If candor is a priority in your leadership practice, the desire for honesty and transparency may leave you or your team members feeling emotionally vulnerable. You may be inclined to control your emotions or tell employees to take their feelings outside the office. But true leadership means doing more self-regulation and conflict resolution. By balancing candor and containment, you can provide your workers the space to have true discussions about their feelings, and work toward a healthier, more collaborative, and more productive workplace.
What Psychologists Mean by “Containment”
When psychologists talk about “containment” they mean the ability to hold onto emotions and decide when and how to express them. Imagine stubbing your toe in front of a toddler. You likely feel an immediate flash of pain, and possibly anger or embarrassment about how it happened. You may feel an instinct to swear or yell out in frustration. Containment is the ability to hold onto those feelings and temporarily sensor yourself, possibly by moving out of the room. It gives you the power to limit the exposure of those around you (in this case the two year old) to the negative impact of your immediate emotional response to a painful situation.
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How Business Leaders Use Containment in the Workplace
Containment is the recognition that not every audience needs access to every bit of emotional expression. It involves choosing the right moment, and the right audience, to vent your frustrations. As a business leader, you may find it necessary to regulate your own emotions to avoid creating conflict or escalating disagreements between team members. Containment also includes the concept of “holding space” for someone else who is in an emotionally vulnerable place, giving them time to experience and process strong feelings. It involves remaining calm and avoiding becoming overwhelmed or reactive to the other person’s emotional expressions.
In this context, psychologists often discuss containment as a parenting skill. However, it also translates to business owners and team leaders who are helping their employees navigate difficult issues at work. Offering containment to your employees gives them a sense of psychological stability and emotional support when things get difficult. It provides an opportunity for team members to express their emotions without fear of retribution or employment consequences. Then, everyone involved can process their feelings and move toward resolution and a healthier coworking environment.
Containment vs Stoicism or Toxic Positivity
Containment is a crucial part of emotional regulation, one of the 5 core aspects of emotional intelligence. It allows you to experience your emotions, while giving you control over when and how you express them. When taken too far, though, containment can turn into something far less healthy, like stoicism or toxic positivity.
Stoicism is the belief that emotional expression is a sign of weakness. Stoics take personal containment to an extreme, keeping a “stiff upper lip” rather than acknowledging when emotions are affecting their ability to interact with others or do business in a healthy way.
When these same tendencies turn outward, it can create a working environment of toxic positivity. In these environments, the assumption, indeed the expectation, is that everything is good or great and that no obstacle is big enough to stop forward progress. Negative emotions or even disagreement can be stifled in favor of an outward expression of team happiness and contentment. This veneer of positive feelings can cover over deep resentment and burnout that negatively affects team members unable to find an outlet for their true emotions.
It is important to remember that containment is not about ignoring your feelings or pretending everything is fine when it isn’t. Instead, it is about finding the proper time, place, and manner to express those emotions in a constructive way. When approaching from this perspective, candor and containment can become complementary tools leaders can use to build authentic connections to team members, increasing trust and improving collaboration.
Balancing Candor and Containment in Business Leadership
Candor is a priority for many emotionally intelligent business leaders. Being honest and transparent about your leadership decisions can do a lot to build trust and improve collaboration among team members. You can also be candid about any emotions you are experiencing if they are relevant to the team or affecting your ability to participate fully.
But candor doesn’t require emotionally over-sharing. You don’t need to wear your heart on your sleeve. In fact, being too emotionally reactive can increase conflict among team members, escalating small issues rather than diffusing disagreements. Being an effective business leader depends on balancing candor and containment to promote a healthy and emotionally safe working environment for you and your team members. This means:
- Providing safe, private spaces for employees to practice self-regulation
- Offering support and containment when employees are facing strong emotions
- Practicing and modeling self-regulation to avoid unhelpful or uncontrolled emotional responses
- Being truthful about the effects of emotions on your work
- Facilitating the healthy expression of disagreements and emotions to resolve interpersonal conflict
Balancing candor and containment means recognizing emotions when they arise (in yourself or your team members), deciding whether expressing those emotions will help or hurt the team, and then providing a safe and supportive avenue to process the emotions in an authentic and non-disruptive way.
Finding the balance between candor and containment isn’t easy. It takes a high degree of emotional intelligence and empathy toward your fellow team members. Fortunately, practice in these kinds of cases, can improve your ability to lead by example through self-regulation and provide supportive containment. Together, these skills can help you build a workplace that is healthy, supportive, and productive.
David Stanislaw and Karen Sherwood are leadership and executive coaches with 70 years of combined experience. Together, they apply their psychodynamic training and extensive experience to help leaders, business owners, and employees develop skills to fight burnout and improve performance. Contact us to meet with Stanislaw Consulting today.
This post was written by a human without the use of AI. Stanislaw Consulting does not consent to the use of its online content to train large language models or other forms of artificial intelligence.
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