The Hidden Emotional Work of Leadership, Part 1: Projection and Authority

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Being a CEO, founder, or C-suite executive comes with an enormous host of emotional complexities, each of which can have a profound effect on how effective one is in the role. There are a number of unconscious mythologies, self-expectations, projections from others, and emotional dynamics inherent to leadership that require a powerful emotional infrastructure in order to handle.

In this post, I’d like to talk about one of the most important and least discussed parts of leadership: the way unconscious projections operate in the workplace and the effects they can have on the leader, the employees, and the organization as a whole.

A leader is not just making decisions, setting strategy, managing people, or being responsible for outcomes. A leader is also constantly digesting emotional material from the people around them. They are absorbing anxiety, resentment, hope, disappointment, idealization, envy, dependency, and fear, often without anyone naming those feelings directly. This is part of the hidden emotional work of leadership.

A projection is an emotional assumption, often unconscious, that affects how people feel about another person. A projection happens when we experience someone partly through the lens of ourselves, our past relationships, or our earlier emotional experiences. For example, an employee may assume that a person in a position of authority will abuse that authority whenever possible. This might be a logical assumption based on past experience, or it might be a projection based on their own history with parents, teachers, bosses, or other authority figures.

The difficult thing about projections is that they usually are not expressed directly or verbally. Instead, they are often expressed through subtle behaviors and reactions. An employee may act cold, hostile, argumentative, withholding, overly compliant, suspicious, or vaguely resentful. They may become less productive, more irritable, or generally less cooperative. In some cases, they may even sabotage the workplace in various ways, consciously or unconsciously.

The executive then has to deal not only with the business problem, but also with the emotional atmosphere surrounding the business problem.

This is where things can get complicated. A CEO may walk into a meeting already carrying investor pressure, payroll anxiety, family stress, strategic uncertainty, and the loneliness of being ultimately responsible. Then, on top of that, they may become the target of an employee’s unresolved anger toward authority. The leader may pick up these cues and feel irritable in return, or confused about why they are being treated poorly when they do not feel they have done anything wrong. They may become more guarded, less generous, more controlling, or less satisfied with work, since work satisfaction is highly connected to how our work relationships feel to us.

Other projections can involve idealization. Employees, board members, investors, or clients may hope and expect that a leader will be unusually strong, unusually wise, unusually available, or somehow free from ordinary human limitation. This can feel flattering at first, but it is a setup for disappointment later. The leader is inevitably revealed to be imperfect, and the idealization can quickly turn into criticism, disillusionment, or anger.

Leaders are often major recipients of projection because authority stirs up people’s feelings about power, dependency, approval, criticism, and safety. In many workplaces, the boss becomes a kind of emotional screen onto which people unconsciously place earlier experiences with authority figures. This does not mean the leader is innocent in every conflict, or that every complaint from an employee is a projection. Sometimes employees are reacting to real problems in leadership. But it does mean that the emotional life of an organization is never just rational, and leaders who understand this have a significant advantage.

Of course, leaders have their own projections as well. An executive may see disagreement as disrespect, anxiety as incompetence, caution as lack of ambition, or normal disappointment as betrayal. They may idealize a new hire, overvalue a loyal employee, underestimate someone who reminds them of a difficult person from their past, or unconsciously recreate family dynamics inside the company. Leadership does not remove a person from human psychology. In some ways, it intensifies it.

This is one reason emotionally integrated leadership matters. An integrated leader is not someone who has no emotional reactions. That would be impossible, and probably undesirable. An integrated leader is someone who can notice their reactions, think about them, and make room for them internally before acting them out externally. They can feel irritation without immediately becoming punitive. They can feel hurt without becoming defensive. They can feel idealized without believing they are as perfect as others need them to be. They can feel criticized without collapsing into shame or retaliating.

This kind of emotional capacity has real business consequences. It affects hiring, firing, conflict, delegation, negotiation, culture, and decision-making. A leader who cannot tolerate projection may become reactive, avoidant, harsh, overly pleasing, or emotionally withdrawn. A leader who can understand projection has more freedom. They can respond to what is actually happening rather than simply reacting to the emotional pressure in the room.

This does not mean leaders should become therapists to their employees. That would be a mistake. The workplace is not therapy, and the leader’s job is not to heal everyone’s wounds. But a psychologically aware leader can recognize that people bring their whole selves to work, including their fears, histories, longings, and defenses. This awareness can help the leader avoid adding unnecessary fuel to the flames. It can also help them create an environment that is clearer, steadier, and more humane.

Executives benefit tremendously when they can understand these dynamics, allow themselves to have normal emotional reactions to them, and put those reactions in perspective so they do not build up and affect performance in dramatic ways. This is part of the emotional infrastructure of leadership. It is not soft. It is not peripheral. It is one of the things that determines whether a leader can remain clear, grounded, and effective under pressure.

At the highest levels, leadership is not only about strategy, intelligence, or drive. It is also about the capacity to metabolize complex emotional realities without becoming overwhelmed by them. The hidden emotional work of leadership is the work of staying human, thoughtful, and effective while carrying the emotional weight that comes with authority.

I work with executives, founders, and leaders throughout the country who want to better understand the emotional complexity of leadership, become more grounded and effective in their work, and feel more satisfied in the relationships that matter most.