Some companies are withholding employee raises as a result of their unexpected AI spending or saying that human employees are now cheaper to hire than deploying AI
The workplace has a recovery problem.
Most organizations know what to do when employees get sick. There are policies for leave, benefits for treatment, and a growing awareness around burnout. But when employees return, the support disappears, and t…
Most people assume that being the most valuable person on a team means delivering the most. The best outputs. The deepest expertise. The highest score on whatever performance metric the org has decided matters this year.
That framing is incomplete …
The MBA is often considered the cornerstone degree for business leaders who aspire to reach the corner office. In fact, roughly 75% of the Fortune 500’s top 20 CEOs received an MBA or some other graduate degree. The chief executives of Apple, Microsoft, Blackrock, and JPMorgan all hold MBA degrees, among countless other leaders who have risen to the top after graduating from business school or pursuing further education later in their career. As a business school professor, I see the ambition in the eyes of MBA students who aspire to be counted among tomorrow’s change makers. Although some enter the program looking for a job with higher pay or perhaps even a two-year vacation from the real world, a common trope depicted on TikTok and Instagram about the perceived unseriousness of B-school, the elite among the crop are looking for something far greater: an opportunity to lead.
To these students, I offer the sincerest advice I can muster at the start of every semester I teach: “The most important thing I can give you in this course is perspective—a way to see the world beyond your own vantage point.” Primarily because the world is filled with a plethora of meanings and possibilities, leading requires first understanding that there are many permutations of reality. Of which, leaders must decide which pathway is most advantageous. So, we invited Andrew Sliwinski, the head of product experience at Lego Education, onto the latest episode of the From The Culture podcast to explore how a company that has built its entire offering on the possibilities of multiple outcomes—brick-by-brick—applies this approach to learning.
Lego Education is the part of the Lego Group that translates the company’s commitment to play to an educational pedagogy that has been introduced into school systems from Detroit to Seoul to Copenhagen. Before Lego, Sliwinski codirected Scratch at the MIT Media Lab, the free programming tool hundreds of millions of children use to figure out the difference between typing the right answer in and figuring out what the right answer might even look like. He has spent his career building products with a single conviction at their center: The goal of any real learning experience is not convergence on one outcome but the orderly production of many. This sits at the heart of what an MBA should provide, not just skills for navigating strategy or an acumen for forecasting cash flows, but an understanding of different realities that lead to different possibilities.
Lego has a metric that operationalizes this, and it’s the one I’d recommend any leader steal immediately. They call it solution diversity. Say during a learning experience the children are broken into groups and assigned a project to build an undefined structure. If every group of kids made the same thing, Lego would send the design teams back to redesign because, in the company’s view, the same outcome means there was a single path through, and everyone took it. That’s because the point of a real learning experience, Sliwinski declares, is that 10 groups enter a room and 10 different things come out.
Think about this for a moment. In a typical MBA course, these students would be rewarded for providing the “right answer.” While that may be so in a fixed environment like a test, for instance, it’s not so indicative of the real world where there are many possibilities and the meanings the market attaches to your category are not singular. And they certainly aren’t fixed. Consider the AI category. There are many permutations of meanings in the minds of the public regarding this breakthrough technology, and they are constantly being renegotiated and reconstructed. The heterogeneity of these meanings impacts not only product adoption but also infrastructure possibilities, i.e., policies surrounding the construction of data centers. A leader who has trained their organization to converge fast on a single reading of one reality has essentially built a blind spot at scale.
So, what’s the remedy? In most classroom contexts, Sliwinski notes, the play patterns that produce the most divergent thinking—the social, the imaginative, the emotionally messy ones—are often the ones that get crowded out. They are seen as a distraction, so they are dismissed or even ignored. The same instinct shows up in the adult workplace, too. The brainstorm where someone goes “off topic” is redirected to the “task at hand.” But perhaps these detours are really reframes in disguise. What if these side conversations actually unlock a path that the team hadn’t yet considered? What if they are a means of corporate playfulness that get the organization to more diverse solutions like the Lego brick constructions built by the kid design team?
Make no mistake, I am a strong advocate for the MBA program as an accelerant for a successful career in business management, but I, like Sliwinski, believe that there is an increasing need for greater understanding of the human condition, which requires understanding the many variations the social phenomenal world presents to us. This truth should encourage business schools across the globe, and learning and development designers across the global workforce alike, to rethink their upskilling efforts to include perspective-widening endeavors to their programming. That way, leaders can learn to see the world in its kaleidoscope of possibilities and properly apply their business savvy to a world that actually exists—not one curated by their own myopia.
Check out our full conversation with Andrew Sliwinski on the latest episode of From The Culture here.
For most of human history, philosophers and scientists alike have viewed emotion as the enemy of reason. From the Stoics of Ancient Greece to modern behavioral economists, the assumption has broadly remained the same—namely that humans are obviously capable of remarkable rationality, adaptability, and intellectual sophistication, but (still) our emotions frequently sabotage those gifts at the worst possible moments.
Leadership offers endless examples. Executives destroy careers because their egos cannot tolerate criticism. Politicians launch reckless vendettas because they mistake personal humiliation for national interest. Founders torch shareholder value because they become emotionally attached to failing strategies long after the evidence has turned against them. One need only observe a boardroom disagreement, a divorce proceeding, or social media during election season to conclude that Homo sapiens is not quite the coldly rational species imagined by economists.
Psychologists have documented these tendencies exhaustively. Emotions distort attention, amplify biases, and impair judgment under pressure. Anger increases risk-taking. Anxiety promotes catastrophizing. Pride clouds self-awareness. Fear narrows thinking. Even highly intelligent people routinely behave irrationally when emotionally triggered. The history of leadership is, in part, the history of otherwise capable individuals losing wars, companies, elections, and reputations because they could not manage their feelings.
And yet leadership itself is fundamentally emotional. This is the paradox. Although emotions often interfere with rationality, leadership depends heavily on the ability to understand and influence other people’s emotional states. Leaders rarely succeed by appealing purely to logic. They succeed by creating emotional resonance. Great leaders inspire, mesmerize, reassure, energize, calm, provoke, and seduce. They win hearts long before they win minds.
Indeed, some of history’s most influential leaders were hardly distinguished by intellectual brilliance. They excelled instead at emotional theater. Winston Churchill understood how to transform fear into collective defiance through rhetoric. Barack Obama mastered the emotional cadence of hope and aspiration. Steve Jobs turned product launches into quasi-religious experiences. Leadership, at its best, often resembles emotional choreography.
Unfortunately, leadership at its worst does too.
Humans possess a tribal appetite for emotional intoxication. Followers frequently reward leaders who polarize, antagonize, and inflame because outrage creates psychological belonging. The demagogue’s genius lies not in making people think more clearly but in making them feel more intensely. Social identity theory has long shown that humans derive self-esteem from identifying with groups and antagonizing outsiders. An insecure population will often prefer a leader who validates their grievances emotionally over one who challenges them intellectually.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: Is it actually better to be an emotional or unemotional leader?
To be or not to be . . . emotional?
Paradoxically, much of the science of leadership suggests that unemotional leaders often possess a meaningful advantage. Or, more precisely, leaders who can regulate their emotions effectively tend to outperform those who merely display them spontaneously. This is where the concept of emotional intelligence becomes useful, though not in the sentimentalized way it is often discussed.
Popular culture treats emotionally intelligent leaders as warm, expressive, endlessly empathetic individuals who “bring their whole selves to work.” In reality, the highest emotional intelligence scores often resemble elite poker players: cool-headed, disciplined, observant, and extraordinarily capable of emotional regulation. They understand emotions without being ruled by them. They can perform emotional labor convincingly while remaining internally composed. In this sense, high emotional intelligence is almost the opposite of the mainstream obsession with authenticity. Truly emotionally intelligent leaders are not impulsively transparent. They are strategically calibrated.
The first major advantage of the unemotional leader is stress management.
Leadership inevitably involves uncertainty, pressure, criticism, and conflict. Under such conditions, emotional stability becomes enormously valuable. Leaders who remain calm during crises create psychological containment for others. Teams look upward for emotional cues. If the leader panics, everyone panics. If the leader remains composed, anxiety becomes manageable.
Research consistently shows that emotional stability, often conceptualized as low neuroticism, is among the strongest predictors of leadership effectiveness. Emotionally stable leaders are less likely to catastrophize setbacks, overreact to problems, or create unnecessary volatility. They provide what organizations desperately need during uncertainty: predictability. Consider airline pilots. Nobody wants a captain who “authentically expresses” terror during turbulence. We want composure, even if partially performative. Leadership works similarly. Calmness is contagious.
The second (related) advantage is the ability not to take things personally.
One of the defining features of emotionally reactive leaders is defensiveness. Feedback becomes attack. Disagreement becomes disrespect. Organizational politics becomes personalized vendettas. Entire companies can become distorted by the fragile ego of one leader. Unemotional leaders possess greater psychological distance between criticism and identity. They are better able to separate ideas from self-worth. This matters enormously because leadership requires continuous exposure to dissent, disappointment, and scrutiny. Leaders who personalize everything eventually surround themselves with flatterers and eliminate honest feedback, which is precisely how incompetence becomes institutionalized.
Many toxic cultures begin not with evil intentions but with emotionally fragile leaders incapable of tolerating discomfort. History is littered with organizations where people learned quickly that disagreeing with the boss was professionally suicidal.
Third, unemotional leaders tend to exhibit superior impulse control and lower emotional reactivity, which is arguably the best operational definition of emotional intelligence. Contrary to motivational-speaker mythology, emotional intelligence is not primarily about crying during town halls or discussing vulnerability on podcasts. It is about regulation. Specifically, the capacity to pause between emotional stimulus and behavioral response.
This distinction matters because leadership often rewards restraint more than expression. A CEO who fires off furious midnight emails may feel temporarily relieved, but they create institutional instability. A politician who impulsively tweets every emotional reaction eventually manufactures scandals. An executive who cannot regulate irritation during meetings discourages dissent and innovation.
Neuroscience research demonstrates that emotionally reactive states impair executive functioning and cognitive control. Put differently, when emotions hijack the system, the brain’s ability to reason declines. Leaders who maintain emotional discipline preserve access to higher-order thinking precisely when it matters most.
The fourth advantage is improved decision-making.
One of the great fantasies of corporate life is that passion automatically produces excellence. In reality, excessive emotional involvement often clouds judgment. Leaders become attached to failing projects because abandoning them feels like personal defeat. They ignore evidence that contradicts their worldview. They overvalue loyalty, underestimate risks, and confuse confidence with competence.
Unemotional leaders are generally better able to evaluate situations analytically rather than sentimentally. They are less vulnerable to emotional contagion, group hysteria, or ego-driven escalation. In complex environments, this can become a decisive advantage.
This does not mean cold rationality always wins. Humans are not spreadsheets wearing trousers. But leaders capable of preventing emotions from interfering with reasoning tend to make fewer catastrophic mistakes over time.
And yet, there is also a downside to excessive emotional detachment.
The first problem is perception. Highly unemotional leaders are often experienced as cold, aloof, detached, or uninspiring. Humans naturally seek emotional connection from authority figures. Employees do not merely want competence; they want reassurance, recognition, and meaning. Leaders who appear emotionally inaccessible can struggle to generate loyalty or inspiration even when technically excellent.
The second limitation is that hyper-rational leadership increasingly resembles what artificial intelligence already does well. Machines excel at optimization, analysis, consistency, and logic. Humans still retain comparative advantages in charisma, emotional resonance, intuition, storytelling, and symbolic meaning. Nobody attends a commencement speech hoping to hear a perfectly optimized risk assessment. They want emotional uplift. They want soul.
This is why some of the most effective leaders in history were emotionally expressive rather than emotionally restrained. Passion mobilizes people in ways logic rarely can.
Third, excessively unemotional leaders may fail to connect empathetically with others. Even if they intellectually understand people’s concerns, they may struggle to communicate felt understanding. This distinction is crucial because empathy is not simply comprehension; it is emotional signaling. Employees want to feel understood, not merely analyzed.
A leader who responds to burnout with “the data suggests workloads are manageable” may technically be correct while completely failing emotionally.
Finally, unemotional leaders are sometimes perceived as lacking “fire in the belly.” Modern organizations often reward visible passion and energy because they signal ambition and commitment. Leaders who remain overly restrained may therefore be overlooked for promotions despite superior judgment. In certain environments, calmness can be mistaken for low drive or insufficient charisma.
There is also a simple stylistic reality: Extremely unemotional leaders can come across as too boring.
Nobody binge-watches documentaries about prudent middle managers who maintained reasonable emotional regulation for 40 years. Humans remain attracted to emotional intensity, even when it creates chaos. The charismatic founder who throws chairs across conference rooms will often receive more attention than the quietly competent executive building sustainable performance.
The ideal, therefore, is not emotional suppression but emotional flexibility. The best leaders possess what we might call emotional range or span. They can project passion when inspiration is required and composure when stability is needed. They understand when to amplify emotion and when to contain it.
This is why the strongest leaders are neither robotic technocrats nor emotional exhibitionists. They are emotionally disciplined without becoming emotionally absent. They can inspire without becoming irrational, empathize without becoming overwhelmed, and remain calm without appearing indifferent.
In practice, this often means mastering emotional performance rather than emotional authenticity. A leader may feel anxious privately while projecting calm publicly. They may feel frustration internally while expressing constructive curiosity externally. Far from hypocrisy, this is frequently professionalism.
After all, civilization itself depends heavily on emotional regulation. Society functions because adults learn not to express every impulse, irritation, or emotional fluctuation immediately. Leadership merely raises the stakes.
The challenge, then, is not choosing between emotion and unemotionality. It is learning to govern emotions rather than be governed by them. The leader who cannot feel becomes disconnected from humanity. The leader who cannot regulate feelings becomes hostage to it.
The sweet spot lies somewhere in between: passionate enough to inspire, disciplined enough to think clearly, and self-aware enough to know the difference.
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