Your Team Knows You're Not Fine (And Pretending Otherwise is Making Everything Worse)
Your Team Knows You're Not Fine (And Pretending Otherwise is Making Everything Worse)
There's this production manager. Running a team. Dealing with high turnover, retention problems, communication breakdowns.
Everyone's walking on eggshells around them. Team members are trying to solve problems on their own instead of asking for help. Making more mistakes. Not getting the support they need.
The manager thinks they're hiding how stressed they are. "I'm fine. Everything's fine."
Spoiler alert: They're not hiding anything. Everyone can tell. And the more they try to hide it, the worse it gets.
My guest Erin Thorpe—leadership coach who specializes in tactical empathy and navigating conflict—worked with this manager on something she calls "emotional constipation."
Yeah. You read that right.
And once this manager learned to be just 1% more vulnerable about what was actually going on with them? Everything changed. The team could finally breathe. Communication opened up. The retention issues started improving.
All because someone finally admitted they weren't "fine."
The Empathy Problem Nobody's Talking About
I asked Erin why so many leaders struggle with empathy, and her answer cut straight to the heart of it:
"It requires us to be a little vulnerable."
And depending on what's happening and who's on the other side of the table, that vulnerability can feel terrifying.
But here's the kicker: If you can't access your OWN vulnerability—if you can't connect with your own emotions—you absolutely cannot extend empathy to someone else.
You have to be able to drop into your own feelings first. Understand what's going on emotionally with yourself. What you're bringing into the conversation.
Because if you don't practice that skill with yourself, there's no way in hell you're doing it with the person sitting across from you. Let alone an entire team.
"Soft Skills" is Bullshaet (These Are HUMAN Skills)
Erin called out the dreaded term: "soft skills."
Let's get this straight right now: These aren't soft skills. They're HUMAN skills. PEOPLE skills.
There are two sides to leadership:
The technical side (frameworks, tools, techniques, processes)
The human side (psychological safety, emotional intelligence, actual conversations about emotions)
Empathy lives on the human side. And it's absolutely NOT taught in traditional leadership training.
Your MBA doesn't cover this. Your management workshops skip it. Most senior leaders still hold this deeply pervasive belief that there is no place for emotion at work.
But the tides are turning. Because the old top-down hierarchical "follow orders" model? It doesn't work anymore.
Not when things are changing so fast that waiting for decisions to go all the way up the chain and back down means you've already missed the opportunity.
Not when your success depends on empowering front-line people to make decisions.
Not when trust and emotional connection are the actual competitive advantages.
The Command-and-Control Delusion
The 19th and 20th century mindset was all about hierarchy. The boss says it, you do it. No questions. No emotions. Just compliance.
That paradigm is dying. (And good riddance.)
If leaders wait to make every decision, check every box, control every variable? You're too slow. Your competitors are eating your lunch. Your best people are leaving for companies that trust them.
To lead in the modern world—to actually scale a company that matters—you have to connect emotionally with your team. You have to trust them. Empower them.
And empathy is the cornerstone of building those trusting relationships.
The old model wasn't about trust. It was about following orders.
That just doesn't work anymore. Period.
Emotional Constipation is Killing Your Team (And You Can't Hide It)
Erin's term "emotional constipation" is perfect because it captures exactly what's happening:
You're holding everything in. Building up pressure. No release valve. Everything's backed up.
And then when something happens—a small thing, a nothing thing—you explode. Or implode. Or just radiate this stress energy that makes everyone around you want to flee.
Here's what leaders don't realize: You think you're better at hiding how you feel than you really are.
You had a rough morning. Got caught in traffic. Fight with your spouse. Bad news from home.
You breeze into the meeting thinking "I'm just going to hide whatever just happened. Nobody needs to know."
Wrong.
Your team KNOWS something's going on. They can read your body language. Your tone. The way you entered the room. The tension in your shoulders.
They might not notice the stain on your collar. But they absolutely notice your emotional state.
And when you say "I'm fine" with that tight smile and those slightly widened eyes? Nobody believes you.
The Story We Tell Ourselves (That Has Nothing to Do With Us)
Here's what happens when you insist you're fine but everyone can sense you're not:
They make it about THEM.
They create a story: "The only reason they're saying they're fine but clearly aren't fine is because they're MAD AT ME."
And then they spend the rest of the day getting worked up about you being mad at them, creating distance, avoiding bringing you important issues, walking on eggshells.
When the truth was you just had a shaetty morning and it had nothing to do with them.
But because you wouldn't just say "I had a rough morning," everyone made up their own narrative. And now your entire team dynamic is screwed.
The 1% Vulnerability Solution
Erin's advice is beautifully simple: Be 1% more open.
When someone asks "How are you doing?" instead of the automatic "Fine," try:
"I had a rough morning"
"It was tough to get here by 8am"
"I had a fight with my spouse"
"I got some big stuff going on with my family"
"I didn't sleep well, feeling pretty tired today"
That's IT. You're not trauma dumping. You're not oversharing. You're just being 1% more real.
And that tiny bit of vulnerability does THREE things:
It explains your vibe. Now people understand why you seem off. They're not making up stories about you being mad at them.
It gives them context. They know this might not be the best time to bring you the big complicated issue. Or they know to give you a minute to settle before diving in.
It models the behavior you want to see. If you want your team to be honest about their emotional state, YOU have to go first.
The Empathy Muscle Exercise Program
Erin's framework for rebuilding atrophied empathy muscles starts with something brilliant:
Start with pets and loved ones.
If you find it difficult to access emotions at work (and a lot of people do), start with areas where you CAN access feelings comfortably.
Talk about your dog. Your kids. Your partner. The thing that happened with your family that you're genuinely worried about.
Build the VOCABULARY for emotions in low-stakes environments. Practice naming feelings. Noticing what influences them. Getting comfortable with the discomfort.
Then bring that practice into work. Slowly. 1% at a time.
It's a muscle. If you're not using it, it's atrophying. Getting weaker.
You have to practice both the technical side AND the human side of leadership. One without the other leaves you incomplete.
The Production Manager's Transformation
Back to that production manager with the retention issues.
Through Erin's coaching, they learned to:
Identify their own emotions instead of suppressing them
Communicate what was actually going on instead of pretending everything was fine
Create space for their team's emotions instead of just demanding results
Build psychological safety instead of just barking orders
The result? The team stopped walking on eggshells. Communication opened up. They brought issues forward instead of trying to solve everything alone. Mistakes decreased. Support increased.
Retention improved.
All because one leader learned to say something other than "I'm fine."
Your Emotional State is Infectious (So Choose Wisely)
Leaders set the emotional temperature of their teams.
If you're stressed, everyone gets stressed. If you're calm, everyone calms down. If you're hiding everything, everyone gets anxious trying to read you.
Your emotional state is INFECTIOUS whether you acknowledge it or not.
So you have two choices:
Keep pretending you're fine while your team suffers from your emotional constipation
Be 1% more vulnerable and watch everything improve
Watch the Full Episode
This conversation with Erin went deep into tactical empathy, why vulnerability feels dangerous (but isn't), and the specific frameworks for rebuilding your empathy muscle without pushing yourself into terror mode.
She's worked with leaders across industries for 20+ years, and she's seen every flavor of "I'm fine" that actually means "I'm drowning."
Your team already knows how you're feeling.
The only question is whether you're going to acknowledge it and make things easier, or keep pretending and make everything worse.
P.S. If you're reading this thinking "my team can't handle knowing about my emotions, I need to project strength and confidence at all times"—congratulations, you've identified exactly why your team is walking on eggshells and your retention sucks. Erin's worked with production managers, engineering leaders, executives—people running high-pressure teams in technical industries—and the ones who refuse to show any vulnerability are the ones with the biggest problems. "Fine" is the most expensive lie in business. It costs you retention, communication, trust, and results. Also, if you just bristled at the term "emotional constipation," you might want to examine why that triggered you. Sometimes the metaphors that make us most uncomfortable are the ones we need to hear most. Start with pets and loved ones if you need an easy entry point. Build that emotion vocabulary. Then bring 1% more realness to work. Your team is begging you to stop pretending.
Karl Pontau hosts The Human Connection Podcast, where we talk about the stuff that actually matters in business: the humans running it. Because whether you're B2B or B2C, it's really H2H—human to human. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode where we probably say something that'll make your HR department uncomfortable.
