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Many organizational leaders use a performance strategy that’s working against them while they take pride in it.
It looks like calm under pressure, like a steady hand. It looks like exactly what we promote people for.
But the research is now unambiguous: It doesn’t work.
The strategy is called suppression—controlling your emotional expression, keeping your face neutral, not letting them see you sweat. We’ve built an entire leadership archetype around it. I’ve called it the Myth of the Unshakable Leader: the belief that real strength means never being moved by what happens around you.
A systematic review of 101 studies shows this clearly: across leadership style, leader well-being, and leader performance, suppressing emotion correlates negatively with effectiveness.
The leaders who perform best don’t feel less. They regulate differently.
In a recent piece on the leaders who can’t switch off, I wrote about the executives who check their phones at midnight not because anything is urgent but because stopping feels dangerous. The hook underneath that pattern is identity fusion, control anxiety, and the deep belief that personal worth equals output. What I didn’t fully address there is what happens when the emotion does surface. When stress hits, when frustration rises, when something lands that threatens your sense of control. The question isn’t just why you can’t switch off, it’s what do you do with the discomfort when it arrives?
Most high performers, when pressed, will say: “Suppress it, get over it, and get on with it.”
The research now shows that this approach has real costs.
What suppression actually costs
The foundational work comes from psychologists James Gross and Oliver John, whose 2003 study became one of the most-cited papers in emotion regulation science. Their finding was counterintuitive and specific: people who habitually suppress their emotional expression don’t feel less. They feel differently: more negative emotion, less positive emotion, all while appearing composed on the outside (Gross & John, 2003).
Suppression doesn’t eliminate the emotion. It locks it inside while consuming cognitive resources to maintain the facade.
We’ve all been there, when stress and anxiety build up inside, but we don’t feel like we’re allowed to release them.
It’s like loading up rocks on a house of cards. And the weight is carried using the same cognitive budget you use for thinking clearly, focusing appropriately, and making good decisions.
Eventually, you can’t carry it all.
Neuroscience adds the next layer. A landmark review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2009) showed that even mild, acute, uncontrollable stress causes a rapid loss of prefrontal cortex (PFC) function. The PFC, the region behind your forehead responsible for decision-making, attention, and complex reasoning, is the most stress-sensitive part of the brain. Under threat, the higher-level thinking you need most is critically impaired. This is where fight, flight, freeze, and fawn live.
Now, stack suppression on top of that. When stress activates the fight-or-flight system, and you attempt to suppress rather than process, the activation keeps going, and so does its demand on your cognitive resources. You’ve added a second cognitive task (suppress the feeling) on top of the first (do the leadership work), during the exact conditions when cognitive resources are already depleted.
The poker face requires effort to maintain, and that effort has to be stolen from other tasks.
The stoicism hook
For many high-performing leaders, suppression isn’t just a strategy. It’s a hook—a long-standing behavioral driver that used to serve them well by allowing them to function better in a chaotic home, a highly demanding environment, or during a traumatic experience.
The old “I’ll give you something to cry about” sure teaches many future leaders how to bury any emotion that may arise.
Early in many leaders’ careers, appearing unflappable even got rewarded. It likely happened at school, on the field, and eventually at work. The promotion came. The pattern got reinforced.
By the time they reach the C-suite, suppression has been so consistently rewarded that it no longer feels like a choice. It feels like identity: I’m the one who keeps it together.
Getting unhooked doesn’t mean becoming emotionless. It means having a choice in how you respond to what you feel, rather than following an automatic response pattern wired in 20 years ago and never examined since.
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Three moves that change the regulation pattern
I worked with a CFO at a mid-sized health care company, I’ll call her Dana, who had built her career on being the calm one. Her board loved her for it. But because she was always stressed under the surface, she was having serious thoughts about quitting her job. She was proud of what she’d achieved, but as she moved up, she wasn’t sure she could keep carrying the stress.
What she discovered was that her composure wasn’t actually protecting her; it was damaging her. Not only was she experiencing more burnout the more she succeeded, but she was also making more careless mistakes, and her staff was trying to emulate her cool, calm, and collected approach, which kept resulting in crises.
Her regulation strategy and the impact it had on her leadership and ability to think were the problem.
The work to change your regulation strategy involves three moves:
1. Name it, specifically. Not simply “I’m stressed” but “I’m feeling frustrated because I don’t have the information I need yet.” Research on affect labeling shows that naming emotions precisely reduces amygdala activation (Lieberman et al., 2007). You don’t have to perform the emotion publicly to name it internally, but it’s the naming that gives your brain comfort and grounding.
2. Reframe the signal, not the situation. The emotional activation is a signal, not noise. “This urgency is telling me something important is unclear.”
Reappraising stress arousal as functional—my body is getting ready to perform—shifts activation from threat to challenge. Indeed, employees who held a “stress-is-enhancing” mindset showed higher resilience, lower anxiety, and more adaptive cortisol responses than those who held the opposite.
Same stressor. Different outcomes based on the perception we hold.
3. Use it, don’t manage it. Recent research using fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) imaging found that the cooperative neural synchrony between people increased under acute stress. Connection under pressure is a real resource.
Leaders who remain accessible, meaning they’re readable, regulated, and present, create the conditions for their teams to think alongside them. Dana didn’t need to emote in board meetings; she needed to signal that the emotion was present, acknowledged, and acceptable.
The reframe
The edge for great leaders isn’t stoicism. It never was.
Leaders who consistently perform under pressure don’t have the most emotional control, but they do have a more sophisticated relationship with their feelings. They can name an emotion quickly, read its signals accurately (in themselves and others), reframe its meaning in real time, and stay connected to the people around them while doing so.
And while emotional intelligence is often called a “soft skill,” I would argue that it provides good leaders with precision. It’s the capacity that 101 studies found to be the positive predictor of leadership performance—not the absence of emotion, but its regulation and reappraisal.
If the earlier piece on always-on leaders helped you identify the hook beneath your availability, this is the next question: When the stress hits, when the activation rises, what do you do with it?
The answer isn’t to suppress it. The answer is to understand it, acknowledge it, reframe it, and use it.
That’s not less leadership, it’s leadership precisely deployed.
