The Biology of Leadership · Issue 08 · Sent to subscribers 11 September 2026
I have interviewed 40 leaders for the book now. Seventeen talked about actively checking in on their people and asking how they are doing. Twelve named, in one form or another, the cost of managing what everyone else gets to see of them.
That duality interests me.
We ask leaders to notice other people’s state, create safety, remain approachable and bring the right energy into the room. At exactly the same time, many are doing another job underneath all of that: managing their own face, tone, energy and emotional state so the room gets the version of them they think it needs.
Nobody really counts that work.
But perhaps we should.
The insight this week
The mask is work performed on top of the work
Six years ago I wrote a series called The Unmasked Executive. Back then I thought the problem with the mask was mostly authenticity. I had twisted myself into whatever version of Rachel I thought would work in the room and, somewhere underneath all those versions, lost track of myself.
I still think that was true.
What I understand differently now is why those versions existed in the first place.
They worked.
In Issue 01 I wrote about our ancient threat-detection system constantly reading the social environment.
Am I safe here?
Do I belong?
Where do I stand with these people?
Then in Issue 07 I wrote about something several leaders had shown me: the environment can be stronger than intention. You can know exactly what helps you regulate and still have your nervous system recruited by the room.
The mask feels like the next part of that story.
If an environment repeatedly teaches us that one version of ourselves is easier to accept than another, behaviour adapts.
From the interviews
They weren’t talking about dishonesty. They were talking about capacity.
One leader told me there are mornings when her energy is low and she consciously puts on a mask because she doesn’t want that energy landing on her team or her children.
Then she described the cost:
Using energy to look like you’ve got more energy.
Later, when I asked what she wished younger leaders understood, she came back to it:
It’s really high energy pretending to be something you’re not.
She wasn’t arguing for permanent unmasking. She talked about professional boundaries and times when the mask appropriately comes back on. Her point was not to lose yourself underneath it.
Another leader described feeling pressure to maintain a “positive facade”, even when he didn’t necessarily want to, because of the responsibilities that came with being a leader, father and partner.
Then another gave me an image I don’t think I’ll forget. During a period of enormous organisational anxiety, she was paying such close attention to the energy she brought into work that:
Sometimes my face hurts ’cause I’ve spent the day smiling.
One particularly brutal week she got home and caught herself fake-smiling at her dogs. That was the moment she realised how automatic the behaviour had become. There was nobody left to manage. The dogs loved her regardless. Yet the mask was still running.
Different people. Different environments. The same biological trade-off.
Psychologists call one version of this expressive suppression. You experience something internally and work to prevent the outside of your body from showing it.
James Gross and Robert Levenson famously tested this by asking people watching emotional films not to let their feelings show. It worked externally. They became less expressive.
Inside, their bodies were working harder, not less.
That distinction matters because we confuse the appearance of regulation with regulation itself all the time. Someone looks calm, therefore we assume they are calm. Someone keeps performing, therefore we assume they are coping.
Sometimes the original state is still running and the body has simply picked up another job: make sure nobody can see it.
Later research found suppression could also consume cognitive resources and impair memory. Work on surface acting, the organisational term for displaying one emotional state while experiencing another, has repeatedly associated that gap with poorer wellbeing.
The leaders had already described the mechanism perfectly.
Using energy to look like you have more energy.
Smiling until your face hurts.
Holding the positive facade.
The twist
Taking the mask off creates another biological calculation
One leader helped me see why this gets more complicated with seniority. Earlier in her career, she said, “you’re still needing to impress people”. You’re thinking about who is watching, who is noticing how you’re performing and, even when you don’t want it to, that shapes how you respond.
That maps onto research on social-evaluative threat. Humans respond particularly strongly when we believe our competence, status or belonging is being judged by other people.
Which brought me back to a woman on my team recently.
She was visibly wound into a ball one day. I named what I could see, asked her to breathe and reminded her that we weren’t doing brain surgery.
A week later she thanked me. She knew meditation and breathwork. She knew what calm felt like, and the environment had sucked her in anyway.
Our relationship later deteriorated and she eventually undermined me in ways I didn’t expect.
I’ve wondered about that interaction a lot.
I had seen underneath the competent, composed version she normally presented. Strangely, my respect for her went up afterwards, not down.
But she couldn’t know that.
She could only predict what I now thought of her.
Anna Bruk and colleagues’ beautiful mess research makes this even more interesting. Across seven studies, people tended to judge their own vulnerability more harshly than they judged vulnerability in somebody else. What feels exposing from the inside can read very differently from the outside.
So I wonder whether relief and exposure can exist at the same time.
I don’t know whether that explains what happened between us, and biology certainly doesn’t excuse behaviour. But it gives me a mechanism worth considering.
Maybe the important part of psychological safety isn’t only what happens when somebody lets the mask slip.
Maybe it is what happens afterwards.
Where this sits on the Wheel
This issue starts at Environment
This is the part that pulled the whole pattern together for me.
Environment teaches us what is rewarded, tolerated or risky.
That shapes Behaviour. We edit ourselves. Become more agreeable, certain, energetic, hard, polished or whatever version seems to work. We put on the mask.
The edited version is the one that leads. The person making the decision, having the difficult conversation and setting the tone is doing it from behind whatever they are holding up.
Holding it up reaches Biology. Suppression, vigilance and continually monitoring whether the performance is holding all use resources. When stress systems keep being called on without fully standing down, the accumulated wear is what Bruce McEwen described as allostatic load.
And that state becomes the weather everybody else works in.
Turning this way, the wheel erodes capacity. Clockwise it builds it.
Round it goes.
The room teaches the rule. We edit ourselves to match. Leading from behind the edit costs the body. And what is left of us becomes the next room.
The practice
Make the mask more optional
One leader gave me the simplest version of this. On a flat day, she sometimes just tells her team:
I’m a bit flat today.
No dramatic disclosure. Nobody needs to fix her.
She gives them enough information that they don’t spend the next few hours wondering whether her changed tone has something to do with them.
That is Issue 06 again: you cannot always control the weather, but you can publish the forecast.
Another leader described her co-founder finally saying, “I’m not coping.” They wrote down everything she was carrying, moved what could be moved and delegated what could be delegated. She could physically see the tension leaving her co-founder’s body as the load came out of her head.
Neither requires bringing your “whole self” to work. I’m increasingly unsure what that phrase even means.
There are parts of my life that belong with Luke, my children, my closest friends, or simply with me. Boundaries are healthy.
The question is whether the mask is something you choose when the moment requires it, or something your environment has taught you that you cannot safely remove.
One more thing
If we ask for honesty, we need to look at what it costs afterwards
If somebody tells you they’re struggling and you respond beautifully, that’s a start.
Do they still get the difficult project?
Are they trusted with the same client?
Do you start checking on them more often?
Does what they shared travel somewhere it shouldn’t?
Do you unconsciously downgrade your view of their capability?
Because the nervous system is still collecting evidence.
If honesty costs status, Behaviour adapts. The mask goes back on.
And that might be the piece I missed when I first started writing about unmasking all those years ago.
A successful adaptation can still be biologically expensive. Sometimes it survives precisely because it works.
So this week I wouldn’t ask whether you’re being your authentic self.
I’d ask something a little more useful:
What version of me does this environment reward, and what is it costing me to keep being that version?
And if you lead other people:
What do they have to hide from me in order to stay credible here?
Those answers tell you something about which way the Wheel is turning.
The other signal
The Capacity Wheel is a read on which way your wheel is turning, and on how much you have to spend before you ask yourself to spend it. About three minutes. It is a mirror, not an assessment.
Which way is your wheel turning?
Using energy to look like you’ve got more energy.
This is Issue 08 of The Biology of Leadership, a weekly note written while I work on Beacon, a book on the biology of leadership. Subscribe here to get each issue a day before it appears on the journal.