Category: Emotional Leadership

Knowing the difference between “emotion frameworks” matters for leaders.

Most leaders have heard of Emotional Intelligence. Many have come across Emotional Agility. Few have explored Emotional Leadership.

Here’s the thing: they’re not interchangeable.

👉  Emotional Intelligence helps you recognize and manage emotions—yours and others’.
👉  Emotional Agility helps you navigate inner experiences with flexibility and values-alignment.
👉  Emotional Leadership (my framework – The Emotional Leadership System™) helps you author emotional tone across teams and contexts, especially in today’s VUCA world.

Each is useful. But knowing which lens to apply—competency, process, or system—can make the difference between just “managing emotions” and truly cultivating climates where people thrive.

I’ve created a one-page reference table comparing all three. It’s designed to help leaders, coaches, and practitioners quickly see what sets them apart—and when to use each.

👉 Download your copy of this handy reference table..

How VUCA Conditions Trigger Invisible Resistance — and What to Do About It

In today’s world of accelerating complexity, organizational leaders are being asked to navigate competing demands, shifting expectations, and persistent uncertainty – often with fewer resources, more scrutiny, and less room for error. They’re expected not just to set direction and make decisions, but to inspire trust, improve performance, and build cultures of accountability and inclusion.

And yet, despite advanced training, years of experience, and a strong sense of personal responsibility, many leaders find themselves stuck – unable to move themselves, their teams, or their organizations forward in the ways they know are necessary.

This “stuckness” is typically not due to a lack of intelligence, strategy, or their sincerity of effort. It’s the result of something far deeper and more distinctly human: a disconnect in how we engage with and make sense of our emotional world – especially under pressure, when the stakes are high and failure may be costly.

The primary challenge The Emotional Leadership System™ (ELS) addresses is this: most leaders aren’t struggling because they don’t know what to do. They’re struggling because they can’t get themselves, or others, to do it.

The real problem is internal resistance: subtle, often invisible forms of hesitation, avoidance, self-sabotage, or tension that show up in moments that require adaptability, clarity, risk-taking, or collaboration. These are moments that call for emotional agility and presence – but are instead derailed by internal conflict, competing values, and defensive narratives that often go unquestioned.

Leaders who appear decisive on the outside may be torn or divided on the inside. Teams that seem aligned may conceal unspoken fears or conflicting priorities. Progress stalls not because people don’t care or can’t see the benefits of doing so, but because their nervous systems are unconsciously protecting them from perceived threats – social, psychological, and/or emotional.

At the heart of this challenge is a fundamental and widespread misunderstanding about the role of emotion.

Despite years of promoting emotional intelligence, our culture still subtly reinforces the idea that emotion and logic are opposites – that good leaders are those who can keep emotions “in check” or lead with reason alone. But decades of recent neuroscience research tell a very different story.

Emotions are not an impediment to rational thinking, they are what give our decisions urgency, context, and meaning. Without emotion, we cannot effectively prioritize, connect, or act with purpose.

Antonio Damasio, the renowned neuroscientist, showed that patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala had impaired emotional signaling, and as a result the quality of their decision-making suffered – not because logic had disappeared, but because the brain lost its capacity to assign value and relevance to the options under consideration.

A separate, but equally essential insight stems from Lisa Feldman Barrett’s paradigm-changing research on emotion and the brain. The extensive and intricate research from her lab at Northeastern University counters many of the longstanding theories about what emotions are and how they originate.

Feldman Barrett’s research shows that human emotions are not a set of universal, fixed responses produced by “emotion circuits” in the brain and having predetermined physiological expression.

Rather, her “theory of constructed emotion” proposes that they are constructed by the brain through a combination of core affect (internal feelings of valence and arousal), conceptual knowledge, and social experience.

Emotions are not common, universal experiences, but are shaped by culture and individual experiences – both physiological and psychological. They are predictive rather than reactive in nature, based on prior knowledge and context, and making emotions more malleable and flexible than traditionally conceived.

Emotions, therefore, are learned and shaped by societal expectations and personal history, rather than being biologically programmed responses.

This perspective, when combined with Damasio’s findings on the importance of emotion in decision making, has profound implications for our general understanding of how emotions work, and why leaders must embrace emotion not as “noise” but as a critical component for improving performance.

The Emotional Leadership System™ was developed as a result of this growing body of research and the urgent need for adaptive, growth-oriented leadership development.

It integrates insights from affective neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and systems leadership into a practical framework that helps leaders understand how emotion actually works – how it is constructed in real time, how it influences what we perceive, and how it can be “authored” through intentional practice.

ELS helps leaders recognize that most emotional experiences are not about what’s happening to us, but what’s happening inside us: the body’s affective signals (internal bodily sensations), the mind’s interpretation of experiences, and the narratives we’ve developed to keep ourselves feeling safe and successful.

At the center of The Emotional Leadership System™ is what I call the NeuroAgility Loop™ – a simplified way of understanding how the brain coordinates three large-scale, domain-general networks that shape experience.

• The Salience Network (SN) acts like a spotlight, scanning for what’s most important in the present moment based on cognitive and sensory cues.
• The Default Mode Network (DMN) functions like a storyteller, generating internal narratives based on past experience and self-concept.
• The Central Executive Network (CEN) serves as the strategist, responsible for focused attention, planning, and task execution.

These three networks are in constant interaction, and how well they work together determines whether a leader can respond to a given challenge in an integrated way, with presence and purpose – or fall into automatic patterns of reactivity and disconnection.

What makes this model especially powerful is that it shows how much of what we think of as “resistance” or “dysfunction” is actually an intelligent, biological response to perceived threat. The brain and body are always engaged in a collaborative effort, generally hidden from our awareness, trying to protect us from uncertainty, shame, failure, or rejection.

This often takes the form of subtle inner conflicts – such as wanting to speak up in a meeting but holding back out of fear of judgment, or pushing for innovation while simultaneously resisting the loss of control that comes with it.

The Emotional Leadership System™ recognizes that these inner conflicts, experienced as felt emotional tension, are frequently rooted in polarities: “interdependent, yet seemingly opposite, states that must coexist for success over time.”

Examples of common polarities include: Belonging vs Autonomy, Support vs Challenge, Stability vs Change, Action vs Reflection, and Flexible vs Resolute.

Central to effectively navigating the tension of polarities is recognizing that they are not problems that need to be solved, but that both ends of each pole are to be valued and embraced for the benefits each offers – in the right context and with an intentional outcome in mind.

• Belonging has many benefits… as does Autonomy
• Stability provides many benefits… as does Change
• Flexibility offers many benefits… as does being Resolute

Acknowledging that both poles are useful and each offers a distinct set of benefits helps us reframe the inherent tension between them, not as automatic signal that something is wrong, but that alternate ways of seeing and being exist in their midst.

Emotion then plays an essential role in helping us determine how we might go about experiencing the benefits of one pole without feeling like we have to sacrifice the benefits of the other.

What matters is vision in context – what does your team need now, in order to create the tomorrow, that leads everyone a step closer to the end you have in mind. And having the agility to take make decisions and take action based on what is most appropriate to achieve those desired outcomes.

This is not a purely logical exercise.

As noted above, Damasio’s work reminds us that emotion is key to assigning value and determining relevance to our decisions.

Andiron’s framework for making sense of and navigating polarities more effectively – by taking a “both/and” approach and developing a “third way” mindset – further informs how and why it is essential for today’s leaders to be aware of ways in which states of emotional tension influence and impact decision making and performance.

While polarity theory helps us to see and make sense of one type of emotional tension, ELS also leverages the Immunity to Change framework (Kegan & Lahey, 2009) to surface other competing commitments, and to make visible the underlying assumptions and emotional drivers that frequently keep leaders stuck.

Kegan & Lahey share an example of a senior executive who came to a coaching engagement frustrated by his leadership team’s reluctance to show more initiative. On the surface, he believed the problem was cultural, that leaders were too cautious or disengaged.

But looking closer at his underlying beliefs and the related emotional dynamics, discovered that he himself carried an unconscious emotional tone of urgency and subtle judgment, shaped by an internal narrative that “things will fall apart if I’m not in control.”

His team, attuned to that tone and the verbal/nonverbal communication, mirrored his energy with compliance and passivity. When the executive learned to shift his emotional tone, bring awareness to his internal state, and voice a different story – one of trust, shared responsibility, and curiosity – his team began to respond differently.

Initiative, openness, and collaboration all increased. So did creativity and willingness to embrace risk. The changes didn’t come from enhanced strategies, better tactical planning, or technical skill development. They came from emotional tone integration and alignment.

Another example from my own work is illustrated by a senior leader in a high-growth tech company who found herself caught between the poles of empathy and accountability.

She wanted to better support her team that was suffering from burnout, but also needed to push forward with demanding objectives to meet a project deadline. The tension she felt wasn’t just from the cognitive complexity of managing the project – it was fundamentally emotional.

She felt guilty when pushing too hard, and anxious when letting people off the hook. She emphasized the need for accountability, but stepped in frequently to cover for mistakes made by others or when team members failed to follow through.

Through the ELS polarity mapping process, she came to see that both poles – empathy and accountability – were valid and essential to her team’s success. Her challenge wasn’t to pick one, but to hold the tension skillfully, recognizing how her own internal bias toward maintaining harmony was limiting the team’s potential.

She began experimenting with setting boundaries with warmth and clarity, something she previously thought to be impossible. Making a shift in her emotional tone to include both created space for more honest conversations and deeper trust, accompanied by improved performance and accountability.

What these examples illustrate is that The Emotional Leadership System™ doesn’t teach leaders to eliminate or suppress emotion, it helps them lead with it.

By understanding how emotional experience is both authored and layered – from raw bodily affect, to conscious feelings, to constructed narratives – leaders gain the ability to intervene earlier with greater awareness and navigate more effectively. They become more adept at shifting their emotional tone, reframing their story, and acting with greater clarity and intention.

And because the system is grounded in the science of brain network integration, it also supports long-term adaptive growth and cognitive resilience – traits that are essential not only for navigating complexity, but for staying healthy and grounded in the process.

At its core, ELS is about transforming the internal experience of leadership and re-authoring it with greater awareness and intention.

It helps individuals move beyond simply managing behavior, to aligning their beliefs, emotional tone, and purposeful action. It gives them tools to engage paradox, decode resistance, and show up with the kind of presence that invites trust and unlocks change at every level of their organization.

Leadership has never been easy. VUCA makes it all the more challenging. Emotional authorship makes it more effective and intentional.

In a world where the demands of leadership are only growing more complex, The Emotional Leadership System™ offers something rare and necessary: a powerful and transformative system for leading more effectively from the inside out.

References

• Barrett, L.F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
• Cameron, K., & Quinn, R. (2011). Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework. Jossey-Bass.
• Kegan, R., & Lahey, L.L. (2009). Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization. Harvard Business Review Press.
• Siegel, D.J. (2020). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.
• Menon, V. (2011). Large-scale brain networks and psychopathology: a unifying triple network model. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
• Craig, A.D. (2009). How do you feel—now? The anterior insula and human awareness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
• Berridge, K.C., & Robinson, T.E. (2016). Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. American Psychologist.
• Dosenbach, N.U.F., et al. (2008). A dual-networks architecture of top-down control. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
• Stern, Y. (2002). What is cognitive reserve? Theory and research application of the reserve concept. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society.

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