Mike Pelfini — 09 November 2026

Leading in a fast-changing world can take an emotional toll on leaders. Peer support within a human-centered environment can help leaders develop the skills and mindset needed to navigate the emotional labor of leadership, fostering healthy growth for themselves and their organizations.

Leaders often ignore the emotional demands of their jobs. These demands are sometimes referred to as emotional labor. These leaders may turn to short-term strategies to address these demands that might seem convenient but carry concealed long-term costs. More useful solutions include emotional regulation, peer group support, and human-centered leadership.

Leadership requires more than technical skill or strategic vision. It calls on leaders to manage, motivate, and inspire others, whether they’re individual contributors, working teams, or entire organizations. In times of competing priorities, these efforts can extract an emotional toll. For that reason, managing workplace emotions, whether your own or others’, has been called emotional labor.

Emotional labor appears in many contexts. 

For example, service workers experience emotional labor when they have to smile at difficult customers. Doctors experience it when they have to deliver bad news in a calm, professional manner. Business leaders experience it when they have to implement unpopular policies, reassure anxious workers, or unify competing factions. 

This emotional aspect of leadership is often minimized or ignored. But as pressures mount, and change and uncertainty disrupt the workplace, leaders are being called on to do more emotional labor. Here are a few points to consider:

• 7 in 10 business leaders now say that speed and agility are their main competitive strategies, while the pace of change is accelerating, according to Deloitte’s 2026 State of Human Capital Trends report.
• U.S. employee engagement fell to 29% in the third quarter of 2026, its lowest level in 15 years, according to Gallup.
• And the average CEO tenure fell from 8.3 years in 2023 to 7.1 years in 2025, according to McKinsey’s CEO services leader Kurt Strovink in Business Insider.

It’s a challenging time to hold an organization together and leaders need new tools to stay engaged. This article examines the emotional labor required of leaders and ways to manage it.

What Is Emotional Labor?

Professor and sociologist Arlie Hochschild introduced the concept of emotional labor in her book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. She described it as the effort involved in managing feelings and emotional expressions to meet the expectations of a job.

As the editors of Psychology Today put it, “Emotional labor refers to the effort and control it takes to display the organizationally appropriate sentiment…when personal emotions run counter to those expected and required.” The appropriate sentiment may be cheerfulness, compassion, neutrality or anything else the person involved doesn’t actually feel.

Leaders are often called upon to project confidence in the place of doubt, patience in the place of frustration, or optimism in the place of skepticism. And they may need to absorb criticism or deflect anger, all while looking after the emotional well-being of their teams. 

Unless leaders develop tools to manage its demands, emotional labor can adversely affect an individual’s mental health. “The cumulative effects of masking one’s true feelings include exhaustion, burnout, stress, job dissatisfaction, and turnover,” according to Psychology Today.

How Leadership Demands Emotional Labor?

In a 2022 Harvard Business Review article, The Emotional Labor of Being a Leader, authors Dina Denham Smith and Alicia A. Grandey observed that leaders perform emotional labor with a frequency comparable to frontline service workers. And because their decisions have much broader impacts, the emotional weight of each decision is magnified.

But while leaders may recognize the mental fatigue that results from “cognitive labor,” or the physical toll of long days and nights, “they often underestimate and neglect to directly address the emotional labor” associated with their role, write the authors.

Writing in Psychology Today, author Jamie Shapiro states that emotional labor is one of the “top five” drains on a leader’s energy. “When leaders choose to display different emotions than they feel[,] in service of their goals and to keep motivation high, it can be incredibly draining,” she writes. Yet she notes a broad failure to account for the challenges of leading from “hope, inspiration, and positivity” while leaders themselves are struggling. 

Neglecting the emotional toll of leadership can have undesirable effects, both on leaders and their organizations. 

Surface Acting and Deep Acting.

People often respond to emotional labor using one of two strategies. The first is surface acting, or portraying emotions without feeling them. The second is deep acting, which entails making efforts to feel the emotions being portrayed. Note that use of the word “acting,” shouldn’t be misconstrued as being inauthentic, as I’ll illustrate in a moment.

Here is an example of the way these strategies can play out in a leadership context, adapted from the 2025 Harvard Business Review article entitled, How Surface Acting Drains Leaders – and How to Break the Cycle.

A team leader, already tired from a stressful morning, is called on to deliver a cost-cutting directive to the team in the afternoon. With low emotional reserves, the leader makes a half-hearted effort to give the directive a positive spin. The team isn’t convinced and peppers the leader with pointed questions, which erodes everyone’s confidence even further. 

That’s an example of surface acting, in which “you suppress your true feelings and simply fake the emotions you’re expected to show,” the authors write. 

But there’s another way, deep acting or deep-level acting. 

According to the HBR authors, deep acting “involves genuinely reshaping your emotional response.” That might include “thoughtfully engaging” with the new policy to find an aspect that “genuinely excites you,” or “proactively imagining” how the policy may be received to anticipate the team’s questions. 

Writing in Psychology Today, author Jamie Shapiro offers this scenario: “With deep-level acting, before the meeting, the leader spends a few minutes acknowledging their difficult feelings and then reflecting on what they are grateful for about their team and workplace. They would lead the meeting with genuine increased positivity.” 

While the facts haven’t changed, the way the leader responds to the facts can change for the better. Deep acting helps the leader adjust his or her mental state. It requires more effort in the beginning but reduces emotional wear and tear over time.

Surface acting works the opposite way. It requires less effort at the beginning but comes with higher costs over time. And while surface acting may be necessary at times, “it has the greatest negative impact on a leader’s energy resources and well-being,” according to Shapiro.

In fact, surface acting can lead to a downward spiral, according to research reported in the Harvard Business Review. The authors write that leaders who resort to surface acting have lower energy and fewer emotional reserves in the following days. Unless addressed, that can lead to a spiral of exhaustion and burn-out. Here are three warning signs:

– Starting the day depleted. Waking up feeling drained or dreading the work day ahead is a sign that the leader hasn’t recovered from the day before. In that situation, surface acting can feel even more necessary to get through the day. But that leads to more emotional depletion and the beginning of a downward spiral.

– Disconnection from the team. Feeling distant or struggling to make genuine connections during the work day is another sign of an emotional spiral. People around the leader can easily spot inauthentic words or forced enthusiasm, which lowers trust.

– Trouble handling emotions. The depletion caused by surface acting can reduce emotional resilience. The consequences may include lashing out at others, using substances to numb feelings, and becoming overwhelmed when team members try to share feelings or concerns. 

How to Manage Emotional Labor

However true to ourselves we may aspire to be, emotional labor isn’t going to disappear. Leaders will always be expected to rise above themselves for the good of the organization. These are some of the ways leaders can strengthen their own emotional reserves and build a more compassionate organization.

Strengthen Emotional Resources. The best defense against becoming drained by emotional labor is to develop emotional regulation. It starts by acknowledging that the feelings exist, especially uncomfortable ones, and developing strategies to manage them. Here are three suggestions:

1. Pay attention and name your feelings. Your body reacts to strong emotions. Paying attention to the body’s signals helps regulate uncomfortable emotions. Naming emotions as they arise is the beginning of self-awareness. 
2. Take time to process your feelings. Emotions take time to process. Give yourself that time, whether it’s a few seconds for deep breaths or a longer leadership pause to reflect and organize your thoughts.
3. Reappraise the situation. In times of stress, we may react out of fear or fixate on the worst possible outcomes. Reappraisal involves looking at situations from different perspectives to achieve a more positive outcome.

Develop Peer Support. The demands of leadership separate leaders from the people they lead, and that separation increases as the leader’s responsibility grows. Separation isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it often results in leaders feeling isolated. Executive peer groups are a useful and powerful way for leaders to stay connected to other leaders who share the same experiences.

Peer support has been shown to have many positive benefits, including improved goal setting and attainment, and a greater sense of purpose, as we discussed in Peer Group Coaching for Leaders: What and Why.

While some leaders may have an established peer group to turn to, others seek out organized groups led by an experienced coach. The benefits of a coached group include strict confidentiality, giving and receiving candid feedback, and accountability for taking action. 

Build Human-Centered Organizations.  Another way to manage emotional labor is to build organizations based on values and purpose. These human-centered organizations understand the reasons behind goals and policies. They pay attention to the why as well as the what. 

By having a purpose beyond profit, human-centered organizations reap many benefits their competitors lack. Among them are greater adaptability and resilience, which can help both leaders and team members when difficult situations arise and cope with the emotional toll. In short, human-centered, purpose-driven organizations require less emotional labor to maintain.

Emotional labor is an under-recognized cost of being a leader. Learning new tools can help leaders manage that cost and become their best selves in the workplace. If you would like to learn more, please contact us.

About ForeMeta

ForeMeta prepares leaders for breakthrough transformation. Founded by leadership coach and Vistage Chair Dr. Mike Pelfini, ForeMeta focuses on the people who make the decisions—helping CEOs and leaders of small to mid-sized companies from all sectors to deepen their self-leadership, clarify their why, and expand their capacity to lead. 

Through either thoughtfully facilitated peer groups or 1:1 executive coaching, ForeMeta helps leaders create new possibilities and more fulfilling results for themselves, their organizations, and their communities.

©Mike Pelfini 2026, all rights reserved.