Affecting and Effective: Emotional Expression in Leaders

In recent weeks, we have seen two political leaders describe how the January 6 insurrection personally impacted them.  First, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez described in an Instagram Live her experience of hearing people yelling outside her door “Where is she?  Where is she?”  She thought that she was going to die, and she said tearfully:

“I really just thought, like, if this is the plan for me, then people will be able to take it from here.  I had a lot of thoughts, but that was the thought that I had about you all.  I thought that, if this was the journey that my life was taking, I thought that things were going to be ok, and that I had fulfilled my purpose.”

The second example is Jamie Raskin, who in his opening statement on the first day of the trial, related his personal experiences that day.  His daughter and son-in-law were with him that day, and they had to hide from the insurrectionists.  When they were reunited, he relates, again with tears: 

“When they were finally rescued over an hour later by Capitol officers, and we were together, I hugged them, and I apologized, and I told my daughter Tabitha, who’s 24 and a brilliant algebra teacher for Teach America, and I told her how sorry I was, and I promised her that it would not be like this again the next time she came back to the Capitol with me.  And you know what she said, she said ‘Dad, I don’t want to come back to the Capitol.’  And of all the brutal things that I saw and I heard on that day and since then, that one hit me the hardest.”

Both of these moments represent the emotional climax of their speeches, one improvisational, the other carefully scripted.  One of them was made to a friendly audience of her supporters, the other was addressed to political rivals whom he was trying to persuade.  At this emotional climax, they both shed tears.  

What makes these moments so affecting and effective?  What lessons in leadership can they teach us?  

Leadership is a one to many relationship that inspires change in people.  It is a relationship between human beings, and as such, it has a social and emotional dimension.  Leaders that try to avoid the emotional dimension in their leadership style are essentially cutting off important lines of communication between themselves and their people.  Leaders that engage emotions will be able to stir and motivate their people and other stakeholder groups.

Yet we are also aware that there are certain kinds of emotional outbursts that can undermine and sabotage a leader's influence with their people.  What are the characteristics of effective emotional expression in leaders?  I can see four, let me know if you see others:

  • Authentic.  We’re all familiar with over the top, melodramatic expressions of emotion.  Great leaders do not indulge in those.  Emotional expression in great leaders is obviously spontaneous, proportional to the event, and expressed gracefully.  It is obvious that Raskin and Ocasio Cortez were not putting on an act, and that the emotions they were expressing were genuine.

  • Centered.  When leaders effectively express emotion, they are still centered in their role as leaders.  They are not trying to turn the tables and get their people to take care of them.  While they need not apologize for their expression of emotion, they are also not asking their people to make them feel better.  Ocasio Cortez did actually apologize for her tears.  While I think this was needless, it did demonstrate that she had not forgotten her role as a leader and wanted the story that she shared to serve a larger purpose for her movement.  

  • Vulnerable.  We all share a fundamentally human need to see and be seen in our humanity.  When a leader shows us what they are feeling, particularly feelings of grief, fear, or the like, they become more relatable.  Our hearts go out to them, because they have opened their hearts to us.  If that wasn’t your response to the videos I linked above, check your pulse: you might be dead.

  • Values-Informed.  What strikes me most about the examples of Ocasio Cortez and Raskin is that their tears came at a time when they were speaking to something greater than themselves.  For Ocasio Cortez, thoughts of the imminence of her death made her reflect on her role as part of a larger movement that would continue on without her.  For Raskin, it was the sense that the sacredness of the Capitol had become fraught and associated with terror in the mind of his daughter.  In both cases, there is a sense of making contact with something sacred and important, and tears often come at such moments.

To make space for this kind of emotional expression, we have to put aside older paradigms of power.  Too often leaders have felt the need to project invulnerability, and have seen a kind of hard bitten callousness as a virtue in leaders.  When we see examples of people in public positions leading by sharing their personal stories and putting their hearts on their sleeve, it is surprising and disorienting.  Yet for me at least, there is a sense of coming home to a more humane vision of leadership when I see these examples.  I leave you with the words of Washington Irving: 

“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not a mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.”