus on output over understanding their employees’ emotional experience. Managerial feedback and coaching emphasized correction and compliance (fault-finding) over learning and understanding (growth and development).
The False Assumptions That Shaped Leadership
One overriding goal of traditional leadership practices has been to control employee behavior (and outcomes) at work, an objective that’s now proven to be entirely misaligned with human nature. Decisions that seemed perfectly reasoned often failed in practice, compliance never inspired discretionary effort, and creativity was stifled by rigid rules and procedures. Teams delivered what was required, but rarely went beyond. As Gallup has repeatedly shown, employee engagement has essentially remained flat—and low (around 30 percent)—for an entire generation.
The underlying assumption that human behavior is governed by intellect has repeatedly been refuted by our direct experience at work, and yet our common leadership practices remain intact and unchallenged. What’s needed today is the full recognition of this profound truth: Human behavior is not governed solely by intellect. How employees feel—their sense of safety, respect, connection, and value—directly shapes their thinking, decision-making, and motivation to perform.
It’s time this knowledge influenced a transformation in how leaders seek to help people excel in their jobs. Here’s just some of the major research that supports this:
The Neuroscience of Emotion
In his groundbreaking book, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Antonio Damasio was one of the first scientists to overturn our longstanding understanding of human nature.
Damasio describes a patient named Elliot whose ability to process emotion had been impaired by a brain injury. Before his injury (from a tumor removed near the front of his brain), Elliot was a successful professional with a sharp mind, strong memory, and solid reasoning skills. And, after his surgery, all of those core intellectual abilities remained intact. Despite that, his life unraveled. He lost jobs, made disastrous personal decisions, got divorced, and struggled with simple decision-making.
What had changed? Elliot no longer experienced normal emotions—he felt flat and detached. He could analyze options logically forever, but without emotional signals to help him feel which paths carried risk, reward, danger, or value, he couldn’t prioritize or decide meaningfully.
Damasio concluded that emotion isn’t an accessory to rationality—it’s essential to it. The brain relies on emotional cues (what he calls “somatic markers”) to assign importance, narrow options, and guide choices in real life. Suppressing or losing emotion doesn’t sharpen judgment; it cripples it. This research flips the long-held assumption on its head: far from interfering with clear thinking, emotions provide the vital guidance that makes effective reasoning possible.
Emotional Experience and Human Performance
Barbara Fredrickson, Psychologist and professor at the University of North Carolina, has shown that positive emotions broaden attention, enhance resilience, stimulate creativity, and sustain effort, while negative emotions narrow focus, reduce motivation, and undermine engagement and health.
Leadership Essential Reads
Consider a team facing a deadline or challenging goal. When people feel valued and supported, they see more possibilities, collaborate more naturally, and sustain effort longer. When they feel anxious or not respected, their thinking narrows, creativity shuts down, and they disengage. How people feel at work proves critical to their performance, and actively supporting employees’ emotional well-being is now essential to leadership success.
Heart-Brain Coherence
Research from the Institute of HeartMath adds a final and important layer to this understanding. It shows that when people experience sustained positive emotional states, communication between the heart and brain becomes more synchronized, a physiological condition known as “coherence.” In this state, people think more clearly, adapt more readily, and sustain higher levels of performance over time.
What makes this especially relevant for leaders is that coherence isn’t something employees generate in isolation. It’s heavily influenced by the emotional conditions in which people work. When employees feel safe, respected, supported, and connected within their team, coherence is more likely to occur. When work is marked by chronic stress or emotionally indifferent (or toxic) leadership, coherence is disrupted.
The emotional environment leaders create does more than affect morale. It shapes the physiological state in which people think, decide, and perform.
Leading From the Heart
Mainstream leaders are beginning to acknowledge this shift. Johnny Taylor, CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management—the world’s largest HR organization with nearly 340,000 members—recently observed on LinkedIn that “great leaders lead with heart.” That matters not as inspiration, but because it aligns with what science now makes clear: attending to how people feel is not softness, it is working with how the brain and body naturally function.
When I say “Lead From The Heart” (in my book of the same title), I mean it not as a metaphor but literally. Leadership is less about authority, technical skill, or analytical acumen than it is about the emotional influence leaders exert. People respond first to how leaders make them feel. Those feelings determine whether they take risks or play it safe, speak up or stay silent, think creatively or defensively, and offer discretionary effort or mere compliance. Intelligence alone does not create trust, safety, or engagement—only emotional influence does.
This explains a common phenomenon: why many high-IQ leaders fail. Being unattuned to their employees’ emotional experience dooms them.
We no longer need to guess what drives human potential. Emotions guide thinking, shape motivation and resilience, and determine whether people engage fully or merely comply. Ignoring emotion—and therefore well-being—narrows attention, weakens judgment, and undermines performance.
The question is no longer whether leaders should align with human nature. It is why anyone would choose not to. Leading from the heart is not optional or sentimental. Ironically, it’s the most rational, evidence-based strategy, long overdue in our workplaces.
