On a recent flight, I did what I often do: I put on a children’s movie.<\/p>\n
I’m not subtle about it. I laugh out loud. I’ve been known to tear up. On this particular flight, I was watching Inside Out 2, and somewhere over the middle of the country, I was laughing<\/a> hard enough that the man beside me finally looked over.<\/p>\n “Whatever you’re watching,” he said, “it must be good.”<\/p>\n “It’s Inside Out,” I told him.<\/p>\n He smiled, genuinely glad to see someone laughing that hard, and went back to his iPad.<\/p>\n There wasn’t time to explain. I wasn’t laughing because the film was silly. I was laughing because I recognized everyone in it. Including myself.<\/p>\n Joy is my favorite, as you can see by the photo, and I cried when Imagination<\/a> Land was destroyed.<\/p>\n In the first Inside Out, Joy is the one running Riley’s emotional control<\/a> panel. She’s optimistic<\/a>, fast-moving, fiercely protective, and utterly convinced that if she can just keep things positive enough, everything will be okay. She’s not wrong to care. But she makes one costly mistake: she keeps Sadness out of the room.<\/p>\n Sadness carries the honest signals. The grief<\/a> of losing something real. The acknowledgment that things aren’t fine. Joy doesn’t see her as useful. She sees her as a risk.<\/p>\n And here’s what the film gets exactly right. When Joy runs everything, and Sadness gets locked out, Riley doesn’t feel better. She goes numb. Everything looks okay from the outside, and nothing is actually working on the inside.<\/p>\n This applies to every organization, in some form, because we are human.<\/p>\n Leaders who keep things positive, relentlessly, reflexively, and sometimes manipulatively, create cultures where the real story never surfaces: the struggling team member who stays quiet because the climate isn’t safe for struggle; the strategic risk nobody names because the leader has already decided how it will go; the early warning signs that get softened into silence because this team doesn’t do negativity.<\/p>\n They’re not bad leaders. They care deeply. That’s usually the problem. They’re so invested in the vision of being right and the team being okay that they’ve unconsciously made it hard to hear when it isn’t.<\/p>\n Joy means well. That’s exactly what makes her dangerous when she’s running the room alone.<\/p>\n Inside Out 2 introduces a new character. If the first film was about Joy, the second one belongs to Anxiety<\/a>.<\/p>\n She arrives on Riley’s control panel like a small hurricane. She’s got plans within plans, and contingencies for the contingencies. She is trying to protect Riley from every form of hurt: rejection, failure, humiliation<\/a>, and being left out. She works harder than anyone. She never stops.<\/p>\n She also eventually locks Joy in a vault, silences Sadness, and runs the entire system on one frequency, “What if this goes wrong?”<\/p>\n I’ve sat across from this leader, too. They’re often highly capable, which is why they’ve been given the most to carry. They over-prepare every meeting. They solve objections before anyone has raised them. They absorb more than their share and tell you they’re fine.<\/p>\n They’re running on anxiety and calling it excellence.<\/p>\n