The Power Trap, the Hidden Cost of Being the Calmest Person in the Room

Guest post by Psychologist Nik Kinley has spent over 30 years assessing and coaching people in their most demanding moments, from prisoners, politicians and royalty to the CEOs of global banks and heads of national security. His latest of eight books is The Power Trap: How Leadership Changes People and What to Do About It.

The Power Trap

I once worked with a COO whose team described him as Teflon. Nothing touches him, they said. He never loses his temper, never really shows anything at all. It was meant as a compliment. And in crises, it certainly helped him stabilise things. As a constant, though, it left people feeling they couldn’t read or reach him, so eventually they stopped trying. And he was the last to know.

Composure is the one leadership quality almost nobody argues with. Steadiness under pressure sits near the top of every competency model, and self-regulation gets treated as the mature endpoint of emotional intelligence, the thing you arrive at once you have done the work. It has a price, though, and most of it is paid by other people.

Start with the physiology. In one experiment, pairs of people who had never met discussed an upsetting topic, and one of each pair was asked to hide their emotions. Doing so, however, disrupted the conversation and raised the blood pressure of the person on the other side of it. The listener paid, physically, for their partner’s composure. Whatever the calm person thought they were containing, they weren’t. They were offloading it.

Then there is what an unreadable face communicates. When people are shown an expression they cannot read or recognise, they are more likely to interpret it negatively. So, the meaning of a face that gives nothing away gets completed by whoever is looking at it, and a blank face does not get interpreted neutrally. Especially by your team, people with every reason to watch you closely, because you control their working world.

The obvious defence is that this is a price worth paying for calmness, and in a genuine crisis it usually is. But the problem starts when composure stops being the emergency setting and becomes the only one. The default, everyday normal setting.

And the reason this is such a problem is that there is a third cost, and it’s both the most expensive one and one senior leaders almost never see until it’s too late.

If people can’t read your reaction, they can’t calibrate. They don’t know whether you viewed the thing they just raised as valued, annoying, or worthless. They don’t know whether it decreased their standing in your eyes. So, they stop bringing you the rough version. As a result, what arrives is more filtered and polished, with disagreements resolved, confidence ranges stripped, and caveats removed. A compressed, reduced version of reality.

In my work and research on how information distorts on its way up an organisation, this is the pattern that does the most damage, because it never looks like a problem. It looks like people doing their job: a good, clear report, or slick presentation. And the leader most likely to be on the receiving end of this is the one nobody can read.

So, composure has an invisible cost.

“Be more expressive” is poor advice here, particularly if you are a woman. Anger expressed at work by a woman tends to be attributed to her character, while the same anger from a man is more likely to be attributed to his circumstances, and a loss of status follows for her and not for him.

So the fix isn’t to show more. It’s to say more. Narrate the reaction rather than perform it. That number worries me. If I’ve gone quiet, it’s because I am weighing something. And interestingly, research shows that naming the reason for a reaction like this removes the penalty women can face for showing emotions. Provide guidance for how to interpret your calm demeanour, and people stop inventing it for themselves and assuming the worst.

Of course, narration costs something. It can read as hesitancy or a lack of confidence. But it is better than being guessed at. Your team will interpret you either way. The only question is whether they are working from your account or their own.

Psychologist Nik Kinley has spent over 30 years assessing and coaching people in their most demanding moments, from prisoners, politicians and royalty to the CEOs of global banks and heads of national security. His latest of eight books is The Power Trap: How Leadership Changes People and What to Do About It.

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