Leading Is Emotionally Draining. Here’s How to Recover by Dina Denham Smith Summer 2025
FACILITATED DISCUSSION BY ALYSIA KEHOE, KEHOE CONSULTANTS | Estimated reading time: 6-7 minutes
Part 1 of our series introduces the concept of “emotional labor in leadership” from Dina Denham Smith’s bestseller. Alysia Kehoe adds context, commentary, and “Big Hints” to help you see how this plays out in practice.
Big Hint / Idea from Alysia #1
On August 19th, I had the privilege to meet author Dina Smith during a book author webinar with The Hudson Institute of Coaching –– of which I am a graduate and certified coach within the institute. Smith’s new bestseller is titled “Emotionally Charged: How to Lead in the New World of Work.”
Smith began the webinar by explaining her new term in this context: ‘emotional labor’ in leadership.
“It’s hard to read emotions in today’s polarized workforce… There are task-related and personal issues that each employee holds. Reacting as a leader can be difficult if you don’t know how to react to each employees’ emotions and keep everything on a level playing field,” Smith explained.
“As leaders,” she said, “we need to marry scientific and practical tools together.”
Smith gave a great example of emotional labor in leadership, saying, “When you get a gift from an individual and you don’t really like the gift, but you know that you have to display the right feeling outwardly to the individual, it takes a kind of labor; not showing the wrong emotion, so that the individual who gave you the gift isn’t made to feel bad.”
Smith further gave examples of how emotional labor plays out within a leader’s team:
- Like rallying your team when you are tired; and don’t want to show your fatigue
- Conducting a layoff of an individual(s): You must put on your “game face” at work and not show your true feelings about the difficult situation.
- Other emotional labor in leadership examples Smith sited:
- Work Design Changes: Process changes that may not be popular to the team and how the leader shows or holds back on their personal emotions about the changes.
- Technical Changes: That affects work flow and how the team moves forward.
- World Events: That affects the organization in a variety of ways.
Big Hint / Idea from Alysia #2
Here are some excerpts of Dina Smith’s Summer Article 2025 writings to share with you, based on her new book.
Emotional depletion is a real and significant tax of modern leadership. Recovery is no longer a luxury. Instead, it’s a leadership imperative, critical for protecting your well-being and sustaining your capacity to lead over the long haul.
Smith’s examples continue:
- You have to lay off a team member, deliver hard feedback in a tense meeting, or end the day absorbing the resignation of a top performer. No crisis. Just another Tuesday.
Each of these moments is emotionally taxing on its own. But taken together—and set against a backdrop of performance pressures, shifting workplace norms, and the unrelenting emotional labor of guiding and supporting teams through crises and global turmoil—they quietly add up.
Big Hint / Idea from Alysia #3
Newly released Gallup data reflects this toll.
Global employee engagement declined to 21% in 2024, with managers experiencing the largest drop. This marks only the second decline in engagement in the past 12 years and a worrying sign for organizations already struggling with productivity.
In 2024, global employee engagement declined for only the second time in over a decade. Unlike the first drop in 2020, however, the drop wasn’t driven by frontline workers. Instead, it was entirely due to declining engagement among managers and leaders.
In a March 2025 survey by Modern Health, 77% of managers reported that their role was more challenging now than ever before.
From the survey:
According to a new report from Modern Health, a leading global workplace mental health platform, the American workforce is grappling with surging levels of stress, low mood, and seeking more workplace mental health benefits.
In this survey of 1,000 full-time U.S. employees commissioned to understand the state of mental health across America’s workforce at the start of 2025, 75% report experiencing some form of low mood, largely driven by politics and current events, and 74% say they want mental health resources specifically addressing global political turmoil. Alarmingly, almost half of respondents say life was easier during the COVID-19 pandemic than it is now—just several months into 2025.
Understandably, leaders focus on managing others through challenging moments.
Faced with external expectations and a genuine desire to show up for their teams, they direct their attention and energy outward: guiding, steadying, and responding.
But with that external focus and the nonstop pressure for results, it’s easy for leaders to overlook a crucial step: processing their own emotional experience. Pressing on feels efficient, even the only choice to stay afloat amid all the demands on your time. Indeed, it can feel nearly impossible to process your emotions when you’re in the thick of it at work.
But over time, just powering through weighty situations without pausing to process your experience can come at a steep cost to your health, effectiveness as a leader, and relationships.
Next week, we’ll share proven ways leaders can actually recover and build resilience. Stay tuned!