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Are Leaders Getting Too Emotional?

An interview with Gautam Mukunda and Gianpiero Petriglieri by Adi Ignatius and Sarah Green Carmichael

There’s a lot of crying and shouting both in politics and at the office. Gautam Mukunda of Harvard Business School and Gianpiero Petriglieri of INSEAD help us try to make sense of it all.

Sarah Green Carmichael: It seems today, with leaders being in public more, there is an emphasis on our leaders always being authentic—that’s the buzzword. And tears and shouting do seem to exude authenticity. Gianpiero, what do you make of that? Are our leaders crying and shouting to prove to us that they are real in some way?

Gianpiero Petriglieri: I don’t think people care about leaders being authentic. I think people care about leaders being consistent. Emotions are a great way to convey that you mean what you’re saying.

I think we also need to make a distinction between people in positions of power, where emotional expression is always problematic because you expect a certain contained demeanor—although norms are changing, as Gautam has said—and leaders, where emotions are the whole thing. Emotions constitute the connection between people whom we follow and ourselves. So just because you happen to be in a position of visible power, that doesn’t mean people regard you as a leader.

In fact, demonstrating emotion is a way of claiming, “Hey, I’m here. I think you should pay attention to this. And I am credibly voicing a concern that we should all care about.” Emotions are a way in which people in power try to lead.

Adi Ignatius: Gianpiero, let me follow up on that because you said that people don’t care about their leaders being authentic, and that’s basically challenging an entire industry—a sub-industry in the management business that says leaders do need to be authentic. Talk about that a little bit, particularly in the context of emotions. You almost sounded Machiavellian in what you were saying, that a leader can be whatever—they can be emotional—but the point is to be consistent and therefore effective. Can you talk more about that?

GP: Now when you talk about authenticity, you’re talking about two different things. One is spontaneity, which is to say, “I voice my feelings of the moment.” Now that might—or much more likely might not—be appropriate for you as a leader.

Then, another part of authenticity means, “I voice credibly, consistently, and authentically the feelings that other people are also feeling. I am showing that we are, in a way, sharing the same concern. I am, in many ways, concerned and I care about the same things that you care about.”

This is what you see leaders doing all the time. Sometimes in a Machiavellian way. But sometimes in a very genuine way. In fact, one of the very reasons why we end up following someone is because they seem to be genuinely concerned about things we care about. In politics you see it a lot. You see in political campaigns one candidate saying, “I am one of you guys. I am like you. I have your same background. I care about the same things. But this other guy, he or she is really out for themselves.” And the other person is saying the same thing: “No, no, no. I’m actually talking about what we all care about. And this other person is out for themselves.”

Whoever manages to define themselves as one of us and define the opponent as personally interested wins. So what I’m saying is we don’t particularly care that our leader is expressing something that’s authentic to them. What we really care about is that our leader is expressing emotions that are meaningful to us.

This is why emotional expression is a double-edged sword. Because sometimes people interpret an emotion as essentially an act of selfishness—that the emotion is really an expression of you being more preoccupied with yourself than with me.

But sometimes people interpret an emotion as an act of generosity: This really shows that you were feeling what I am also feeling. Remember Bill Clinton? In ’92 there was a moment during his first campaign where he said in a rally, “I feel your pain.” And that remained a legendary moment in his first election. Because he was doing what leaders always try to do, not always manipulatively or in a way that’s Machiavellian, but often very genuinely to convey that the leader shares not just the same understanding of our situation but the same experience of our situation. This is what most of us have always wanted in the people that we then trust to lead, not just that they intellectually understand our circumstances, but that they feel what it’s like to be in our circumstances—that they feel our pain, they feel our concerns, they aspire to our same aspirations, they desire our same desires.

That’s ultimately what we care about when we say we want leaders to be authentic. We want them to have a lived understanding of our predicament. We don’t just want them to express what happens to be true to them at that particular moment.

AI: Gautam, do you agree with that? Because that seems to be a statement that empathy and emotional intelligence are really the key to leadership. I’m simplifying, but does that all make sense to you?

Gautam Mukunda: I think empathy and emotional intelligence are extraordinarily powerful keys to leadership. You do often hear people saying—if you look at the Trump phenomenon here in the United States, for example—that they want leaders to tell them what they really think, as opposed to just telling them what the leader thinks they want to hear in order to gain power.

But of course it’s worth noting that the same people who say this then support those who tell them what they want to hear, not in fact what they really think. So there is some level of doublethink, where, “Donald Trump says what I think, so that must be what he really thinks.”

It’s that ability to tell people what they want to hear in a way that they believe that you’re being sincere that strikes me as being a pretty effective tool in getting power. And certainly, what I got from Gianpiero’s comment is the extent to which we want our leaders to be not just self-interested but interested in the welfare of the group, of the people they lead, as much as themselves. And that, essentially, many of these contests for power involve people struggling to define their opponents as only being self-interested.

I think that’s true across almost any organization. A leader who is self-interested is one whose followers will be much less likely to lead. But to me, then, you get this question: What are emotions?

Even a very skilled actor, for example, finds it difficult to fake tears on cue. That’s something that even professional actors can struggle with. So when President Obama cries over children who are murdered in a school, there is a sense that he’s revealing some deeply held emotion.

It is also striking, of course, that so much of the conservative response to that statement was to suggest that he had onions or something under the podium that were allowing him to fake it, both because I think the people saying this realize how powerful it was to see a president break down in tears and because it reveals something about themselves—that they felt that the murder of many innocent children was somehow something that wouldn’t move a person to tears.

GP: You see, I don’t think people just want to hear leaders tell them what they think. I think people want to see leaders show them what they themselves feel. They want to see their leaders express the feeling that they also sense to be true.

Of course, not everyone shares the same feelings. The example Gautam brings up—President Obama crying—it’s an extremely powerful message. And it humanizes a leader. For people who share the same dismay, the same discomfort, that humanization actually enhances his leadership. And for people who oppose his understanding of the situation, for people who don’t share his sentiments, that humanization diminishes his leadership. This is where emotional expression is always a double-edged sword. Because the people who share the sentiments you are expressing will actually feel closer to you and, therefore, feel that you are more of a leader. And the people who don’t share those sentiments will suddenly feel more distant from you, and they will suspect that you are being manipulative, Machiavellian, and whatnot.

In that moment, you have a man who occupies one of the most powerful positions of leadership in the world facing, on his watch, a tragedy. A tragedy that, despite all his power, he cannot reverse. He is therefore expressing frustration at the limitation of that power—a frustration that’s not just his own but is also expressed on behalf of a large group of people who probably feel that it is a tragedy that could easily have been prevented with political will, with political action. And it isn’t prevented simply because there is not enough political will to implement the changes that you would need for gun control.

SGC: In that moment, President Obama crying—would that moment have been different if he were a female president? Is there something different about when you see a man break down that way and a female leader of that stature break down that way?

GM: I mean, surely, without a doubt. The criticism that someone is too emotional is one of the classic gendered tropes that are used to go after female leaders. It’s worth noting that when Hillary Clinton cried a little bit in 2008 in New Hampshire it was highlighted as one of the high points of her campaign. This was one of the moments that turned it around and put her back into the race against Obama in 2008.

But it’s illustrative that one of the criticisms of Hillary is that she’s robotic. Right? So that was a breakthrough of that facade.

I think for most women leaders it’s a much riskier proposition to cry than for a male leader to do so. It just plays into gendered stereotypes that opponents of that leader can use to weaken them very rapidly.

SGC: We should also probably mention here that there may be racial stereotypes. There may be other emotions, like maybe anger, that Obama might get in trouble for expressing that Hillary would not.

GM: Without a doubt. On those few occasions when Barack Obama has revealed how he thinks about the way he presents himself—and it’s clear that he is someone who thinks deeply about this kind of thing and is very self-reflective on these issues—he has said that, above all else, the thing that he most strives to avoid is being perceived as the angry black man. That’s the phrase that he used. And that this is a profound force that is shaping how he wants to be seen.

He essentially feels that visible expressions of anger are, because of racial dynamics in the United States, almost entirely off limits to him as a leader. And in fact, if you note, before he was reelected, anger was in fact entirely off limits to him as a leader. I can’t think of any time that he expressed anger in those first four years. What we’ve started to see after he was reelected, and particularly in the past year, is that he essentially has more freedom to express these emotions. And he is taking advantage of it quite powerfully on some occasions.

AI: So given what you said, would you advise female executives to hold their emotions in check? That it may not be fair, but society will still hold it against them if they cry in public in front of their teams?

GM: First, I would advise any leader, male or female, to work pretty hard to do that. The power of these moments is at least in part precisely because they are rare.

John Boehner’s tendency to break down in tears became a punch line in Washington. I don’t think it was an asset to his leadership. When Barack Obama did it, it was striking because we had never seen a president do something like that, that I can recall.

So male or female, I would say, if you are extraordinarily emotional at all times, that is likely to be a handicap for you as a leader at least to some extent. I would tell female executives that it is deeply unfair, but they are being judged more harshly.

And they surely know that better than I ever could; I’ve never spoken with a woman leader who wasn’t well aware of that fact and who hadn’t thought through the fact that they were being judged by standards that their male counterparts were not.

But it is too easy to use gendered attacks—to argue that someone is overly emotional and not thinking things through—against a female leader, or any female leader in a contentious situation where there are people trying to undercut her, to not be extremely cautious of that concern.

SGC: Gianpiero, do you have anything to add either about the anger issue or the weeping issue?

GP: I generally think outrage is a lot easier to fake than sadness. And perhaps a lot easier to mistrust, frankly. See, I think we risk spending too much tension under the stereotypes about what you should or shouldn’t do.

I would tend to agree that, especially for a senior or a visible leader in politics or business, it’s a good rule of thumb to have a relatively contained demeanor. I also think that anyone who wants to really be a leader—not just call themselves one—has to have some kind of relationship with their emotional life. They ought to be able to ask themselves not just, “Do I express emotions or not?” but to be a little bit more sophisticated with themselves and with others to ask, “How do I express emotions?”

If you are attentive to the undercurrent of organizational lives, emotions are constantly being expressed. When I work with senior management teams, my first question is never, “Do you openly express emotions or not?” My first question is, “How do you tend to express emotions?”

So, for example, one classic way to scream your divergence with a group’s opinion is simply not to show up. Or to show up late to a meeting and say nothing when everyone else is very animated. That’s a very overt, very visible expression of disappointment or even aggression. Now, whether that’s discussed, whether that’s decoded, whether that’s verbalized is a different thing. Just because we aren’t verbalizing our emotions or melting into tears doesn’t mean we aren’t expressing strong emotions or that we aren’t expressing emotions appropriately. Too detached of an emotional response can very often be extremely inappropriate and extremely ineffective.

So I think, as a leader, the more important questions are: Do you know what you’re feeling? And do you know whose feelings those are? Do you know why you’re feeling that way? Are you interpreting those feelings just as an expression of your emotional state of the moment? Or are you able to think more deeply about what those feelings are telling you about what’s happening around you—what’s happening to the people that you’re responsible for? And can you make sense of and then articulate them in a way that is useful, in a way that actually advances the task?

GAUTAM MUKUNDA is an assistant professor in the Organizational Behavior Unit of Harvard Business School. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in political science. His first book is Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERI is an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, where he directs the Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive program for emerging leaders. A medical doctor and psychiatrist by training, he researches and practices leadership development. Follow him on Twitter @gpetriglieri. ADI IGNATIUS is the editor in chief of Harvard Business Review. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review. Follow her on Twitter @skgreen.

Adapted from “Are Leaders Getting Too Emotional?”
on HBR IdeaCast (podcast), March 17, 2016.