CCR: Chief Co-Regulator Part One

Transcript: Episode Three, Part One

This is the Feeling Leader Podcast with Kristen DeLong, doctoral candidate and licensed master clinical social worker. The information shared in this podcast is not a replacement for therapy or support from a mental health provider. And now, here's your host, Kristen DeLong, DSW (C), LMSW-C.

Chapter: Introduction to Episode 3, Part One 

I want you to try a little thought experiment to start us off today. Okay, so if you're sitting in a conference room right now, or maybe you're commuting and in your car, or just at your desk, I want you to imagine your nervous system. Just visualize it. Normally we're conditioned to think of our nervous system as this completely closed private circuit, like it's locked away inside of our own bodies. We assume it's just in there, processing our own unique stress, generating our own calm, and basically functioning in isolation. But what if that model completely misunderstands how human beings actually operate in a group? It's a huge shift in perspective. It really is. What if instead of your nervous system being closed, it is essentially an open loop? Imagine constantly broadcasting a physiological Wi-Fi signal to everyone around you and simultaneously downloading the states of those people around you. So, welcome to today's deep dive. We have a mission that is going to fundamentally change how you view your interactions at work and specifically how you view leadership. Because accepting this open loop reality requires a profound shift. If we acknowledge that our nervous systems are porous and constantly interacting, then we have to completely redefine what a leader really does. The 20th century kind of traditional view of a leader is someone who just makes strategic decisions, delegates tasks, and optimizes resources. It's the, you know, leaving the emotions at the door feeling. But the stack of research that I compiled for our podcast today suggests that leaving your emotions at the door is biologically impossible. You literally cannot do it. So instead, we need to reframe the leader as the chief co-regulator of the team, the CCR. And the sources that we have today are incredibly rich. Of course, I will always put those in the meeting notes. I am pulling from a good amount of material to build out this comprehensive picture for you. We are going to start off with some hard neuroscience today, actual fMRI scans, you know, mapping what happens inside the human brain when interacting with different types of leaders. And from there, we are going to bring in developmental psychology, specifically looking at how childhood attachment theory manifests in the modern workplace. It's fascinating. And then we are going to take a sharp turn into existential philosophy, examining Martin Heidegger's concepts of attunement. And finally, we'll ground all of this in some highly practical management studies to figure out what mechanically happens in that relational space as humans try to lead each other in a working space on, say, a random Tuesday. We're tracing a line from the cellular level all the way to the philosophical level, and that's gonna be a big journey.

Chapter: Mechanics of Co-Regulation

So let's get started. What emerges from all this research is that all of these fields, neuroscience, psychology, phenomenology, organizational management, are all pointing toward the same conclusion. Human connection isn't some ancillary soft skill. It is a biological imperative in a stark physiological reality. You're gonna hear me say that a lot. So today we're going to explore the mechanics of that connection, the cognitive dangers when it breaks down into a fake-it culture, and the profound ethical responsibilities that come with holding a position of power over someone else's nervous system. So let's map out the biological hardware first. To understand why a leader has such a massive impact, we are going to look at a concept called psychological attunement and flourishing. This is a foundational premise. The premise here is that the human brain evolved to explicitly expect access to social relationships. It isn't just a preference for extroverts, it's a default survival strategy built into our gray matter. Behavioral ecology and cognitive neuroscience provide a wealth of data on this. We are not solitary survivalists, we are deeply interdependent and a highly social species. The brain uses social proximity to mitigate risk and to drastically reduce the sheer amount of metabolic effort required to keep us, the organism, alive. When we are socially connected and perceive that connection as secure, our brain interprets that environment as less threatening, which downregulates our defensive systems. And by doing this, it conserves an immense amount of physical energy. The literature highlights two specific mechanisms for how this connection occurs on a physical level. The autonomic mimicry, okay, that's one, and emotion system coupling. This is where that open loop Wi-Fi signal analogy really comes to life. Because autonomic mimicry dictates that if I'm sitting across a desk from you, my body is implicitly mirroring your physiological state entirely below your conscious awareness and fine. So if you're stressed as a leader, your pupils dilate slightly, your heart rate shifts, your cortisol levels spike. If I'm sitting across from you, my body is going to pick up on those micro cues and immediately begin to replicate them to prepare for whatever invisible threat you are reacting to. Building on that hardware metaphor, this is rooted in predictive coding mechanisms in the brain. The brain operates as a prediction engine, it's constantly attempting to anticipate what will happen next to minimize errors and avoid threats by aligning our internal physiological state with the observed cues of somebody else. This is especially true for someone who is an authority figure. The brain is attempting to synchronize with the environment to stay safe. We observe this synchronization deeply in infants whose neocortex is underdeveloped. They rely entirely on their caregivers for emotion regulation through this exact physiological coupling. But the critical takeaway for leadership is that as adults, we never actually outgrow or lose this mechanism. It remains a foundational part of how we process authority.

Chapter: fMRI Research 

Which brings us to an incredible study in our resources today, Richard Boyotzis fMRI research. In this research, they didn't just rely on self-reported studies. They wanted to see what physically happens inside the brain when a person recalls a specific interaction with a leader. And then they categorized the leaders into two distinct camps, resonant leaders and dissonant leaders. So to visualize the methodology, they took subjects who are advanced professionals, people with years of corporate experience, and they put them inside an fMRI scanner and asked them to recall specific incidents with these different types of leaders. The terminology Boyatsis uses is essential here. Resonance in this neurological context describes a relationship characterized by physiological attunement and interpersonal balance. It produces a distinctly positive emotional tone. And dissonance is the exact opposite, a severe lack of attunement resulting in interpersonal discord, stress, and a negative emotional tone. By mapping the neural activation during these specific recalls, the researchers provided a literal blueprint of leadership's impact on human biology. Let's break down the resonant leaders first. When these professionals in the study were simply remembering, and remember, they weren't actively interacting with these leaders, but just visualizing a resonant leader, a very specific network of neural regions positively activated, the bilateral insula and the inferior parietal lobe. So the bilateral insula is heavily involved in our physical self-awareness and our ability to perceive internal bodily states. And the right inferior parietal lobe is a key component of the mirror neuron system, which is huge because the mirror neuron system is the neurological foundation for empathy and social imitation. It allows us to understand another person's state by internally simulating their actions and emotions. So activating these regions means a resonant leader literally stimulates an employee's neurological capacity for empathy. Furthermore, recalling these resonant leaders activated the default mode network, which, as you know, we've discussed the social network of the brain. And as you remember, this network engages when we're thinking about other people, reflecting on our own values and engaging in broad social cognition as opposed to narrowing our focus down to solve an analytical problem. And crucially, this widespread activation is linked directly to the parasympathetic nervous system, your rest and digest state. So when you interact with a resonant leader, or if you are a resonant leader yourself, this is your impact, your body receives a biological chemical signal that you are safe from predators and danger. Your heart rate variability smooths out, your digestive system functions normally, and your immune system isn't suppressed by stress hormones, you become capable of greater creativity and are much more open to novel, divergent ideas. The leader is biologically acting as a donor of calm. You can borrow some of my calm. But we have to look at the inverse to fully grasp the gravity of this dynamic, the dissonant leader. The fMRI scans in that same study, detailing the recall of dissonant leaders, the micromanagers, the harsh critics, the emotionally disconnected bosses, painted a starkly different neurological picture. Recalling experiences with dissident leaders actively suppressed or negatively activated regions like the right anterior cingulate cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex. This negative activation in the interior cingulate cortex is staggering because that region is deeply involved in empathy and recognizing the emotional pain of others. So the data implies that, say, a toxic manager doesn't just make an employee temporarily unhappy, they actively suppress the employee's neurological capacity to care about their coworkers. It forces the brain to abandon communal thinking. The suppression suggests that a dissonant leader throws a person into a state of self-preservation. Attention turns entirely inward toward self-pain and survival. Simultaneously, the regions that were positively activated by recalling bad leaders are heavily associated with avoidance behaviors, narrowed attention, and negative emotional processing. The dissonant leader triggers the sympathetic nervous system, the classic fight or flight response. The employee's bloodstream is flooded with cortisol, their peripheral vision narrows to focus strictly on avoiding the threat, which in this case was the leader. Their capacity for complex problem solving plummets because their brain is routing all of that energy away from the prefrontal cortex to prepare for physical survival. So whatever physiological frequency they are vibrating at, whether it's frantic or high-pitched anxiety of a dissonant state or the grounded low frequency, the calm of a resonant state, the moment they walk into that room, the physiological toning forks of every other single employee begin to vibrate at the same frequency. That visualization perfectly captures polyvagal theory. It suggests that the mammalian nervous system evolved a subconscious process called neuroception, and it's a continuous involuntary scanning of the environment for cues of safety or cues of danger. Because of our innate biobehavioral alignment, a leader who is genuinely anchored in parasympathetic residents can physically downregulate a panicked employee's heart rate just by being in the room, just by being there. The leader's physiological stability serves as an anchor, a regulatory donor for the team's deregulated nervous system. This represents a massive paradigm shift for anyone in management. We're conventionally taught that managing a team means managing their KPIs, their deliverables, their time. If you're in the nonprofit space, it's the project management, you know, funding and grants and making sure the humans that are on the other side of these programs are having positive outcomes. But this hard science dictates that you are fundamentally managing their biology. And that transition from biological hardware of our nervous system to the psychological software we install on it leads us to our next portion of this discussion: the attachment environment at work. Because no one walks into a conference room as a completely blank slate. Everyone brings their own physiological and psychological history and states with them.

Chapter: Attachment Theory

To contextualize this for you, Bowby's attachment theory argues that our earliest interactions with our primary caregivers create an internal working model for how we interpret all future relationships. We learn to answer subconscious questions, such as: Are people fundamentally reliable? Will they be there when I need help? And am I inherently worthy of support? And the answers to those questions form our attachment style. The revelation in these modern organizational studies is that these deeply ingrained styles do not magically evaporate when we graduate college or become an adult or enter full-time employment. We bring them directly into the office and we unconsciously project the role of the primary caregiver onto our managers, directors, and executives. So let's unpack how these attachment styles actually manifest in the workplace. The research defines the leader's role as serving two primary attachment functions for an employee. They must act as a secure base and a safe haven. Think of a secure base like a parent or a caregiving adult and a child at a playground. A toddler will run off to the slide, but they constantly look back to make sure that their adult is sitting calmly on the bench. The adult's predictable presence gives the child the psychological safety required to take risks and explore the unknown. So applying that to a professional setting, a secure base leader provides employees with the autonomy, structural trust, and psychological safety necessary to innovate, to pitch unconventional ideas, and take calculated professional risks. The employee knows that if an experiment fails, if the risk does not land, they won't be severely punished or abandoned by leadership. They have the foundational security to push some of their professional growth boundaries. The safe haven function is for when that exploration grows wrong. So when the toddler in our playground example inevitably trips and falls and scrapes their knee on their playground, they don't hide. They run directly back to the adult for physical and emotional comfort. In the workplace, when an employee loses a client or makes a pretty big calculation error or is overwhelmed by their workload and is having trouble managing their tasks or is navigating a personal crisis, the safe haven leader is the person they go to for support, for reassurance, and for constructive guidance rather than retreating in fear of blame and consequence. The dynamic becomes deeply complex when we introduce the principle of attachment system activation. Our attachment styles are not always glaringly obvious during periods of routine stability. The attachment system functions much like a thermostat in a house. It remains dormant until it detects a significant drop in temperature, which in the psychological realm would be stress. When an individual experiences systemic stressors, whether that is a quarterly deadline, sudden organizational restructuring, rumors of funding or budget cuts, or just chronic burnout, the attachment system activates and takes control of behavior. The thermostat clicks on, and suddenly that internal working model from childhood is driving the car. Let's look at how the different attachment styles react when systemic stress hits the office. So we take an anxious employee under stress, the research notes that they experience hyperarousal, the anxiously attached individual operates in an internal model built from inconsistent caregiving. They learned early on that in order to secure necessary support, they had to be highly visible, loud, and sometimes clingy because the caregiver's response was unpredictable. So in the workplace, when systemic stress activates their thermostat, their default behavioral strategy is proximity seeking. They become intensely hypervigilant to interpersonal cues, they'll agonize over a leader's tone or a brief email, and wonder why a meeting invite was declined. They require excessive reassurance, constant external validation, and they might physically or digitally hover around the leader, seeking explicit confirmation that their job is safe and that their contributions are valid, valued, and appreciated. If you're listening to this and recognizing a colleague who needs you to validate every step of the way in a project when deadlines loom, that sounds like proximity-seeking behavior. Now, on the other end of all of this is we have an avoidant type of employee. When their stress hits the thermostat, their system goes into hypoarousal. The avoidant internal working model is typically forged by caregivers who are consistently emotionally unavailable, dismissive, or they punish emotional needs. This individual learned that seeking help is a dangerous vulnerability that leads to rejection. Therefore, the safest, most logical strategy is radical self-reliance. When workplace stress activates their attachment system, their immediate response is to withdraw. They create severe emotional and physical distance. They might stop responding to non-essential communications, retreat entirely into their own silo, and they actively resist any genuine attempts by the leader or others to offer support or collaboration, viewing such offers as potentially micromanagement or intrusiveness, or a trap that will expose their perceived weaknesses. So as a leader, you are simultaneously trying to manage an anxious employee who is metaphorically clinging to your leg for survival and an avoidant employee who has barricaded themselves in a cave. That's incredibly difficult. Navigating that is a profound challenge. But here is what's tricky and what is backed by the research. Leaders have their own attachment style. So leaders are not immune to this biology. They have their own vulnerability, and this is a vital dimension that traditional leadership training and models ignore. The leader is not some objective, enlightened entity operating in a vacuum above the messy reality of human psychology. They're bringing their own stuff with them. And when the pressure is applied, for example, when the board of directors is demanding answers or a funder is prompting an audit or a product or program is failing, the leader's attachment system activates with just as much intensity as the entry-level employees. So let's look at an anxious leader. So the research indicates that a leader with an anxious attachment style is fundamentally driven by an unexamined fear of rejection and a deep chronic need for approval from their team. If you are that leader, how does that manifest in your decision making? An anxious leader might initially appear empathetic and universally liked, but that empathy is often laced with a hidden personal agenda. They desperately need their team to like them in order to feel secure in that role. And this becomes a severe organizational liability when hard, unpopular choices are required. An anxious leader will struggle immensely to deliver necessary critical feedback or address chronic underperformance or execute difficult strategic pivots because they possess a low tolerance for the idea of their employees being upset with them. So by avoiding conflict to soothe their own anxiety, they inadvertently foster a chaotic, unpredictable environment because they lack the boundary setting capacity required to be a genuine, secure base. And what about when a leader has an avoidant attachment style? The avoidant leader values extreme autonomy, logic, and self-reliance above all other traits. They are often highly effective at task-oriented execution, but are profoundly emotionally disconnected from the human elements of the work. When their attachment system is activated by executive stress, they distance themselves from their direct reports. As the stress rises, the anxious employee seeks proximity, demanding more meetings, looking for more feedback, seeking reassurance, but the avoidant leader perceives this emotional neediness not as a request for safe haven, but as a direct threat to their own autonomy and a sign of personal professional weakness. So the avoidant leader reacts with subtle disapproval, impatience, or cold or blunt responses. And that cold reaction is interpreted by the anxious employee as rejection, which sends that employee into a spiral of greater levels of anxiety, which increases their proximity-seeking behavior. This in turn further repels an avoidant leader. It is a catastrophic, self-perpetuating mismatch. It's a complete collapse of co-regulation. The leader's unexamined attachment triggers cause an exact mismatch with the specific physiological inputs that the employee needs to regulate their nervous system. So that leads us directly to the consequences of that collapse because when an employee is trapped in one of those dissonant dynamics or a catastrophic attachment mismatch, they rarely just quit on the spot. Human beings are incredibly adaptable. We adapt to hostile environments, and the primary mechanism that humans use to adapt is a highly destructive process called surface acting. So, surface acting is a concept originating from foundational research on emotional labor. It occurs when an employee is organizationally forced to fake positive emotions, such as smiling brightly, nodding in agreement, faking some enthusiasm for a flawed project, or actively suppressing those negative emotions, hiding that deep frustration, swallowing that fear, or masking profound burnout in order to survive the interpersonal dynamics of their workplace. It is devastating for our open loop co-regulation. The employee is actively presenting a fabricated physiological facade while their internal state is turmoil. There's actually a fascinating study from the International Journal of Management, Accounting, and Economics on narcissistic leadership and follower voice that illustrates this trap. The methodology of this study looked at teams operating under leaders with high traits of narcissism. Narcissistic leaders were defined in the study as individuals who demand constant external admiration, possess an incredibly fragile ego underneath the veneer of grandiosity, and react with disproportionate aggression to any form of negative feedback or any perceived challenge to their authority. Operating under a narcissistic leader is the definition of a chronic, unavoidable stressor. The leader's fragile ego requires constant daily management by the entire team. Because a narcissistic leader is biologically incapable of serving as that safe haven, in fact, they are often a source of threat, the followers must resort to heavy surface acting simply to maintain their employment and to avoid unpredictable aggressive behaviors or even retaliation. They're forced to flatter and validate their leader while suppressing their own authentic operational concerns or even their own innovative ideas. So if you're listening to this and you're realizing you've spent half of your day carefully managing a manager's ego rather than doing your actual job, the science explains why you might feel so physically drained by 5 p.m. The human body cannot simply fake physiological states forever without paying a metabolic toll.

Chapter: Resources

And that brings us to conservation of resources theory, or COR. This is a theory that I will speak on in a future episode much more in depth. Essentially, it suggests that human beings possess a finite, limited pool of vital resources, including cognitive bandwidth, emotional resilience, and physical energy. We are evolutionarily highly motivated to protect and accumulate these resources. So when you're forced to engage in surface acting, you're generating severe cognitive dissonance, literal neurological clash between the fear or exhaustion you truly feel in your amygdala and the cheerful compliance you are forced to display with your facial muscles and vocal tone. Managing that ongoing dissonance requires a tremendous continuous expenditure of metabolic and psychological energy. It drains your resource pool at an alarming rate. What happens thermodynamically when that resource pool runs completely dry is that the inevitable biologically predetermined outcome is emotional exhaustion. The employees are completely drained by the daily requirement to surface act and just to survive the leader's instability. When emotional exhaustion sets in, a very specific and highly damaging organizational casualty occurs, a complete loss of follower voice. And follower voice is a umbrella term for any opportunity for employees actually speaking up and telling the truth in organizational settings. So voice in organizational literature isn't just chatter, it's the voluntary discretionary sharing of ideas, critical concerns, and constructive feedback aimed at improving the organization's functioning. Utilizing voice requires surplus energy and also entails inherent social risk. When an employee is emotionally exhausted from surface acting, their brain calculates that speaking up will only cost them more of their depleted energy and will likely invite further negative consequences from the dissonant leader. So they enter a state of defensive silence, they withhold their ideas, they watch projects fail without intervening, and the organization permanently loses its most valuable competitive asset, the localized intelligence and the innovative capacity of its frontline workers. It's a devastating chain reaction. I'd like to bring in an interesting study that offers an interesting counterpoint to this experience, the Kilduff study on self-monitoring. This study looks at the difference between high self-monitors and low self-monitors in leadership positions. To clarify some terms, self-monitoring refers to the degree to which an individual actively monitors and adapts their expressive behavior to match the external social cues of their environment. A high self-monitor is essentially a social chameleon. They easily read the subtle politics of a room and seamlessly adjust their personal opinions in effect to fit in, to avoid conflict, or to gain favor with whoever holds power. A low self-monitor is guided primarily by their own internal values and principles, showing little regard for adapting to external social expectations. They present the same version of themselves in every room, regardless of the audience and regardless of who holds power. Now, conventional corporate wisdom might suggest that a high self-monitor would make a highly effective leader because they are socially adaptable and politically savvy. But the Kildef study suggests something counterintuitive. It points out that low self-monitoring CEOs often enact much more principled, stable, and ethical leadership over time. Low self-monitors generally refuse to engage in surface acting for the sake of political expediency. While a high self-monitoring leader might easily compromise an ethical stance or change in strategic direction simply to smooth over a tense interaction or appease a demanding stakeholder, the low self-monitor relies on their internal ethical charter. They fundamentally will not fake agreement. In the long run, this principled unyielding consistency creates a much more stable, highly predictable, and trustworthy environment for the organization, even if it causes some short-term interpersonal friction. They aren't draining their own resources or forcing their team to drain theirs through the constant cognitive dissonance of political shape shifting.

Chapter: Closing and Part One Recap

So that was part one of this two-part episode. And we went over a lot. So we talked about psychological attunement. We brought in a little bit of polyvagal theory with neuroception. We brought in classic attachment theory with Bullby and what happens in the leadership environment when there is an attachment mismatch. We brought in surface acting and we talked about narcissistic leaders from a very specific study. We touched on conservation of resources theory, which again, we will talk about in a whole episode in the future. And we talked about the Killdoff study. I know it was a lot. I wanted to make sure this episode had a stopping point halfway through. And next episode, we are going to get into the philosophical side of things and uh dive in a little bit deeper with that. So thank you so much for being here with me today. And I'll see you in part two. And as always, you can check out the meeting notes for all of the references and resources that I used in today's episode. You can also check out the meeting notes for transcripts and any other additional materials.