Nick HutchisonFounder and CEO, BookThinkers

For years, I thought “leave your emotions at the door” was solid leadership advice #Leadership

14 Jul 2025 · 1 min

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1:29

In this YouTube commentary, Nick Hutchinson reflects on his long‑held belief that leaders should tell employees to "leave their emotions at the door" to boost performance. He now recognises that this stance is a form of lazy leadership and that hyper‑productivity often masks trauma responses. Hutchinson cites striking mental‑health statistics—62% of missed workdays and 50% of full‑time employees leaving their jobs for mental‑health reasons—to illustrate the cost of ignoring emotional wellbeing. He recommends the book What Other Leadership Books Don't Tell You, written by a psychotherapist‑turned‑leadership coach, and highlights its actionable EMBRACE formula, which he claims leaders can start using immediately. The message is aimed at leaders who want to move beyond surface‑level management, address pain in their teams, and treat employees as humans rather than robots.

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Sometimes you have to admit when you're wrong. And this is something I was wrong about for a very long time. I used to think as a leader that you should encourage your employees to leave their emotions at the door. I thought that would improve their performance, disassociating work from everyday life. 40 hours a week. I remember my first part-time job, right? Just focus on hyperproductivity. But what I've realized now is that that's lazy leadership. Oftentimes hyperproductivity is not high performance. It's actually a trauma response. This book taught me that 62% of missed workdays are due to mental health and 50% of full-time employees leaving their job due to the same thing. And still, most managers have no clue how to manage their emotionally distressed teams. This book calls that out and finally gives leaders the tools they can use to fix that broken opinion. It's called What Other Leadership Books Don't Tell You, and it's written by a psychotherapist turned leadership coach. And her EMBRACE formula is actionable. It's something that you could start using tomorrow. This is for the leaders who know that performance suffers when pain goes unaddressed. It's for the leaders who want to have a deeper conversation, not just lead at the surface level. It's for the ones ready to lead humans and not just robots. Stop making the same mistakes that I did for so long and share this with a leader in your network who needs a little wake-up call.