There is a finding in the emotion regulation literature that ought to be better known by anyone who leads people. When you hide what you are feeling from someone, their blood pressure goes up.
Not yours. Theirs.[1]
Butler and colleagues put pairs of people in a room to discuss something upsetting. One of each pair was asked to suppress any visible emotion. Suppression disrupted the conversation, reduced rapport, and produced a measurable cardiovascular response in the person who was being protected from the emotion they could not see.
If you want a single answer to the question of how leadership affects team performance, it is somewhere in that result.
What your team is actually reading
Leaders under pressure tend to concentrate on the things they can construct. The plan. The message. The order in which to tell people. All of which matters, and none of which is the first thing the room processes.
Barsade demonstrated group emotional contagion in a controlled study: moods transfer between people in a group, reliably enough to shift individual attitudes.[2] Two details from that work are worth holding onto. Contagion was not affected by how pleasant the mood was, so anxiety travels as efficiently as optimism. And it was not affected by the energy with which it was expressed, which means quiet dread spreads about as well as visible panic.
A team does not need you to say anything. It has already read you and adjusted.
Why the obvious fix makes it worse
The natural conclusion is to manage the display. Keep it off your face. Give the team the calm version of you and carry the rest privately.
This is the single most common piece of leadership advice we hear repeated, and it is close to the opposite of what the evidence supports.
Suppression is what psychologists call a response-focused strategy: the emotion has already happened and you are managing what shows. It is expensive. It occupies attention, which makes you less responsive in conversation. It degrades communication. And, per Butler, it transfers physiological cost to the other person rather than sparing them.[1]
Hiding what you feel does not protect your team from it. It leaves them working out what you are not saying, which is more effortful than being told.
Teams are extremely good at detecting the gap between what someone is saying and what they are transmitting. What they are usually not good at is naming it. So the gap gets filled with something worse than the truth, and it gets filled privately.
What ‘containment’ actually means
Containment is not a facial expression, and it is certainly not pretending things are fine when they are not.
It is the difference between a leader who has processed the difficulty and one who is holding it down. Both leaders may look similar for about ten minutes. Only one of them is still available to the team afterwards. The other one is wrapped up in trying to manage their own internal chaos and maintaining the illusion of calm.
The distinction in the research is between suppression and reappraisal. Reappraisal happens earlier: you change how you are construing the situation before the full emotional response has formed. It is consistently associated with better outcomes for the person doing it and for the people around them.[1] It is also considerably harder, because it requires actually thinking about the thing rather than deciding not to show it.
A contained leader can say the situation is serious without the room concluding that it is hopeless. That composure comes from having done the work of understanding what is actually true, so what gets transmitted is proportionate rather than raw.
What this means practically
The leadership work under pressure is mostly regulation work, not communication work, and it happens before the meeting rather than during it.
That is an uncomfortable reframe, because it means the thing your team most needs from you is not something you can put on a slide. It also means the time you spend actually thinking through a difficult situation, on your own, before you walk into the room, is not preparation for the leadership. It is the leadership.
The team will read whatever state you arrive in. The only real choice is whether that state has been processed or is still in flight.
From the ATP store
Calm Containment is one of the leadership conditions measured in the Leadership Report, alongside how a team experiences emotional tone, fairness, repair and rhythm.
About the author
Dr Antonio Zarola
Founder & Managing Director
PhD · CPsychol · AFBPsS · HCPC Registered Occupational PsychologistTony specialises in leadership within teams, and in how emotions influence team performance. His doctorate examined violence and aggression in healthcare settings, and the part collective confidence played in how teams handled incidents, which is where his interest in leadership and teamwork began. He has worked with over 900 teams, and is drawn to the moment a team finally says the thing nobody has been saying.
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