The Emotional Work Leaders Rarely Name
By Oriane Kets de Vries, CEO, KDVI
Twenty-two years as an entrepreneur have taught me that leading through change is as much emotional work as it is strategic. Leaders tend to focus on managing change while underestimating the psychological transition it demands. When disruption hits, leaders are expected to set direction, project confidence, and bring others with them. This creates a fundamental tension: the gap between what you feel and what you believe you need to show to avoid destabilising your team. Disruption brings real loss. Plans you have invested in may suddenly no longer make sense, and letting them go can surface frustration, disappointment, and a deeper fear that what you have built may not endure.
In the early days of COVID, I thought everything we had built at KDVI might collapse. My leadership team was dealing with their own anxieties about health, family, and financial security, but none of it was spoken about. Our urgency to act pushed us straight into planning. It didn’t work. Unacknowledged anxiety undermined the team, and pressure surfaced in ways that were anything but productive. What was meant to be a disaster-planning meeting was itself a disaster.
We had to stop and start again. I spoke with each person individually, creating space to name what they were feeling and bring into the open what had gone unspoken. Only then could we, as a group, think clearly about what to do.
The lesson was that emotions do not disappear when ignored; they shape decisions, behaviour, and team functioning. Anxiety doesn’t dissolve; it displaces. It shows up as overactivity, avoidance, conflict, or rigid control. Much of what gets labelled as resistance to change is, more often than not, unmanaged anxiety. Leadership, then, is not simply about driving change but about creating the conditions in which people can process it. That requires slowing down at critical moments, acknowledging what is hard, and making room for reflection.
There is also a cumulative toll to relentless change. When strategy moves faster than execution and direction keeps shifting, people disengage, and organisations lose their capacity to deliver. Stability is not complacency but continuity of direction, and it is what enables execution, learning, and commitment. This matters most for long-cycle investments such as human capability, culture, and trust. When leaders become consumed by immediate pressures, these longer-term investments are deprioritised, eroding engagement.
The leaders I most admire resist the pull toward constant motion. They are not driven by the need to be seen to act, but by a clear sense of purpose that holds steady across cycles of disruption. They attend to people and culture with the same rigour they apply to strategy.
My friend and colleague Anton Opholtzer often uses the image of a bell jar, a glass dome placed over young plants to protect them from the elements and allow them to grow. In a world of permanent disruption, this feels like a helpful metaphor for leadership: creating a shelter of stability, clarity of direction, and space for people to process, learn, and do their best work.
What Lies Beneath the Surface
Research and psychodynamic thinking help explain why disruption is so consistently difficult to lead through, and what is happening beneath the surface.
Disruption activates threat. David Rock’s SCARF model shows how perceived threats to status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness narrow thinking and increase reactivity precisely when leaders need their teams to be at their most open and adaptive. Under sustained pressure, groups can slip into the defensive patterns Wilfred Bion described: dependency, where people wait to be rescued; fight-flight, where blame and avoidance take hold; or pairing, where unproductive alliances form and others are excluded. These are not character flaws. They are predictable responses to anxiety that has nowhere to go.
Disruption also involves loss: of plans, routines, identities, and assumptions. William Bridges’ distinction between change and transition is important here: change is situational, transition is psychological. When those losses go unacknowledged, they resurface as resistance, cynicism, disengagement, or conflict. Leaders who create space for these experiences to be named reduce their destructive power considerably.
There is also a pull toward premature action. Action reduces the discomfort of uncertainty and creates a feeling of control. But moving too quickly, before teams are aligned, before emotions are processed, before the situation is adequately understood, often makes things worse. The discipline of pausing, even briefly, is harder than it sounds and more consequential than it appears.
A core task of leadership in disruption, then, is what Manfred Kets de Vries calls containment: creating a holding environment in which anxiety can be tolerated and thought about, rather than acted upon impulsively. This kind of leadership requires four qualities: 1) hope, providing direction and meaning; 2) humanity, recognising the human impact; 3) humility, accepting you do not have all the answers; and 4) humour, maintaining perspective under pressure.
Clarity and consistency are equally critical. Research grounded in adaptive leadership frameworks consistently shows that leaders who openly acknowledge uncertainty, sharing what is known and what is not, outperform those who offer false reassurance. Frequent shifts in direction reduce performance more than an imperfect strategy does. Setting a small number of clear priorities and holding them long enough for execution is among the most impactful things a leader can do. And because disruption is too complex for any single leader to navigate alone, building distributed leadership and pushing decisions closer to those with the best information is essential.
What This Means in Practice
The following recommendations are organised around three domains: self, others, and business.
Lead yourself first. Notice how you are responding to pressure, what you are feeling, and what you might be avoiding. Create protected time to reflect, even briefly; in disruption, reflection is not a luxury. Build a small peer group where you can be honest about uncertainty without having to perform. Monitor your own signals: disrupted sleep, shortened temper, and difficulty concentrating are signs of depletion that will affect everyone around you.
Attend carefully to others. Name the difficulty openly saying “this is hard”; it reduces isolation and gives others permission to acknowledge their own experience. Acknowledge what is being lost: plans, ways of working, certainties. Communicate frequently and consistently, sharing what you know and what you do not. Be visible and accessible and create genuine space for honest conversation. Ask how people are and wait for the real answer.
Stabilise the business where you can. Set two to four clear priorities and hold them. Resist the pull to constantly reprioritise; frequent shifts reduce performance more than an imperfect strategy. Be explicit about what will not be done; if trade-offs are not made visible, burnout follows. Build a rhythm of regular reflection and adjustment, pausing to ask what is working, what is not, and what assumptions have proven wrong. And distribute leadership by pushing decisions closer to the front line and building others’ capacity to act.
A Final Thought
Leadership in disruption requires balancing action with reflection, clarity with honesty about uncertainty, and direction with genuine empathy for those navigating the change alongside you. The leaders who navigate disruption most effectively are not the ones with all the answers. They are the ones who create just enough stability in priorities, in relationships, and in themselves for their people to function amid instability. They do not eliminate uncertainty. They make it workable.