13 Who You Must Be Now
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A mentor once told me you can tell the difference between a good executive and a bad one by what happens to a room in crisis. A good executive walks in and the temperature cools, people visibly relax, coordination starts happening. A bad executive does the opposite. When they walk into a room people tense up, they look over their shoulder, they get visibly more nervous. The room may get quieter, but it’s because people are afraid to talk. What you project, they catch (Sy, Côté and Saavedra, 2005; Barsade, 2020).
Presence is a choice, even when it doesn’t feel like one (Coqual (formerly Center for Talent Innovation), 2012). It’s a mask that we craft and put on for the sake of the organization.
13.1 The Temperature Test
That this wasn’t just theory struck me in my first major outage at one company. Systems were down, customers couldn’t use the site, everyone looking for direction. I was new enough in the role that I felt uncertain about holding it together.
But something clicked when I stepped in. I pushed aside my doubts, and put on a mask of calm. Where are we? What needs to happen next? Have we notified our stakeholders? The questions came out steady, practical, sequential. The room settled. Chaos organized itself into something workable. The temperature cooled. People stopped spiraling and started solving.
I wish I could say I’ve always passed that test.
One time a massive storm knocked out power to our call centers. Our support technicians were sheltering in place and had no ability to work for several weeks. Customers couldn’t reach anyone. Complaints piled up. Leadership asked for volunteers to answer phones and support tickets, and most of the executive team stepped in. I didn’t.
My reasoning felt sound at the time. I was busy. I had work that mattered to the business. Answering phones wasn’t the highest use of my time. All of that was true enough to let me believe it.
But I didn’t want to, and I talked myself into not doing it.
It cost me. I felt the shift afterward in how people looked at me. The executives who had been on the phones together had shared something. I hadn’t been part of it. My absence had the unintended consequence of communicating that I was above it, that I didn’t think the work mattered, that when things got hard I wouldn’t be there.
In a crisis, symbolism matters more than logistics. Answering phones didn’t solve the power outage. The number of tickets the executives closed was tiny compared to people who knew what they were doing. My presence on the phones wouldn’t have restored electricity or cleared the backlog any faster. But it would have answered a different question; the one everyone asks in a crisis: Is my leader with us? I let them answer that question without me, and they answered it correctly. I wasn’t.
The mask isn’t just about regulating your presence in the room. It’s about showing up in the first place. Leadership has ceremonial obligations. Sometimes the ceremony is the point. You don’t get to decide which moments demand your presence based on what you feel like doing.
13.2 The Mask as Service
The mask isn’t lying. It isn’t pretending the building isn’t on fire. It’s curation. You choose the version of yourself the moment requires.
The principle is simple: Situational truth, not internal state. Tell them the truth of their situation. Protect them from the truth of yours.
Radical transparency about the situation is non-negotiable. Tell the team the hard news. Don’t hide the business realities, the challenges, or the stakes. They deserve to know what they’re working with. Hiding the situation is paternalism, and it usually backfires. People sense when something’s wrong, especially when you have spent the time and effort to build them up into owners. Your silence just adds anxiety to uncertainty.
But your internal state is a different category. Your anxiety about whether you can pull this off. Your doubt about the strategy. Your frustration with the board. None of this helps them do their jobs. Knowing we lost the client is actionable. Knowing your leader is scared is just weight.
You can share fear with select people—that’s vulnerability, and it can create connection and mutual support. But only with extreme care, and only when the nature of the relationship can hold it. If sharing serves the relationship, do it. If it doesn’t, don’t. When you share fear with someone who reports to you, it almost never serves. They can’t reassure you. They can’t fix it. They can only carry the added weight of knowing their leader is uncertain (Schmodde, Schmitt and Knipfer, 2023). That’s not intimacy. It’s burden.
The modern “authentic leadership” movement gets something right. Closed, emotionally unavailable leadership erodes trust. The instinct toward genuineness is correct. But the movement often ignores that vulnerability doesn’t work the same across a power differential. It lands differently than you intend. Applied indiscriminately downward, authenticity becomes burden. The structural reality of power doesn’t disappear because of good intentions.
So you curate. Not for your benefit, but for theirs. The mask is not about suppressing emotion. It’s about allocating emotional labor correctly. It’s about showing what helps them do their jobs, holding what would only make those jobs harder.
Your private anxiety is real. So is your judgment that the situation is manageable. So is your confidence in the team’s ability to execute. When you project calm, you’re not hiding the truth. You’re showing a different true thing. The one that serves them.
13.3 The Mask in All Directions
The mask applies in every direction where you carry weight. The principle is always the same regardless of direction. Don’t transfer emotional weight to people who can’t do anything productive with it.
Your direct reports need your steadiness. So do your peers, if they look to you for stability. So does your boss, who needs confidence that your domain is in steady hands. Your CEO doesn’t need your 3 a.m. terror about whether the platform will scale. They need to know you have things under control. Here’s the challenge, here’s the plan, here’s what I need from you. They’re carrying their own weight. Adding yours drains political capital you can’t afford to lose.
You may show your boss more than you show your reports. There’s more room and more need for candor about difficulty. But it’s still curated. “This is hard and I’m on it” lands very differently than “I don’t know if I can do this.”
And the mask doesn’t just protect people from your fear. It protects them from your judgments.
Most leaders have an A team and a B team, even if they never say so. A group that’s more capable and a group that’s less. Out of frustration, I sometimes talk about challenges with the B team to people I am close to on the A team. Not derogatorily. I do it just to process, to vent to people who will understand.
There’s some truth in this instinct. Sometimes the A team needs to know you’re aware that someone is struggling and that you’re doing something about it. You can acknowledge: yes, I see the problem, I’m handling it. But that need gives you an excuse, and you can’t let the excuse become license. Acknowledgment is not venting. The details aren’t for them.
Venting serves no one.
The A team probably already knows who’s struggling, they work together, they see it. What they learn from your venting isn’t who’s on the B team. It’s that you vent. They know now that you talk about people when those people aren’t in the room. They have to wonder what you say about them when they’re not around. And the information leaks, maybe not the words, but the temperature.
The damage goes deeper. They’re watching how I treat people who struggle, drawing conclusions about what happens the day they underperform. The behavior erodes psychological safety for everyone, not just the people I’m venting about, but the people I’m venting to.
When you need to vent about people, you do it outside the organization, with a coach, a therapist, a friend who doesn’t work with you. Not with other direct reports, no matter how trusted.
This is why leadership is lonely (RHR International, 2012). Not because you’re cold or distant, but because power turns certain kinds of honesty into burden rather than connection. Your colleagues are partners in the mission, not friends in the way peers outside the power structure can be. The asymmetry makes that impossible.
The mask must come off somewhere, or it eventually cracks. At home, with friends outside work, with a coach or therapist. Sustainable leadership requires finding that somewhere.
13.4 Becoming What You Practice
The mask metaphor eventually breaks down, and that’s the point.
Early in your leadership journey, projecting calm under pressure takes effort. You’re terrified, and steadiness is work. The mask is something you put on deliberately. You can feel the gap between what you’re projecting and what you’re feeling.
But if you keep doing it. If you keep choosing the steady version of yourself in moment after moment, crisis after crisis—something shifts. The gap narrows. The projection becomes less effortful. The calm you were performing starts to become the calm you actually feel.
You’re not condemned to a career of acting. You’re practicing a way of being until it becomes your way of being. The mask isn’t permanent theater. It’s training (Kross et al., 2021).
I’m steadier now than I was ten years ago. Not because I’ve seen fewer crises, but because I’ve seen more. Each one was practice. Each time I chose calm over panic, the version of me that chooses those things got stronger. The version that panics didn’t disappear, it’s still there, but it’s no longer the default.
The calm, grounded version of you isn’t a fiction. It’s a capacity you’re developing. The demands of the role draw it out. Repetition strengthens it. Over time, you become someone who actually is what you were once only projecting.
13.5 The Threshold
Storms come; you dress for them. Calm is essential clothing. Leaders who run warm surface problems early and navigate them steadily. Leaders who run hot burn credibility. Leaders who run cold create anxiety in the vacuum.
When you walk into a room under pressure, does the temperature drop or rise?
You don’t get to answer that question about yourself. The room answers it. Your job is to become the person who produces the right answer, and to keep getting better at it. To show up when the moment demands presence, not because it’s the best use of your time, but because leadership has obligations that aren’t optional.
And one day, after enough practice, you realize that you’re not wearing the mask anymore. You’re just wearing your face.
What happens when your CTO walks into a room that’s already stressed?
If the tension drops, if people visibly settle, if chaos starts organizing itself into something workable, you have the right person. If the tension rises, if they add noise or demand answers in ways that amplify rather than calm, you have a problem.
Don’t mistake volume for competence, or tough questions for leadership. Adding pressure is not the same as adding value.
Watch what happens over time. A leader who holds the room in familiar crises might wobble when something genuinely new arrives. The capacity deepens with practice, or it doesn’t. Your job is to see whether it’s developing.
What happens when you walk into a stressed room? Are you the steady presence you’re asking of them, or are you the one adding chaos?