Faculty Column ∙ September 30, 2026
Debbie Bayntun-Lees ∙ Professor of Leadership & Organizational Development at Hult International Business School
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“Emotional regulation” has become a familiar instruction in working life. Stay calm. Don’t overreact. Handle conflict constructively.
As a leadership capability it genuinely matters, and I have spent much of my career helping people develop it. But there is a question we rarely ask when this subject appears in a development plan, a well-being initiative or a performance conversation, particularly in conversations about women:
Why is there so much emotion to regulate in the first place?
When we asked 350 leaders around the world what they would do to become “better”, women told us something I have been sitting with uneasily ever since. The second most frequently mentioned theme among female respondents was the need to regulate and moderate their emotions more. Women reported this need significantly more often than men.
I know what usually happens next with a finding like this. Someone commissions a workshop. Emotional regulation finds its way into the competency framework. A cohort of women is offered coaching in staying composed under pressure, and we all agree that this is progress.
But I think we have read our own data backwards.
Emotional regulation arrives in leadership development dressed as a skill, and skills are convenient. They sit inside individuals, where they can be assessed, taught and measured. What they cannot do is tell us anything about the conditions that produced the emotion in the first place.
Listen to how respondents put it when asked what they’d be doing less of as a leader:
“I would avoid so many outbursts of anger, which do not help, neither in the workplace nor in human relationships.”
“Trying not to stress about everything that is pressing.”
“I’d be doing less worrying, and reacting impulsively.”
Every one of these locates the trouble in the speaker. Not one asks what is generating the anger, pressure, or impulse. Our own report, I must acknowledge, follows them there. We concluded that the theme emphasizes the role of emotional intelligence, with leaders recognizing that unchecked emotion can undermine trust and, ultimately, performance. That is true enough, but it reads a woman’s anger as a flaw in her composure, when I would read it as evidence about the conditions she is working in.
When emotional regulation is framed as a development need, it reinforces the outdated assumption that women’s emotions are the problem to be managed. Women learn that credibility is conditional on calmness, that frustration is to be swallowed, and that directness may be labelled as too much. Over time, “regulate more” starts to mean “take up less emotional space”, even when the emotion is an entirely rational response to a poor decision, unfair treatment or an impossible workload.
Alongside wanting to regulate their emotions, women wanted more recognition from their leaders. They wanted their managers to spend less time on administrative work (a frustration ranked fourth for women and only tenth for men) and more time on strategic planning. Leaders themselves recognized and shared this call for them to step back from the details – to micromanage less and delegate more.
When firefighting becomes the operating system, emotional regulation becomes the price of getting through the week without snapping, shutting down, or burning out.
The pattern is subtler when we look at delegation. Both men and women wanted more delegation and trust from their managers. What differed was how they said it. For men, it was something they wanted their managers to do more of. For the women it was something they thought their managers should do differently.
That asymmetry is worth pausing on. The same need, voiced once as a request and once as a fault requiring correction.
Read together, these findings describe workplaces in which women are less recognized for what they deliver, more entangled in administrative drag, and obliged to frame a request for autonomy as a complaint.
And then, in the same breath, they tell us they must get better at managing their frustration?
My doctoral research inquired into women’s experiences of being silenced in organizational life. Working co-operatively with female leaders, I came to understand a number of practices that I called “technologies of womankind”: practices we develop unconsciously in early life and carry into all of our interactions. One of them was this: We hold our emotions in check.
I noticed that the women I worked with rarely spoke of their emotions unless I inquired directly. Control of emotion was a defining feature of their experiences of being silenced. In every story of silencing, without exception, some form of emotional turmoil was present, and many were carrying unresolved and unspoken emotion.
Jean Baker Miller wrote in 1976 of our long tradition of trying to dispense with, or control, emotionality rather than valuing and embracing its contributing strengths. Nearly 50 years on, I contend that when we hear women asking to regulate their emotions more, we are not hearing a development need at all. We are hearing a technology of power at work, one that has been disciplining the feminine voice since early life, and one that we are now at risk of reinforcing with a training budget.
This matters practically, not only theoretically. Women’s self-control absorbs a great deal of organizational dysfunction that would otherwise have to be addressed.
I contend that when we hear women asking to regulate their emotions more, we are not hearing a development need at all. We are hearing a technology of power at work, one that has been disciplining the feminine voice since early life, and one that we are now at risk of reinforcing with a training budget.
The next question is – what is producing emotion? Here, I am drawing on what I have observed over many years of leadership development and organizational consultancy, working inside organizations as they restructure, merge, grow, and struggle. Five conditions come up repeatedly, accounting for much of the avoidable emotional load I encounter.
Chronic overload – compounded by an always-on culture
Digital tools and hybrid working have created continuous demands for visibility, and I watch people’s recovery time disappear almost without their noticing.
Persistent uncertainty
Restructures, redundancies and leadership churn arrive faster than people can absorb them. The emotional residue of the latest change is still present when the next one begins.
Low autonomy
I regularly meet people who carry full responsibility for an outcome without meaningful control over how the work is done – one of the most reliable sources of frustration.
Emotional labor itself
The effort of displaying the right emotion at the right time, regardless of what is actually felt, is draining in a way that never appears in workload calculations.
Low psychological safety
Where people hesitate to speak up, emotional regulation becomes a protective behavior. This is the condition I find most often mistaken for an individual confidence problem.
Our research findings map onto this closely. Leaders told us they needed to do less operational work, carry less administrative load, do less micromanaging, and sit in fewer unnecessary meetings. They are stuck in firefighting.
These are questions of organizational design: how work is structured, how decisions are made, whether trust flows or is withheld.
Recent research offers strong support for this systemic reading. A 2026 study by Nikolaos Antonakakis analyzed data from 43,850 workers across 35 European countries, drawn from the 2015 European Working Conditions Survey. It constructed an index measuring demands such as hiding feeling, handling angry clients, navigating emotionally disturbing situations, and managing interactions with the public.
Women reported significantly higher emotional labor demands. Even after controlling for occupational category, women faced demands equivalent to 12.5% of a standard deviation above male counterparts, and the largest differences appeared among professionals and technicians. Men reported higher demands among operators and craft workers, a pattern the study interprets as consistent with gendered expectations around emotional expression and the suppression of vulnerability.
Antonakakis’ conclusion is more direct: emotional labor is not a soft skill, but a measurable occupational demand with real consequences for mental health, and it falls disproportionately on women. Gender-neutral policies alone, he argues, will not close the gap.
Analysis published by the Centre for European Policy Studies puts the design argument more bluntly still. Jobs combining low autonomy with high emotional demands are “burnout factories”. The evidence does not support treating women as inherently more susceptible. They are, however, disproportionately allocated to roles built to produce precisely this outcome, through vertical segregation that holds them below the glass ceiling and horizontal segregation that concentrates them in sectors where emotional labor is a core requirement.
Emphasizing individual resilience, the authors argue, distracts from the root causes: how we value and design work.
So here is what I would suggest to any executive team looking at findings like ours. If a group of your people report needing to manage their emotions more, what does it tell you about the environment?
The behaviors our respondents complained of most are exactly those that manufacture emotion. Micromanagement was the most prevalent frustration in the entire study. Employees spoke of leaders who second-guessed decisions and interrupted people mid-sentence. These patterns were seen as undermining trust, slowing delivery, and creating unnecessary stress.
Being managed by someone who does not trust you generates frustration. Working without recognition generates resentment. Watching a colleague granted latitude you are denied generates something harder to name and harder still to voice, which is precisely why it must be held in check.
A healthy organization does not try to eliminate emotion. Work is human, and emotion carries necessary information. Instead, a healthy organization reduces avoidable emotional load: the frustration created by pointless bureaucracy, constant interruption, shifting priorities, unfairness and performative busyness.
When trust rises and noise falls, people do not have to spend as much energy managing themselves in order to stay safe.
We assess our cultures through engagement scores, retention figures and inclusion metrics. I would add the following:
How much emotion does this organization require people to manage in order to keep functioning?
Who is doing that managing? Is it distributed fairly?
How much of that load comes from things we could simply stop?
The instrument would need building, but the questions are not difficult.
Emotional intelligence remains a genuine leadership strength. Our participants described listening and empathy as crucial skills for motivation and performance, and I agree with them. Emotional intelligence is a capability a leader chooses to develop. Emotional labor is a load an organization imposes, and distributes unevenly. We should stop treating the second as though it were the first.
When women are disproportionately telling us they want to regulate their emotions more, the responsible response is not to hand them another coping tool and call it development. It is to ask what they are coping with. The best workplaces do not demand heroic self-control. They are designed and led in ways that make calm more available, through clarity, trust, fairness, and a manageable load.
So yes, help people build emotional skills. But if you want to be a better leader, do not stop there. We have spent a long time asking women to hold themselves in check. The more useful question is:
Why do we keep building workplaces that make it necessary?
1. Remove one avoidable pressure point
Look at the next five working days and ask what single demand you could stop, delay or simplify. Cancel a recurring meeting that has no agenda. Halve a reporting requirement. Replace a status meeting with a short, written update. Reduce the friction and you reduce the emotion it generates.
2. Run a 15-minute clarity reset
Mindfulness, reflective journaling, and narrative sharing all train the capacity to notice emotion – in oneself and in others – without judgment.
3. Make one visible shift from control to trust
Choose a piece of work you are currently over-involved in. Agree the outcome and a check-in point, then step back. Not only would you be delegating a task, you are switching off the stress signal that constant monitoring sends.
4. Name the invisible work
Notice who calms the difficult stakeholder, who repairs the atmosphere after a challenging meeting, who onboards the new team member, who mentors informally, who holds the team together during uncertainty. Then ask whether that pattern is gendered, and redistribute it if it is.
5. Model regulation without weaponizing it
Choose one pause practice for when it matters: ten seconds before replying to a difficult message, one clarifying question before disagreeing, a summary before delivering feedback. Explain what you are doing so that it reads as thoughtfulness rather than a standard others are failing to meet.
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Professor of Leadership & Organizational Development at Hult International Business School
With extensive experience in leadership and organizational development, Debbie works with boards, senior teams, and HR practitioners to foster inclusive leadership, navigate cultural transformations, and build high-performing teams in complex environments.
A former Managing Director of Connecting for Change Ltd and senior leader in the UK NHS, Debbie’s research explores workplace dynamics, focusing on gender equity and inclusive dialogue. Her doctoral work uncovered how women are “socially silenced” in professional settings. Passionate about gender equity, Debbie designs innovative learning solutions to support leaders in creating inclusive workplaces where everyone can thrive.
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