Why Great Leaders Don’t Always Try to Make People Feel Better

Posted on by Mikayla Hull

A new perspective on emotional intelligence in the workplace

When a colleague is discouraged after a failed presentation, a team member is frustrated by a missed promotion, or someone on your team is struggling through a difficult transition, most leaders instinctively try to make things better. They offer reassurance, encourage optimism, and help reframe the situation in a more positive light. For decades, this has been considered the hallmark of emotional intelligence.

But what if that instinct isn’t universal?

A landmark international study involving more than 6,900 participants across 17 countries suggests that one of our most fundamental assumptions about empathy may actually be shaped more by culture than by human nature. The research found that while people around the world generally want to improve their own emotional state, they differ dramatically in how they believe they should respond to the emotions of others. In other words, culture has a far greater influence on how we support someone else’s emotions than on how we manage our own.

For leaders, this finding challenges a deeply ingrained habit: the belief that the most compassionate response is always to reduce another person’s distress.

In many Western, individualistic cultures, this approach feels natural. Leaders are taught to validate emotions, encourage positive thinking, and help people move beyond disappointment as quickly as possible. Success is often associated with personal happiness, resilience, and emotional well-being, making the reduction of distress seem like an obvious expression of care.

The study found, however, that this perspective is far from universal. In many collectivistic cultures—including countries such as Japan, South Korea, China, and India—negative emotions are not necessarily viewed as problems that need to be solved. Instead, they are often seen as valuable experiences that encourage self-reflection, strengthen relationships, build humility, and create meaning through adversity. Attempting to immediately remove someone’s discomfort may actually interfere with an important process of personal growth.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery was not that these cultural differences exist, but where they exist. Across virtually every country studied, people shared a remarkably similar desire to regulate their own emotions toward greater happiness and well-being. The major differences emerged only when participants considered someone else’s emotional experience. Culture, it appears, shapes our beliefs about what other people should feel and what it means to truly support them.

This insight has important implications for today’s leaders. Organizations are increasingly global, with teams spanning multiple countries, cultures, and value systems. A leadership behavior that communicates empathy in one culture may unintentionally signal dismissal or misunderstanding in another. A manager who immediately encourages an employee to “look on the bright side” may believe they are being supportive, while the employee may have preferred the opportunity to process disappointment before moving toward solutions.

The lesson is not that one approach is superior to another. Rather, it reminds us that emotional intelligence is more nuanced than we often assume. True empathy requires more than recognizing another person’s emotions—it requires understanding how they interpret those emotions and what kind of support they actually need.

This opens the door to more thoughtful leadership conversations. Instead of immediately trying to solve emotional discomfort, leaders might ask themselves: What does this emotion mean to this individual? Are they looking for encouragement, or do they simply need someone willing to sit with them in the difficulty? Am I trying to remove their discomfort because it serves them—or because it relieves my own discomfort as a leader? These questions often lead to deeper understanding than quick reassurance ever could.

This research also invites us to reconsider the meaning of psychological safety. Many organizations mistakenly equate psychological safety with making people feel comfortable. In reality, growth, innovation, and resilience often emerge from periods of uncertainty, frustration, and constructive discomfort. Psychological safety is not the elimination of difficult emotions; it is creating an environment where those emotions can be expressed, explored, and learned from without fear of judgment or punishment.

One of the greatest responsibilities of leadership is learning to distinguish between reducing discomfort and facilitating growth. Sometimes people genuinely need reassurance. Sometimes they need perspective. But there are also moments when the most supportive response is simply to remain present while another person works through a difficult experience on their own terms.

Rather than asking, “How can I make this person feel better?” exceptional leaders may begin asking a far more powerful question:

“What kind of support will help this person grow?”

Reference: Ginosar Yaari, S., Tamir, M., et al. (2026). People in more individualist cultures are more motivated to make others feel better. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(26), e2533994123. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2533994123

The Biology of Being Present: What Heart Rate Synchrony Reveals About Leadership

Posted on by Mikayla Hull

We often describe meaningful interactions as “connection,” “presence,” or “rapport.” But emerging neuroscience suggests these experiences may be more than subjective feelings — they may be reflected in our biology.

A study published in PNAS Nexus in June 2026 provides compelling evidence that when people are physically together and genuinely engaged with one another, their bodies begin to synchronize in measurable ways. Researchers working out of the Technical University of Denmark found that people’s heart rates naturally rise and fall in similar patterns when they are socially engaged with one another.

This doesn’t mean two hearts literally beat in unison, beat for beat. What the researchers measured is something subtler and, in some ways, more interesting: the slow, minute-to-minute ebb and flow of heart rate — the rises and dips that track our shifting states of arousal and engagement — tends to move in the same direction across people who are genuinely connected in the moment. Statisticians call this inter-subject correlation of heart rate, or ISC-HR. Think of it less like a metronome and more like two boats riding the same swell.

A Closer Look at the Study

What sets this research apart is where it happened. Most prior synchrony research has come from controlled laboratory settings or single high-arousal events, such as a haunted house or a fire-walking ritual. This study instead followed 72 students (mostly engineering students, ages 19 to 32) across three separate four-day trips to New York City, part of an annual audio-engineering competition. Rather than constraining behavior to a lab, the researchers let real life happen and simply measured what unfolded.

Each participant wore a Garmin wristband to continuously track heart rate, a hearing aid microphone clipped to their collar to capture the sound environment around them, and a smartphone to log GPS location. Data streamed in from roughly 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. each day across the trip, generating well over a thousand hours of combined physiological, spatial, and acoustic data. The researchers then broke the heart rate signal into five-minute windows and statistically compared real, time-aligned synchrony against a “shuffled” control — heart rate segments that were randomly paired and therefore should show no meaningful relationship. Any synchrony beyond that baseline reflects something real happening between people, not coincidence. What they found was fascinating:

1. Proximity matters — a lot

Heart rate synchrony increased significantly when people were within about 20 meters of one another, and the effect held up across all three trips with what researchers call large effect sizes — a way of saying the difference wasn’t small or borderline, but a substantial, reliable pattern. At the level of whole groups together in a space, the effect was especially strong; at the level of individual pairs, it was more modest but still consistently present in two of the three trips. Being more than a kilometer apart looked statistically no different from random chance — in other words, distance doesn’t gradually fade the effect so much as the effect mostly requires real physical closeness.

2. Shared attention strengthens connection

The researchers sorted activities into three types: close, face-to-face interaction (like group discussions or games), joint attention to a shared stimulus (like a lecture or presentation), and dispersed interaction (like a reception where people were physically present but scattered and only loosely engaged with one another). Synchrony was strongest during face-to-face interaction, still clearly present during shared-attention moments, and essentially absent during dispersed mingling. A rooftop reception where people drifted in and out of brief conversations produced no measurable synchrony at all, even though everyone was technically “together.” Mere co-location wasn’t enough; what mattered was whether attention was actually shared.

3. Relationships matter

Even after controlling for physical proximity — comparing people who were equally close together — pairs who already knew each other before the trip showed significantly higher synchrony than strangers placed in the same setting. This is a meaningful detail: it means familiarity adds something on top of simple shared space and shared stimulus. Existing trust and rapport appear to do real physiological work.

4. Noise disrupts connection

Using the hearing-aid microphones, researchers measured both how loud an environment was (sound pressure level) and how clear speech was relative to background noise (signal-to-noise ratio). The relationship was more nuanced than “noise is always bad”: in quiet settings, synchrony was actually highest when there was a moderate amount of clarity in the signal, not the absolute maximum. But once the overall environment got loud, synchrony dropped across the board, settling to levels similar to those seen in dispersed, low-engagement interactions — regardless of how clear the conversation itself was. In other words, loud rooms seem to flatten connection no matter how good the acoustics otherwise are. The researchers’ interpretation lines up with what we know about cognitive load: when the brain has to work harder to separate speech from background noise, it has fewer resources left for reading faces, tracking tone, and staying attuned to another person.

Where This Fits in the Bigger Picture

This study didn’t emerge from nowhere. A growing body of research has documented interpersonal physiological synchrony in other settings: heart rates align between mothers and infants during face-to-face interaction, between romantic partners, among choir singers, and even between spectators and performers during high-arousal rituals like fire-walking. What makes the New York study distinct is that it captured this phenomenon outside the lab, across ordinary, lower-intensity, multi-day social life, and ruled out a simple alternative explanation: that synchrony was just a byproduct of everyone’s heart rate generally rising and falling together (say, from physical exertion or the excitement of city life). The researchers checked for this directly and found no meaningful relationship between average heart rate and the degree of synchrony — the alignment tracked something more specific than generic arousal.

One of the most interesting findings from the study is that simply being near someone isn’t enough. The strongest synchrony occurred when participants focused on the same external event — listening to the same presentation, working through the same problem together, or sharing the same experience. This has direct implications for:

  • Team meetings
  • Strategy sessions
  • Important conversations
  • Group gatherings
  • Professional development programs

The quality of shared attention may matter as much as the content being discussed. Two people staring at their own laptops in the same conference room, each half-listening to a meeting, are physically co-located but may be doing very little of the physiological work that builds trust.

The study also found that people with established relationships demonstrated greater physiological synchrony, even holding proximity constant. Trust appears to extend beyond emotions and behaviors — it may influence how our nervous systems respond to one another. Trust allows people to devote less energy to uncertainty and more energy to collaboration.

One of the most practical findings involved noise. When participants were surrounded by loud, complex listening environments, synchrony decreased. The explanation is straightforward: the brain has limited cognitive resources, and in noisy settings those resources are redirected toward separating speech from background sound, leaving fewer available for reading facial expressions, interpreting tone of voice, and responding to subtle interpersonal cues. So it’s worth asking: are we creating environments that promote connection — or environments that compete with it?

Conference rooms with constant interruptions, noisy restaurants, multitasking during virtual meetings, and continuous digital distractions may all reduce the very connection we’re trying to build. From this information we can extrapolate some behavioral best practices:

  • Eliminate distractions during important conversations — phones away, notifications off, full attention on the moment.
  • Design meetings around a clear, shared focus rather than competing agendas; a room full of people quietly multitasking is not, physiologically speaking, “together.”
  • Create environments that support attentive listening — quieter rooms, fewer overlapping conversations, better acoustics where possible.
  • Invest time in relationship building before expecting peak performance; familiarity appears to lay physiological groundwork that proximity alone cannot.
  • Recognize that presence is not simply a communication skill — it is a physiological state that influences everyone in the room.
  • Where possible, favor shared, synchronous experiences (a joint working session, a live discussion) over parallel, disconnected ones (everyone silently reading the same document).

Although much more research is needed, one message is already clear: meaningful connection requires more than good intentions. It emerges from shared attention, psychological safety, and relationships that allow people to align — not only intellectually and emotionally, but physiologically as well. When people truly connect, it appears their nervous systems begin to tell the same story.

Reference
He, H., Christensen, J. H., Sørensen, A. J. M., & Konvalinka, I. (2026). Heart rate synchrony as a marker of real-world social engagement. PNAS Nexus, 5(6), pgag181. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag181

The Biological Cost of Being Undervalued at Work

Posted on by Mikayla Hull

In the S.A.F.E.T.Y.™ Model, Esteem is the need to feel respected, valued, and positively regarded. It’s easy to file that under morale — the warm feeling of being appreciated. A new piece of aging research, read alongside decades of social-epidemiology work, suggests the Esteem domain may sit closer to the body than we tend to assume.

A team from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Columbia University published a systematic review and meta-analysis in Nature Human Behavior on how social conditions relate to biological aging. Instead of just an individual study, they pooled the field: data from 140 studies, covering 65,919 people from birth to age 86 — the most comprehensive assessment to date.

Scientists can estimate your body’s “biological age” (how old you are on the inside) using something called an “epigenetic clock”. It works by reading chemical tags on your DNA that change over time based on your lifestyle and environment. Because these tags respond to how you live, your biological age can be different from the number of years you’ve been alive. When using new technology to track more aspects of aging, the findings were surprising:

  • Social disadvantage is associated with faster biological aging. Lower socioeconomic status and marginalized racial or ethnic identity were consistently linked to faster aging.
  • It starts early. Children in lower-socioeconomic circumstances already showed signs of accelerated aging.
  • It lingers. Adults who grew up disadvantaged tended to age faster later in life, even when their social disadvantages had improved.

In U.S. cohorts, Black participants showed faster aging markers than white participants, with smaller differences for Latinx participants. Of course these are associations synthesized across many studies, a strong, consistent pattern, not a controlled proof that inequality causes aging.

The Piece That Points at Esteem

Here’s the part worth dwelling on. We often treat socioeconomic status as a purely material variable — income, resources, access. But status is also a social variable. To be low on the socioeconomic ladder is, very often, to be afforded less respect, less recognition, and less positive regard in everyday encounters. Material deprivation and esteem deprivation travel together. That distinction isn’t speculation, as a long line of social-epidemiology research demonstrates this. Most notably, the work on the social gradient in health most associated with Michael Marmot’s Whitehall studies, found that health outcomes track with where people sit in a status hierarchy even after accounting for material resources. The experience of relative standing, of being valued or devalued, appears to carry its own biological weight. This new meta-analysis didn’t isolate that mechanism, but it adds large-scale evidence that the social dimension of disadvantage is written into the body’s aging.

For the S.A.F.E.T.Y.™ framework, that reinforces the importance of Esteem. The brain’s need to be respected and positively regarded isn’t a soft preference layered on top of “real” survival needs. Across a population and a lifetime, chronic esteem deprivation looks like exactly the kind of psychosocial stress the aging literature keeps pointing to. So what does this mean for how we think about workplace dynamics and leadership?

1. Recognition is a health-relevant input, not only a motivation lever.

Withholding recognition, taking credit, or routinely overlooking someone creates an Esteem threat. This research lets us frame the stakes more honestly: chronic esteem threat is the category of stressor associated with physiological wear, not just disengagement. Being valued is closer to a biological need than an HR nicety.

2. Status histories travel with people.

The early-life and lingering-effect findings matter here. Someone’s sensitivity on the Esteem domain may reflect a lifetime of being under-regarded — by class, by background, by identity — long before they walked into the organization. Two people can post identical Esteem scores on the S.A.F.E.T.Y.™ assessment and carry very different histories of being valued or dismissed. As ABL already teaches, the score opens a conversation; it doesn’t “work the person out.” Curiosity about why esteem lands hard for someone is more useful than treating the trigger as a fixed dial.

3. Esteem threats are quiet and cumulative — which makes them addressable.

Most esteem damage at work isn’t dramatic. It’s being talked over in the meeting, having an idea re-attributed, getting passed over for the visible project, the offhand dismissal. Individually, each is forgettable. The aging research suggests the relevant variable is chronic, repeated exposure — which is precisely the pattern these micro-slights form. That gives us concrete, observable behaviors to pay attention to: who gets credit, who gets airtime, who gets seen.

Source: Willems, Y. E., Rezaki, A. D., Aikins, M., Bahl, A., Wu, Q., Belsky, D. W., & Raffington, L. “Social determinants of health and epigenetic clocks: a systematic review and meta-analysis of 140 studies.” Nature Human Behaviour (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02477-6. Research conducted by the Biosocial team at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development with Columbia University.

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