The Audience Is You: Why Looking Like You've Got It Together Costs the Team
Leading in our current chaotic environment hasn't felt clean for anyone for a while. The leaders I sit with are holding it all in. What comes out somewhere else is emotionally dumping at home, venting to a trusted colleague, or nothing at all. The result is the same. Teams feel it. Leaders aren't themselves at work; they wish they could be, and they show up in performative ways instead.
Across my coaching and consulting work, I've sat with leaders who, when I ask how they handle the big emotions that surface at work, answer plainly: "I stuff them." It isn't a reflective disclosure but a practice many of them have been doing for weeks, maybe always, and the cost downstream is what I keep returning to. Some leaders stuff, others rant, others disengage, and the whole thing is directly felt by the team.
This isn't a phase
You've sat across from someone you love who insisted they were fine when nothing about them was. The words held. The room didn't. That's what teams sit across from in a leader running on composure.
The prevailing take is that this is the new context of work, with the quiet caveat that this too shall pass. People are still holding onto a one day: one day this will slow down, one day the change crazy we find ourselves in will shift. I don't think it will, and trying to normalize the situation back into yesteryear's thinking misses what's actually being asked of us.
What I'm watching instead is leaders self-protecting under high levels of fear, uncertainty, and unhealthy ways of metabolizing this chaotic change environment. There's organizational theater in here somewhere, with people acting for what, or for whom, and many have convinced themselves it's normal. Meanwhile, teams are drowning in uncertainty and trying to read the cryptic signals from their leaders.
The pattern has a name
Researchers call it surface acting — performing emotions you don't feel — and the practice traps energy-depleted leaders in a cycle of exhaustion and disengagement that gets harder to break the longer it runs (Sayre, Grandey, & Chi, 2025). The strain literature describes a quiet routing problem alongside it: depleted capacity flows into laissez-faire leadership, which then erodes the team's psychological safety (Groulx et al., 2024).
I want to name something the research underplays, which is that for many of the leaders I work with the composure isn't strategic but containment of the not-knowing. The performance is holding up a thin layer of looking like it's all together, because falling apart opens up the door for so much more than can reasonably be handled.
If that's true, then the avoidance IS the leadership. The audience isn't the team; the audience is the leader.
Yes, and…
The strongest counter to this argument comes from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, who proposes that strict authenticity can read as unprofessional and that some impression management actually signals more trust, not less (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2025). He's not wrong about discernment, but discernment requires that there be something underneath the performance to draw from. If we're not showing up as ourselves, how do we know what's real and what isn't? Avoidance dressed as composure isn't strategic disclosure; it's the absence of self-leadership wearing a suit.
What I keep watching
Across coaching and consulting engagements, the same beats show up. A leader, out of depth, can't put sentences together, gets flippant, defaults to toxic positivity, and quietly slides into laissez-faire. A senior leader once told me, after I named a safety gap on the team: "I have positional power and can tell people what to do. You can't." That, too, is the avoidance, and it's the door closing.
What our own abilities to lead become in this climate is diminished, or extinguished, because there is nothing left.
Three practices
Name the moment. Don't ask others to be themselves at work if you won't. One sentence in real time is enough: this is hard, I can see you're struggling with this, and I'm feeling the tension too. The naming is the practice.
Use the cue, don't suppress it. Anger, frustration, and the act of keeping it all together are data. As Susan David puts it, "Emotions are data, they are not directives." They're invitations to get curious and get beneath the surface, your own surface before anyone else's.
Build the capacity you'd ask the team to use. Self-leadership is the precondition for team leadership, not the side project. When our own abilities to lead are extinguished because there is nothing left, no team practice will hold.
One closing thought
Putting on the oxygen mask isn't a fun cute thing they say on airplanes. It's safety, and it's literally the air that will keep us safe when the pressure drops, and from where I'm standing, the pressure is plummeting and we need to act fast.
What's one cue you've been suppressing this week that might be worth naming instead?
Sources
Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2025, October 7). When authentic leadership backfires. Harvard Business Review.
David, S. A. (2016). Emotional agility: Get unstuck, embrace change, and thrive in work and life. Avery.
Groulx, P., Maisonneuve, F., Harvey, J.-F., & Johnson, S. (2024). The ripple effect of strain in times of change. Frontiers in Psychology.
Sayre, G. M., Grandey, A. A., & Chi, N. (2025, October 20). How "surface acting" drains leaders — and how to break the cycle. Harvard Business Review.
