Why good leaders get rigid under stress
Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching:
“A man is born gentle and weak; at his death he is hard and stiff. Green plants are tender and filled with sap; at their death they are withered and dry. Therefore, the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death; the gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.”
I have used this phrase in clinical work for years and find myself coming back to this passage as I have been working through research on emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility, and leadership.
Coaching and working with people over the years, I have found that some of the most rigid behaviors come from people not always from rigid people. I have seen several examples of folks who were thoughtful, relational, and genuinely committed to the people they served. Situationally, though, they became less curious. Disagreements perceived as disloyalty. New information was an obstacle rather than something to consider. I’ve seen flexible people rely more heavily on rules and familiar explanations, even when those approaches were clearly not working.
In reflection, I have observed that emotional content: stress, anger, shame, and many others- may be what sets these events apart from the ones that do not display the same rigidity. A disagreement that feels emotionally manageable leaves room for questions. A disagreement interpreted as a threat to competence or a deeply held value produces a very different response. Attention narrows. The first explanation becomes more convincing. Familiar strategies become easier to remember. The person may still see themselves as acting rationally, even as their available range of thought and behavior contracts. Research on executive functioning helps explain some of this narrowing. Stress and strong negative emotion can interfere with inhibition, working memory, and cognitive shifting—the capacities that allow us to resist a dominant response, hold competing information in mind, and consider another course of action (Collins & Jackson, 2015; Diamond, 2013).
This is where I find the language of rigidity useful. In talking about rigidity, I mean that, in a particular moment, a person can lose some capacity to ‘move’, to redirect attention, revise an assumption, hold another perspective alongside their own, or abandon a response that no longer fits. Research on emotion regulation gives us one way to understand how this happens. Emotions do not arrive as isolated feelings that sit beside our thinking. They develop through an interaction with a situation. Our regulation hinges on what we attend to, how we interpret what is happening, and how we respond. Each response then changes the situation and can intensify the next round of attention and interpretation (Gross, 1998).
Imagine for a moment a common workplace situation: a staff member questions a leader’s decision, maybe offhand or in an inelegant way. The leader notices the sharpest part of the criticism and interprets it as a challenge to their knowledge or competence. That appraisal produces anxiety, anger, embarrassment, or some combination of the three. The leader responds by defending the decision more forcefully. The staff member, caught off guard by the response, becomes frustrated and pushes harder. That reaction is then taken as evidence that the original interpretation was correct. The leader was not necessarily a rigid person, but they have become rigid in this particular emotional loop.
Emotion regulation involves efforts to influence which emotions we have, when we have them, and how we experience or express them (Gross, 1998). There are multiple points where we might make a regulatory change. We might shift what we are paying attention to, reconsider what the interaction means to us, or control what we do once the emotional response is already underway. These strategies require different skills and come at different costs.
Cognitive reappraisal, for example, means changing the interpretation of the event. Perhaps that employee is not trying to undermine me. Perhaps they are worried about how this decision will affect their clients. Perhaps their delivery is poor, but the underlying information is still useful. Reappraisal is centrally about considering other meanings before committing fully to any one.
Suppression, on the other hand, happens when we are already angry or threatened but work to conceal or shift our response. Self-control of this form is necessary in many situations, and many leaders cannot express every emotional reaction they experience. But hiding an emotion does not necessarily alter the interpretation producing it, and the effort involved takes significantly more mental resources than shifting our perspectives before the feeling takes hold (Gross & John, 2003; Torrence & Connelly, 2019). Research generally distinguishes reappraisal, which changes meaning, from suppression, which primarily changes what others can observe (Gross & John, 2003).
This is where cognitive flexibility, the ability to shift perspectives, rules, or strategies, comes into play. Flexibility is not simply openness (the personality characteristic for all of my psychologist friends out there). It emerges through several cognitive operations working together in context. A person must inhibit the dominant response, hold relevant information in mind, move attention, and generate another possible course of action (Diamond, 2013; Ionescu, 2012).
If that sounds similar to the elements of reappraisal, you are certainly following along. Reappraisal also requires a person to interrupt the initial meaning, construct another interpretation, and hold it long enough for the emotional response to change. Reviews and meta-analytic research suggest that executive functions, including working memory, inhibition, and shifting, contribute to successful reappraisal, although the relationships vary depending on how the capacities and strategies are measured (Schmeichel & Tang, 2015; Toh et al., 2024).
In the modern era, where there is a push to retreat from emotionally driven, heart-led leadership, research has shown that doing so puts us at risk of failing in our jobs as leaders. In fact, we need more skills to manage our own feelings in the workplace. If we can help regulate effectively by shifting our thinking about situations, we can increase our ability to respond effectively (Edelman & van Knippenberg, 2017). Who knows, maybe we can even cultivate these skills in the workers and folks around us who are serving people in our vulnerable communities. Through thoughtful skills development, we can turn leadership towards the discipline of life that we all deserve at work.
