There is a recurring winter disagreement in our house.
Stella says, “It’s cold in here.”
For context, I am wearing shorts and a T shirt. Stella is wearing a fleece.
This is a true story, although perhaps not the supporting evidence I think it is.
I look at the thermostat, which displays a perfectly respectable 21 degrees, and point to it as if the number has just won the argument.
“It can’t be cold. Look.”
Stella explains that she is not asking the thermostat how it feels. She is telling me how she feels.
I respond by explaining how thermostats work.
Nothing brings warmth into a marriage quite like using a digital display to explain to your wife that she has misunderstood her own body.
Amber suggested the thermostat for the fourth piece in this series because good leadership is partly about noticing and regulating the emotional climate around us.
Stella assumed Amber was finally supporting her campaign for a warmer house.
Again, both have a point.
A thermostat does not produce heat. It senses the temperature, compares it with the chosen setting and tells the heating when to come on or switch off.
Its purpose is not to make the house as hot as possible.
That would be ridiculous.
Yet it is remarkably close to how some organisations respond when performance begins to fall.
A target is missed. A deadline slips. A customer complains.
The temperature goes up.
There are more meetings, more updates, more scrutiny and more people copied into emails. The weekly call becomes daily. The dashboard acquires additional shades of red. Somebody senior begins sending messages containing the words “pace,” “urgency” and “laser focus.”
Before long, everyone is operating at full temperature, although nobody is entirely sure whether they are solving the problem or simply demonstrating how seriously they are taking it.
Sometimes it is just panic wearing a lanyard.
I once worked with a sales team whose forecast had weakened. The senior leader responded by holding more reviews, challenging every number and demanding greater certainty about every opportunity.
His intention was perfectly reasonable. He wanted better visibility.
What he got was better theatre.
People quickly learned that saying an opportunity was uncertain led to an uncomfortable interrogation. So uncertain opportunities became “very promising.” Customers who were still thinking became “verbally committed.” Problems were not hidden exactly, but they were given time to mature before being introduced to senior management.
The dashboard became greener.
The forecast became less reliable.
The leader had not removed the uncertainty. He had simply increased the cost of being honest about it.
Short periods of challenge can focus attention and mobilise effort. Psychological safety does not mean keeping everyone permanently comfortable. Teams still need standards, deadlines and conversations that are occasionally uncomfortable.
But when every week is critical, every request is urgent and every missed number triggers another layer of scrutiny, people begin protecting themselves. They take fewer risks, ask fewer questions and become more careful about which truths travel upwards.
Exactly when the organisation needs clear thinking, the emotional temperature makes it harder.
Good leadership is not about keeping everyone comfortable or endlessly turning up the heat. It is about creating the conditions in which people can think, perform and tell the truth.
Before adding more heat, leaders should ask whether the real problem is effort, clarity or unnecessary obstacles, and whether the urgency belongs to the team or has simply travelled down from above.
Accountability tends to move in the opposite direction.
AI can already help leaders read the organisational temperature by identifying patterns in performance, communication and sentiment. That could be enormously useful.
Connected to an anxious leader, however, it could simply turn every wobble into an automated demand for another update. Smarter measurement may give us more precisely managed anxiety rather than better leadership.
The real skill is not reading the temperature. It is knowing what to do with it.
Next week, I am moving from the thermostat to the mirror, because before leaders diagnose everybody else’s behaviour, there is an awkward person they may need to examine first.
Stella has just told me the living room is still cold.
This time, I resisted pointing at the thermostat and went to investigate.
The radiator was cold. The thermostat, sitting comfortably in the warmer hallway, had already decided the house was warm enough.
The data was accurate. It was simply measuring the wrong room.
Stella says this proves two things.
Context matters, and after more than 40 years of marriage, I should have learned to listen before explaining.
Apparently, my development remains a work in progress.
