Leaders who perform best don’t feel less—they read emotion better.

Around 101 studies found that emotional suppression negatively predicts leadership performance.

Suppression doesn’t make emotions disappear; it taxes the same cognitive resources you need to lead well.

Many organizational leaders use a performance strategy that’s working against them while they take pride in it.

It looks like calm under pressure, like a steady hand. It looks like exactly what we promote people for.

But the research is now unambiguous: It doesn’t work.

The strategy is called suppression—controlling your emotional expression, keeping your face neutral, not letting them see you sweat. We’ve built an entire leadership archetype around it. I’ve called it the Myth of the Unshakable Leader: the belief that real strength means never being moved by what happens around you.

A systematic review of 101 studies shows this clearly: across leadership style, leader well-being, and leader performance, suppressing emotion correlates negatively with effectiveness.

The leaders who perform best don’t feel less. They regulate differently.

The leaders who perform best don’t feel less. They regulate differently.

In a recent piece on the leaders who can’t switch off, I wrote about the executives who check their phones at midnight not because anything is urgent but because stopping feels dangerous. The hook underneath that pattern is identity fusion, control anxiety, and the deep belief that personal worth equals output. What I didn’t fully address there is what happens when the emotion does surface. When stress hits, when frustration rises, when something lands that threatens your sense of control. The question isn’t just why you can’t switch off, it’s what do you do with the discomfort when it arrives?

Most high performers, when pressed, will say: “Suppress it, get over it, and get on with it.”

The research now shows that this approach has real costs.

What suppression actually costs

The foundational work comes from psychologists James Gross and Oliver John, whose 2003 study became one of the most-cited papers in emotion regulation science. Their finding was counterintuitive and specific: people who habitually suppress their emotional expression don’t feel less. They feel differently: more negative emotion, less positive emotion, all while appearing composed on the outside (Gross &........

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