Building Cultures That Can Hold Humanity
I once started my day by assuaging the heartache of one of my team members. He came in looking disheveled and not as perky as normal. When I asked him how he was doing, he unloaded about a breakup he had the night before. They’d be dating for long enough that he had been planning to propose, but she apparently had a different experience. We talked through it. He cried. After he went through several tissues, I offered to let him take the day off. He declined and went to his desk to work. Later, he went to lunch with his colleagues and came back more himself.
This happens a lot. Leaders get handed the emotions of their team members. It could be that they’re irritated about a decision, overwhelmed by work, or it could be something happening in their personal life. Or, it could be that other leaders in your organization are asking you to take care of the reaction of a decision that they made. When we lead people, it’s common for us to get the whole person, not just their work selves.
In traditional leadership, we’re told to encourage people to leave their emotions and personal lives at the door. But, this doesn’t actually work. Several studies including one in 2014 by Ditzfeld & Showers show that compartmentalization may work in the short-term, but in the long-term cause higher reactivity and stress (both mentally and emotionally). This means that leaving these things “at the door” may be a short-term fix with long-term negative consequences.
The alternative is not to just let people’s emotions become the star of the show (though I’ve seen that as well). The real solution becomes building a culture and a system that can hold humanity while also moving the work forward. This might feel like threading the needle at first – especially for those who are accustomed to the traditional view of leadership. So, let’s walk through this at a higher level.
In many cases, leadership tends to drift toward two extremes. We either attempt to silence the emotional landscape because it feels unmanageable, or we find ourselves shouldering burdens that weren’t meant for us to carry. Neither approach fosters a culture that is truly capable of supporting humanity. In many ways, organizations can over-function just like people can. When every conflict, disappointment, frustration, or emotional challenge gets routed to a single leader, the organization becomes dependent on that person instead of developing its own resilience. That’s not emotional containment. It’s organizational over-functioning.
Emotional Containment: What is it? And, who does it?
Emotional containment is a culture’s ability to acknowledge, process, and move through emotions without becoming overwhelmed by them. Emotional containment isn’t something you can write into a policy or announce at a staff meeting. It develops over time as people build trust, create real relationships, and learn how to support one another without becoming responsible for one another.
Since we’re no longer checking our humanity at the door, people are going to keep coming to work in all versions of themselves. But, the leader doesn’t have to hold all the emotions. Back to my example above, I listened. I offered support. I offered time off. I could do that because we had built a system that wasn’t reliant on one person. He could take time off and the rest of the team could keep functioning because we had trust and back-ups. He wasn’t over-functioning.
He chose not to take the time off, and instead he spent time with his colleagues who also allowed him to show up as his real self. When they came back from lunch they were all joking and laughing. They had built a real enough relationship with one another that they became each other’s support system. Not in a toxic “we’re all family here” kind of way, but in a way that allowed each member of the team to be themselves.
This wasn’t a “my boss solved all my problems” situation. It was a place where he had the space to process first with me and then his team. Not one person carried all of it. Honestly, I’m not sure any of us carried it. We simply allowed him to move through his emotions on his own.
The Role of Emotional Leadership
I’m going to take a wild guess and assume you’re not a therapist. Neither am I. It’s not the job of a leader to become the therapist or to hold all of the emotions of the team. Even if there are a lot of them. Our role as leaders is to create an environment with the following:
- Psychological safety
- Clear expectations
- Healthy boundaries
- Peer support
- Accountability
- Trust
We are not meant to carry people. But, we can help create an environment that allows our team members to carry themselves and support one another.
The Inherit Leadership Connection
We have four pillars that we believe hold the structure for every leader. When it comes to emotional containment, here’s how they play out:
- Trust – people feel safe being human. Notice how my team member felt safe with the team and with me to be honest about his emotional space.
- Power – responsibility is distributed rather than centralized. He could’ve taken time off because the responsibility of his job didn’t rest fully on his shoulders. Additionally, I didn’t have to hold all his emotions because the team also felt empowered to give him support.
- Culture – support is normalized. It wasn’t weird that he showed up in my office telling me about his break-up. We regularly talked about our lives outside of work both one-on-one and as a team.
- Systems – structures exist to help people navigate challenges. There were team members to back up his daily work so nothing would fall apart. That doesn’t mean that his work wasn’t valued, but that the system wasn’t dependent upon him being logged in that day.
If any of these pillars are weak, the containment fails, and it eventually falls on one person – usually the leader.
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The goal of leadership isn’t to avoid emotions or become the dumping ground for them. The goal is to help build a culture where people can show up as human beings, support one another, and continue moving forward—even when life gets messy.
Because life will get messy.
People will lose parents. They’ll get divorced. They’ll struggle with their health. Their kids will leave for college. They’ll experience grief, joy, fear, excitement, and uncertainty.
The strongest teams I’ve worked with weren’t the ones that avoided hard things. They were the ones that knew how to move through hard things together. When trust exists, when support exists, and when the burden doesn’t fall on one person, people can focus on what matters. Not because life got easier, but because they don’t have to navigate it alone.
