The calm at the top

This is part of a series of ten posts exploring the questions behind the Sticky Change Sense Check, a free tool for leaders navigating organisational change. If you haven't read our introduction: When change energy goes unmanaged: the human cost, that's a good place to start.

Think about the last time you walked into a room and immediately sensed the mood before a word had been spoken. Even without you consciously knowing this, you read the room, almost instantly and you adjusted accordingly, and so did the people around you.

This isn't just social sensitivity. The human brain is wired for social referencing, constantly scanning the emotional environment and using other people's responses as data about whether a situation is safe or threatening. In stable times, this process runs largely below conscious awareness. During change, when uncertainty is high and the stakes feel real, it moves to the foreground and the person whose signals carry most weight, whose reactions matter the most, is almost always the person with the most power in the room. This spreading of mood between people is well documented in organisational research, where it is often called emotional contagion. Sigal Barsade, whose 2002 study remains a touchstone on the subject, describes it simply as “the transfer of moods among people in a group” and her research found it moving through a room well before anyone could name what was happening.

This is particularly meaningful when we think of leaders, therefore. During periods of rapid change, what happens at the top doesn't stay at the top. It radiates.

Thermometer or thermostat

There is a useful distinction between leaders who function as thermometers and those who function as thermostats. A thermometer measures the temperature of the environment. It registers the anxiety, the pressure, the urgency and passes it on, amplified or unchanged. A thermostat regulates, notices the temperature and actively works to shift it toward something more productive.

Many leaders, under genuine pressure, default to thermometer behaviour. This is not a character failing; it is a natural human response to stress. When things are uncertain, anxiety is appropriate and when the stakes are high, urgency is reasonable. The challenge is that leaders who allow anxiety and urgency to flow unmediated into their teams are, without intending to, making the experience of change harder for the people below them.

The regulated leader, the one who can hold their own anxiety without projecting it and can communicate urgency without creating panic, who can be honest about difficulty without catastrophising, creates something genuinely different in their organisation. Not false reassurance. Not toxic positivity. But a steadiness that allows other people to think clearly and act effectively, even when things are hard.

What regulation actually looks like

It's worth being specific here because 'calm leadership' can sound like a personality trait that some people have and others don't. In practice, regulated leadership is a set of behaviours that can be learned, practised and developed.

For instance, it looks like a leader who, in a tense team meeting, slows down rather than speeds up. Who asks questions rather than issuing instructions. Who names the difficulty honestly; “this is a hard period and I know it”; without catastrophising it.

It looks like consistency under pressure, the leader whose communication style doesn't change dramatically depending on whether they've just had good news or bad. Whose team can predict, broadly, how they will respond to a setback, not because they suppress their reactions but because they've developed the self-awareness to know how their emotional state affects those around them.

It looks like a leader who takes care of themselves well enough to have the capacity to take care of others. This is not self-indulgence, and Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety points consistently to leader behaviour as one of the most significant factors in creating environments where people feel safe to engage, speak up and contribute. A leader operating at the edge of their own capacity is rarely able to do this well.

The cost of dysregulation

When leaders don't regulate well during change, the effects compound quickly. Teams that are watching an anxious or volatile leader think and feel that the environment is not safe for honest conversation. They become skilled at telling the leader what they think the leader wants to hear and problems get managed downward rather than surfaced upward. The intelligence the organisation most needs, about what's not working, where the resistance is, what people are actually experiencing, goes underground. Recent multilevel research maps this pattern directly. A 2025 study of professional services teams found that when a team's emotional contagion runs high, an individual's work stress has a noticeably stronger effect on their wellbeing, which suggests that a leader's unregulated stress rarely stays contained to them, it tends to be absorbed and magnified by the people watching them.

This is not intended to be an obstruction; it's a rational response to an environment where honesty feels risky. And it leaves the leader operating on an increasingly inaccurate picture of what's actually happening, which is a significant risk during a period of change.

The organisations that come through periods of rapid change with their culture and their people intact are almost always ones where the leaders at the top have done this work on themselves; where emotional regulation is understood not as a soft skill but as a core leadership capability, with real consequences for organisational performance.

This is developable

The most important thing to say here is that regulated leadership is not something you either have or you don't. It's something leaders can develop through coaching, reflective practice and the kind of honest feedback that most senior leaders rarely receive.

The first step is simply awareness which means noticing, as a leader, the emotional state you're carrying into rooms and the impact it is having. Paying attention to the signals your team is sending and asking honestly whether your own behaviour might be contributing to that.

That kind of honest self-reflection is where the real work of regulated leadership begins.

When you're under genuine pressure, what emotional temperature do you set for the people around you, and how would they describe it?

If this resonated, The Sticky Change Sense Check is a free, ten-question tool designed to help senior leaders, HR and OD professionals see clearly where their change energy is well-channelled and where it needs attention.

Download The Sticky Change Sense Check

References

Edmondson, A. (2018). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.

Barsade, S. G. (2002). The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and Its Influence on Group Behavior. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(4), 644-675.

Hernandez Grande, A., Farr-Wharton, B., Sharafizad, F., Darcy, S., and Gavin, M. (2025). Catching on: Work stress, employee wellbeing, and the moderating role of team-level emotional contagion. Journal of Management and Organization, 31(1), 346-359.