4 The Thermodynamics of Emotional Intelligence
This chapter is currently in draft form.
I was hired to replace some folks. The person that hired me didn’t replace them and they still owned part of the platform I needed to deliver through. It was a tough situation that created constant friction.
After a year or so of constant, unrelenting frustration, I realized I was frustrated and angry all the time. That’s no way to live.
So I decided not to be frustrated. It wasn’t that simple, of course, you can’t stop feeling a feeling something just by deciding to stop, but you can stop letting it have traction in your soul. You can step outside of it and look at it instead of just being in it. It’s a little mental judo that helps you deal with this kind of problem.
Once I could see the frustration instead of just feel it, it became useful as a signal. That frustration is triggered by something. Something is causing it. It may be your unreasonable expectations, it may be something else off in the ‘machine’. Once you stop ‘being’ frustrated and start detecting your frustration, you can use it.
That frustration is heat. In thermodynamics, heat represents energy that isn’t doing useful work: friction in a machine, resistance in a circuit, inefficiency in a system. Your frustration works the same way.
You are going to be frustrated. That is guaranteed. Treat that frustration as a diagnostic tool in the machine.
And like a machine, something can be fixed. Sometimes you add oil. Sometimes you make an adjustment. Sometimes you rebuild. Sometimes you replace a part. The heat tells you something’s wrong; the assumption underneath this whole chapter is that you can do something about it. Not everything. Maybe not the part you most want to change. But somewhere in the system, there’s a lever that moves.
4.1 Detecting Your Frustration
It’s a leading indicator. Traditional metrics fail to capture the nuances that create inefficiency in complex human systems. You can’t measure coordination overhead in Jira. You can’t see misaligned incentives in a dashboard. You can’t track the slow erosion of trust in your quarterly reports. But you can feel it. The frustration shows up before the metrics do.
The question is what kind of frustration you’re feeling.
Personal frustration (yours alone, not shared by others) often signals a gap between where you’re operating and where the team can currently reach. You might be frustrated because your expectations are pitched at a level they haven’t grown into yet. That doesn’t invalidate your expectations, it tells you where to invest. Step down a level. Meet them where they are. Grow them. Then work back up together.
Team frustration (shared among your direct reports) usually indicates structural problems within your domain: unclear processes, inadequate tools, conflicting priorities, skills gaps. When multiple people are frustrated about the same things, the system is generating that outcome reliably. The problem isn’t the individuals.
Organizational frustration (widespread across teams and functions) points to deeper issues: strategic confusion, structural misalignment, or people problems in high-level roles. This is hardest to address because solutions often lie outside your direct control.
The same symptom can indicate different problems depending on the pattern. Everyone complaining about meetings could mean you personally have unrealistic expectations about meeting efficiency, or your team has a process problem, or the organization has a structural dysfunction that forces excessive coordination. Your job is to trace the heat to its source.
When you feel frustration, ask where it originates in The Hierarchy of Leverage. Is it generated by unclear or contradictory strategy? By high organizational distance in your structure? By an individual whose behavior creates unnecessary volatility? By ritualistic process that adds no value? Once you’ve traced it, fix at the highest level you can reach. Fixing strategy eliminates structural friction. Fixing structure eliminates people conflicts. Fixing people eliminates process complaints. Work down from the top.
4.1.1 Calibrating Your Thermometer
Frustration is only useful as diagnostic data if your readings are accurate. You might run sensitive: every friction feels like a crisis, every delay triggers alarm. Or you might run insensitive: real problems don’t register until they’re emergencies. This is different from running hot or cold. You can be warm but oversensitive, reacting calmly to too many false positives. You can be warm but insensitive, staying regulated while missing real problems.
Neither extreme gives you reliable signal. If you’re too sensitive, you flood your own system with noise, treating minor irritants as major dysfunction. You burn yourself out responding to readings that don’t reflect reality. If you’re too insensitive, you miss early warnings entirely, only noticing heat when something is already on fire.
Calibration means knowing your own tendencies. If you run sensitive, build in a delay before acting on frustration. Check whether the reading holds after a day. If you run insensitive, actively solicit frustration data from others whose thermometers might be picking up what yours misses.
Your calibration also drifts. After a rough quarter, everything feels harder than it is. After a win, warning signs don’t register. Periodic recalibration against your team’s readings and against outcomes keeps your instrument accurate.
4.1.2 Correcting Distortions
The biggest calibration errors come from the narratives you tell yourself. “They never listen.” “This person is an idiot.” “This always happens.” These stories amplify frustration beyond what the situation warrants. They’re not readings — they’re distortions.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is useful here — pattern-matching on your own faulty reasoning, backed by decades of clinical research (Hofmann et al., 2012). Catch the narrative, question it, and the reading often corrects itself. This isn’t about feeling better. It’s about seeing accurately.
Your CTO snaps at a product manager, sighs audibly when requirements change, or sends frustrated 2 a.m. emails.
Ask: Is this a pattern, or a moment? One bad week after a production crisis is human. Weekly volatility is a problem.
If it’s a pattern, act fast. Political capital erodes with every outburst, even when the frustration is legitimate. Your other leaders are watching. Your board notices. The longer you wait, the more credibility they burn — and the more your tolerance looks like endorsement. Coach hard on emotional regulation. If it doesn’t stick, you have a leadership gap, not a stress problem.
4.2 Managing Emotional Entropy
The second law of thermodynamics: in any closed system, entropy tends to increase. Things move toward disorder unless energy is actively invested to maintain coherence.
Teams work the same way.
Emotional entropy is the tendency for team dynamics to drift toward dysfunction if not actively managed. Communication breaks down, trust erodes, and small misunderstandings compound into significant conflicts. The natural state of any complex system is disorder, and order requires work.
I’ve watched this happen repeatedly. A high-performing team gradually loses coherence. Not because anyone did anything wrong, but because the ongoing energy investment required to maintain alignment got neglected. People got busy. One-on-ones got canceled. Retrospectives got perfunctory. Six months later, you’ve got silos where you used to have collaboration, and defensiveness where you used to have trust.
If you don’t understand this, you’ll get frustrated when teams drift. You’ll think something went wrong, that you hired the wrong people or built the wrong culture. Sometimes that’s true. More often, the team is experiencing normal entropy, and what’s missing is your ongoing investment to counteract it.
Entropy reduction is work. It’s the energy required to hold that difficult retrospective when everyone just wants to move on. It’s reiterating the “why” behind a project for the fifth time because the team has drifted. It’s the one-on-one you don’t skip even though your calendar is crushing you.
The energy cost of poor emotional management is real. Emotional entropy burns political capital faster than technical failures. A team that’s technically competent but emotionally chaotic drains your credibility with stakeholders who see the dysfunction even if they can’t diagnose it.
Systems drift toward dysfunction. Maintenance is continuous.
4.3 Finding the Root Cause
Once you can detect your frustration, you can act. But effective action requires tracing the heat to the right level.
The Hierarchy of Leverage provides the diagnostic framework: Strategy → Structure → People → Process. Trace your frustration through the hierarchy and fix at the highest level you can reach. If your engineers are frustrated about incident response, don’t tweak the on-call rotation. Ask why incidents keep happening. Maybe it’s a fragile system, understaffing, a release process that skips validation, or organizational pressure that prioritizes features over reliability. The heat your engineers feel at 2 a.m. is real. The source might be a prioritization decision made months ago.
At every level, check whether you’re contributing to the heat. Static thinking, believing a situation is broken and unchangeable, generates more friction than the situation itself (Dweck, 2006). Ego generates heat too: frustration that a solution isn’t your solution, or a process isn’t mathematically optimal. The need for control can itself become the friction. When frustrated, ask: what part of this is the system? What part of this is me?
The situation I described at the start of this chapter was both. The systemic issues were real — blocked pipelines, weak engineers, obstacles at every turn. But I was also generating heat. I was frustrated they couldn’t see what I saw, but I’d never tried to teach them to see it.
I had to work both sides. Build coalitions, prove the cost of blocked pipelines, gradually remove obstacles. And learn to translate across abstraction levels so they could see what I saw. Some things I couldn’t fix at all — I just routed around them.
Sometimes you can’t change the system — politics, history, protected individuals, organizational inertia. Assess whether the issue is a deal-breaker or something you can design around. Sometimes the right answer is to leave.
4.4 Transforming Heat into Work
Frustration is heat from friction. You don’t fight the heat; you find the misalignment and fix it.
The difference matters. Consider two responses to the same frustration: a required sign-off ceremony that slows your team’s deployments.
Low efficiency (venting): You spend twenty minutes in a colleague’s office complaining about the process. You generate empathy, feel slightly better, solve nothing, and lose focus for the next hour. The heat dissipated as social friction. No work was performed.
High efficiency (useful work): You recognize the frustration, spend five minutes writing a clear two-sentence proposal to the decision-maker explaining the cost, figuring out what problem created the gate, and addressing that so it can be removed, then return to primary work. The heat was channeled into a pressure differential that might actually move something.
Both responses acknowledged the frustration. Only one converted it to work.
The conversion process starts with pinpointing the origin. Organizational issue? Personal issue? Both? Trace the heat to its source before acting, because misdiagnosis leads to wasted intervention. If the problem is systemic, engage your team. Don’t just note collective frustration; open a dialogue. When multiple people are frustrated about the same things, that’s significant data, and the conversation often reveals dimensions you hadn’t seen. Then drive change. Identified a systemic issue? Don’t merely propose a solution; initiate it. Frustration channeled into action is how systems improve.
The mark of great leadership isn’t the absence of problems. It’s the ability to transform problems into improvement. Frustration isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you. It’s a sign that something in the system deserves attention.
4.5 The Emotionally Efficient Leader
Understanding emotional thermodynamics multiplies your effectiveness over time. You stop wasting energy on reactions that don’t improve anything. You start investing energy where it generates returns. You build a reputation for staying steady under pressure, and that reputation itself becomes capital.
Your emotional patterns create the operating temperature others expect from you. Run hot, and people will manage around your volatility, hiding information that might trigger you. Run cold, and people will fill your silence with anxiety. Run warm, and people will bring you problems early, when they’re still solvable.
This is the practical difference. If you run warm, you hear about the integration failure when it’s a day’s work to fix. If you run hot, you hear about it when it’s blown a deadline, because nobody wanted to deliver bad news. If you run cold, you hear about it in the postmortem, if at all. Same problem, three different outcomes, determined entirely by how people expect you to react.
That’s the thermodynamics of leadership. Listen to the friction. It’s telling you where the machine needs attention.