Leadership still hasn’t accepted this key truth about performance

This month marks the 15th anniversary of the publication of my book Lead From The Heart. While years have passed since then, I’m very much aware that the book’s central premise is one many leaders and organizations have yet to fully embrace—or perhaps don’t yet believe.

In 2011, I argued that the most effective way to improve workplace performance isn’t to focus first on performance itself. It is to focus on employees’ emotional experience at work and specifically on how people feel.

At the time (and arguably still today), the prevailing wisdom in leadership was that people are primarily motivated by pay, incentives, goal achievement, and opportunities for advancement. The assumption is straightforward: Provide these things in sufficient measure and high performance will follow.

But if these expectations were entirely correct, we would expect to see consistently high levels of employee commitment and relatively uniform levels of discretionary effort across organizations. What we see instead is wide variation—both in engagement and in the degree to which people choose to invest themselves in their work.

What this variation suggests isn’t that pay and incentives are unimportant. They matter. But it does clearly suggest that they’re insufficient on their own to explain the wide differences we see in how people show up at work, how much effort they choose to give, or how deeply they commit to an organization.

Something else is operating alongside them, and in many cases exerting a stronger influence than leaders typically acknowledge.

Mind and body

For much of modern management thinking, emotions have been treated as an intrusion on effective rational thinking. And because men traditionally held most leadership roles, emotions have long been disparaged as being soft, weak—and, for good measure, feminine. Leaders were encouraged to keep emotions out of their own decision-making—and explicitly out of the work environments they managed.

Yet over the past several decades, research across neuroscience, psychology, and organizational behavior has steadily pointed in a different direction.

For centuries, Western thinking about the mind was shaped by René Descartes, who argued that the body and mind are fundamentally separate—that reason, to function properly, must be free from the influence of emotion and physical sensation. Descartes famously declared, “I think, therefore I am”—and in doing so, he placed reason at the center of human identity, with emotion firmly outside it. This became the philosophical foundation for how modern institutions, including businesses, came to think about rationality: Clear thinking meant emotionless thinking.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio was one of the first to dismantle that assumption. In his landmark book from 1994, Descartes’ Error, Damasio demonstrated that patients with damage to the emotional centers of the brain didn’t become more rational. They became less capable. They could reason through problems intellectually but were unable to make sound judgments in practice—particularly those requiring prioritization, values, or social context. Emotion, it turned out, wasn’t interfering with good decision-making. It was essential to it.

The implication is not that emotion replaces reason, but that it enables it.

The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

On my podcast, the University of Michigan marketing professor Marcus Collins arrived at a similar conclusion from a different direction. Collins said most of us pride ourselves on being rational decision-makers—particularly in business. But he asserted that we are more accurately described as “rationalizing decision-makers.” We make choices based on emotional associations and ingrained shortcuts, then search for evidence that supports the conclusions we’ve already reached.

He calls this the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: A gunman fires bullets into the side of a barn, then paints a target around the holes—creating the illusion of precision after the fact. Leaders do this constantly. Beneath our level of consciousness, decisions get made on feelings; the rationale gets constructed afterward.

The psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer, who coined the term “emotional intelligence,” made the identical discovery. Emotions and cognition, they argued, are not separate systems competing for influence. They are interconnected processes that continually shape one another. What people feel influences what they notice, how they interpret events, how they relate to others, and ultimately how they behave.

The workplace is no exception.

Sigal Barsade, the late professor of management at Wharton, made this concrete. Every organization has not only a cognitive culture—goals, processes, incentives—but also an emotional culture that shapes how people actually experience (feel) their work. And emotions spread. Trust, compassion, and appreciation are contagious. So are anxiety and fear. They influence cooperation, commitment, performance, and even well-being. Emotions, Barsade argued, are not noise. They are data.

Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina who studies positive emotions, added another dimension. These emotions don’t just make people feel good. They broaden thinking, increase creativity, strengthen resilience, and improve problem-solving. Her research demonstrated that human beings are wired to thrive on positive emotions—and perform optimally only when they experience them consistently.

Pressure and accountability

This directly challenges one of leadership’s most stubborn assumptions: that pressure and relentless accountability are the primary pathways to higher performance. Yes, standards matter. But people perform at their best when positive emotional experiences are sufficiently present to support learning, collaboration, and persistence.

Viewed together, this body of research points to a conclusion that is now difficult to dispute: Human beings are emotional creatures whose feelings and emotions shape attention, judgment, motivation, and behavior. Workplace performance is inevitably shaped by one’s emotional experience. And this is a small sample of a much larger body of evidence that has accumulated across disciplines over the past three decades.

Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, punctuates all that’s been learned: Everything that happens at work is an emotional experience. Receiving feedback is an emotional experience. Being recognized is an emotional experience. Being left out of a meeting is an emotional experience. Being trusted with responsibility is an emotional experience. So is having that trust withheld.

What employees are feeling, moment to moment, is not incidental to their work. It is the context in which all of their work gets done.

And what they most need to feel is this: that they matter. That their leader genuinely cares about them as a person. That their contributions are seen and appreciated. That they are growing. That they belong to something—and to people—worth giving their best to.

In effect, leaders distribute what I call “emotional currency”—constantly, whether they intend to or not. Respect, trust, safety and appreciation function as deposits. Indifference, inconsistency, and disregard function as withdrawals. These exchanges are rarely tracked formally. But they accumulate, and over time they shape employee commitment, engagement, and discretionary effort in ways that no incentive structure ever can.

The idea of leading from the heart is predicated on this: Human beings have emotional needs that leaders must actively support—and elevating employee well-being drives performance higher, not undermines it, as so many leaders continue to fear and assume. Caring about the people you lead and driving high performance are not in tension. They never were.

Fifteen years of accumulating evidence has not moved the needle nearly enough. Most organizations remain expertly designed to manage the cognitive side of work—goals, metrics, incentives, accountability—while the emotional component that determines how people actually experience all of it goes largely unexamined and unmanaged.

And, because the research is now settled, it’s a leadership problem.

It is also a choice—made every day, in every interaction, by every person who has responsibility for other human beings at work. Leaders who continue to treat feelings and emotions as peripheral to performance are not being rigorous. They are being wrong.

The question is no longer whether feelings matter at work. The question is whether leaders will finally act as though they do.