The mislabelled emotions of leadership

Most of what we call workplace conflict isn’t really about work at all. It’s about feelings, the ancient, unexamined, beautifully messy feelings that we drag into our meetings, our relationships, and our leadership roles without realising they were never born in the boardroom. The key word here is born. They began with our nervous system finding safety, reward and belonging in our human families of origin, our communities and our institutions of our early years, and continue on, unsurfaced as our neural safety responses to relational safety.

I’ve spent years working with leaders across every imaginable sector, agriculture, rail, health, education, small business, government. And I can tell you this: the problems we diagnose as performance, productivity, or communication issues are so often mislabelled emotions.

We think we’re managing conflict. What we’re actually managing is fear. We think we’re holding people accountable. But sometimes, we’re just re-enacting the longing to be seen, loved, supported, or the terror of being blamed for someone else’s emotional deficit. We think someone’s being difficult, or direct, or not hearing us, when what we’re really seeing is their nervous system trying to stay safe – or ours.

It’s not weakness. It’s wiring. Our systems are working as they are meant to, but we might need an upgrade on our human software.

Our nervous system, the exquisite, primal technology that keeps us alive, has one job: to detect danger and keep us connected. It doesn’t care about KPIs or stakeholder reports. It cares about belonging, about not being cast out of the tribe. So when the body senses threat, even subtle threat, a frown, a tight tone email, a meeting invite with no context, a growth conversation that feel like criticism, it activates an old, familiar strategy: fight, flight, freeze, fawn. We think we’re being professional; our biology is being protective.

Many of us became leaders because, early on, we learned that competence equals safety. If I’m useful, I’m loved. If I perform, I belong. If I make everyone happy, I can rest. But that kind of safety is conditional, and conditional safety is never really safe.

Those parts of us that drive our competencies protection, the Pleaser, the Fixer, the Controller, the Diplomat, are brilliant at getting results. They keep us on time, on task, and on top of our inboxes. But they also keep us locked in performance mode, scanning for subtle signs of rejection or disapproval, responding not to the reality in front of us but to echoes of earlier experiences all while digging deeper into sympathetic nervous system exhaustion.

The workplace becomes a stage where old relational dramas are re-enacted daily: the over-responsible leader carrying everyone’s emotional load, the hyper-independent one who never asks for help, the pleaser who keeps harmony at the expense of honesty, the perfectionist whose worth lives in output.

These aren’t just personality types. They’re adaptive strategies, intelligent, embodied responses to a world that once felt unpredictable. And unless we learn to name and work with them, they quietly run the show.

When a colleague questions our idea, it’s not the colleague who feels dangerous, it’s the memory of being shamed for getting it wrong. When someone on our team withdraws or doesn’t respond, our body remembers being left out, forgotten, invisible.
When we find ourselves micro-managing, rescuing, or over-delivering, we’re often just trying to keep our nervous system calm by covering off all the potential risks. We label it stress, overwhelm, lack of support. But really, it’s fear of disconnection.

This is why so many organisational strategies miss the mark. We try to fix emotional pain with structural change or technical solutions: a new policy, a new org chart, a new slogan about values. But you can’t manage attachment wounds with a spreadsheet. What’s playing out in your team might look like misalignment or inefficiency, but underneath, it’s an unspoken emotional economy built on unmet needs. Attunement comes before alignment and is an integral part of the systems of organisational flourishing and optimisation.

So what do we do? We start by noticing.

When you feel that surge of irritation, defensiveness, or anxiety in a meeting, pause. Don’t rush to fix or explain it. Ask yourself, “What am I actually feeling?” Often the emotion underneath isn’t anger or frustration, it’s fear, sadness, or shame wearing a harder mask.

If you can trace it back, even just a little, you might find an old story running quietly underneath: I’m not enough. I’m about to get it wrong. No one’s got me, so I have to hold it all. If I’m the best, they will still love me.

This is where the work begins. Not in blaming or analysing yourself, but in gently recognising that your nervous system is still trying to protect you using tools it built decades ago.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) calls this working with parts. You begin to see that the perfectionist isn’t you, it’s a part of you trying to help. The pleaser isn’t weakness, it’s love in disguise. The controller isn’t cruelty, its vigilance born from care. And all of them want the same thing – safety, reward and belonging. And once you can see those parts, you can lead them. That’s real self-leadership.

In my workshop, coaching and therapy rooms, I see this shift every week the moment a leader realises their problem isn’t personal failure or a team member issue, but a nervous system trying to keep them safe. It’s like watching armour melt. There’s usually a surprised recognition and return to selfhood, sometimes tears, often grief, a little laughter. Because the truth is both painful and freeing: we’re not broken. We’re just human. Now we can begin to lead.

Leadership development that ignores this human architecture, that trains cognition and performance but neglects attachment, embodiment, and regulation leaves people technically brilliant but relationally brittle. The future of leadership isn’t just about AI, systems, and innovation; it’s about the neurobiology of connection.

So if you’re leading people, or being led, start there. Notice your body before you speak. Pause before you defend. Breathe before you decide. Get curious to how you arrived at that split second judgement. What got that human to that behaviour? It 100 percent wasn’t you. So you need to lead by perception, neuroception and interoception – all your senses being used to be understand how to work in the moment in your skillset, with all your own reactions and protectors.

When discomfort arises, that hot sting of rejection, the fog of overwhelm, the tension behind your eyes, resist the reflex to fix it or move away. Sit with it. Let it teach you what it’s protecting. That’s the beginning of emotional literacy.

Because until we can name what we’re feeling, we’ll keep building systems to solve feelings that were never born in them. We’ll keep asking organisations to give us the safety our nervous system hasn’t yet learned to provide. And we’ll keep calling that leadership.

Leadership isn’t the absence of emotion. It’s the capacity to stay present in its presence. That’s the real work. And it starts, as all healing does, not in the boardroom, but in the body.

Dr Polly McGee is a Neuroleadership Designer, Facilitator, Author, Podcaster  and Co-CEO of DISCO. Polly spends their time in organisations building trauma-responsive leadership capacity and psychologically safe, productive cultures; designing and leading workshops; and working with high performance clients in their private therapy practice. From leading fast growth start-ups and excelling in innovation to guiding digital strategies Polly brings a unique perspective to the table with an intersectional lens that collides neurobiology with scaling technology and person-centred leadership capacity across organisations.