• Defining Emotional Labor: The "Forgotten" Work: Emotional labor is the conscious and subconscious effort required to display the "right" emotions as dictated by unwritten workplace rules. While organizations have long acknowledged and measured physical and cognitive labor, emotional labor has remained a largely invisible, yet taxing, component of professional life.

• Core Function: It involves either suppressing genuine feelings (e.g., swallowing frustration in a tense meeting) or evoking emotions one does not actually feel (e.g., appearing energetic and positive when feeling burnt out).

• Scientific Definition: Dina describes it as "the work that we do subconsciously and consciously to display those right emotions at work."

• A Universal Experience: All employees perform some level of emotional labor, such as laughing at a superior's unfunny jokes or calming an anxious client while feeling anxious themselves. However, the quantity and complexity of this labor are significantly amplified for those in leadership positions.

The viral response to Dina's HBR article, "The Emotional Labor of Being a Leader," revealed a widespread hunger among leaders for this phenomenon to be named and validated. The feedback indicated that giving a term to this exhausting and intangible work made leaders feel seen and understood.

• The Unique Burden on LeadersLeaders perform what Dina terms an "obscene amount of emotional labor," a responsibility that is rarely, if ever, included in a job description. This heightened burden stems from the complex and multifaceted nature of their roles.

• Key areas where leaders perform intensive emotional labor include:

• Stakeholder Management: Constantly switching emotional personas and communication styles to be effective with their direct reports, the executive team, and the board.

• Team Motivation: Rallying their teams and projecting confidence, even when feeling exhausted, uncertain, or doubtful about the goals themselves.

• Conflict Resolution: Navigating and managing interpersonal conflicts on increasingly diverse and often polarized teams.

• High-Stakes Decisions: Processing and managing their own emotions while making weighty decisions that affect people's lives, such as conducting layoffs, restructuring a change-fatigued team, or letting an underperformer go.

• Meeting Expectations: Navigating the "superhuman expectations" of modern leadership, such as being confident yet humble, and demonstrating an appropriate level of authenticity without losing credibility.

This continuous emotional regulation is a form of unacknowledged work that, when unmanaged, leads to significant negative consequences.

• The High Cost of Unacknowledged Emotional Labor: Suppressing emotions is a common, and sometimes necessary, short-term strategy. However, when it becomes a chronic response, the costs are steep for the leader, their team, and their personal well-being.

• The "Beach Ball Metaphor": This metaphor vividly illustrates the unsustainability of emotional suppression.

• The Action: Suppressing emotions is like holding a beach ball underwater. It can be done, but it requires constant energy and effort.

• The Accumulation: As more difficult situations arise, a person is forced to hold down multiple beach balls at once.

• The Consequence: Inevitably, the beach balls pop out, often sideways and unexpectedly, hitting others (e.g., snapping at family after a hard day) or the individual themselves.

This happens because emotions are composed of three parts: the behavioral (what is shown), the physiological (internal bodily sensations), and the cognitive (the interpretation or "feeling"). Suppression, or "surface acting," only addresses the behavioral component, leaving the physiological and cognitive aspects to build up internally.
• Negative Consequences of Chronic Suppression

• Leadership Effectiveness: Diminished trust with the team; increased likelihood of abusive behaviors like being overly critical or making belittling comments.

• Personal Life: "Spillover" effects, such as holding it together at work only to "snap" at loved ones at home.

• Health and Well-being: Increased compulsive behaviors (drinking, eating), higher rates of physical pain, depression, insomnia, anxiety, and, in extreme cases, cardiovascular issues.

• The Leader's Role in Shaping Team Emotional Climate: A leader's emotional state has a disproportionate impact on their team's environment due to the inherent power dynamics of their role. This influence is exerted through two primary mechanisms:

1. Emotional Contagion: Emotions are highly infectious in group settings. A leader's emotions, whether positive or negative, "spread at velocity" throughout their team, setting the overall tone.

2. Inference: Team members are constantly trying to "read the tea leaves" of a leader's emotional state. Because the leader controls resources, promotions, and job security, employees scrutinize their words, actions, and non-verbal cues to determine how to behave and what to expect.

Failing to recognize this outsized impact is a disservice to the entire organization. When leaders actively work to create an emotionally authentic climate, one where a normal range of emotions is permitted, the benefits are substantial.
• Research shows these teams are:

• More resilient

• More creative

• More effective at problem-solving

• Higher in psychological safety