The Argument · 02
What’s missing in leadership development.
Something I find genuinely strange: leadership development says very little about emotions.
Not because emotions aren’t relevant. But because somewhere along the way, the field decided they were too messy to target directly.
So instead, leadership science built frameworks. Competency models. Behavioral checklists. Cognitive strategies. And yet, leaders who know all these still struggle to act with behavioral integrity under pressure.
The field targets cognition and behavior — skipping the part that drives both.
Most development frameworks focus on two things: what leaders think, and what leaders do. These aren’t wrong targets. They’re incomplete.
What is missing — reliably, almost universally — is emotion. Specifically: how to actually regulate elevated emotional states in high-stakes, ambiguous, and pressure-filled environments.
Emotional arousal drives behavior, especially in complex situations where regulatory demands are highest. Once activated, emotions rapidly organize attention, cognition, and behavior in response to perceived threat. They shape how a leader processes information, where their attention goes, and what they feel compelled to do.
Without sufficient emotional regulatory capacity, even the most well-intentioned leaders are vulnerable to protective responding. Behavior drifts from values. Actions contradict stated intentions. And what follows provides relief — which is exactly why it gets repeated.
That’s the feedback loop. Nearly impossible to intercept when ignored.
Organizations prefer to route around emotions — and it costs them.
They maintain a complicated relationship with emotions. The dominant strategy: route around them.
The preference: to appeal to reason and logic. Build the rational case. Hope that understanding produces effective execution.
This assumes knowing the “why” behind effective behavior translates into doing it. That knowledge overrides feeling and suppresses emotion. That if a leader intellectually understands what to do, they’ll do it.
Yet when emotions are suppressed, although the external display of emotions might decrease, the internal intensity remains. Hiding emotions requires active effort. This effort drains regulatory capacity. And the more depleted those resources are, the more behavior drifts from intention.
Suppression looks like composure. It functions like a slow leak.
Emotional intelligence got closer — and still left the mechanism out.
It tried to close the gap between intention and behavior.
It highlighted the importance of emotional awareness in the workplace and benefits of emotional recognition, understanding, and management. It made the argument that what leaders feel matters to how they lead. That was critical progress.
And then emotional intelligence became a competency model. Something rated, scored and ranked, rather than learned, practiced, and refined.
The mechanism for intentionally developing emotional regulatory capacity was left out. That’s the missing component.
Emotional regulatory capacity uniquely predicts leadership performance outcomes, even after accounting for cognitive and behavioral capacity. Meaning: leaders who think clearly and behave consistently under normal conditions are still vulnerable when emotion regulation skills are limited.
Emotional regulatory capacity is teachable. It can be developed. And research supports that improvements in emotion regulation are directly associated with more frequent, consistent, and effective leadership behaviors under pressure.
The mechanism for building emotional regulatory capacity — that’s what leadership development keeps missing.
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