Emotional Labour

Civic leadership involves more than visible decision-making, public speaking, or formal authority. It also requires substantial emotional labour. Emotional labour is the work involved in managing one’s own emotions and responding to the emotions of others to meet the expectations of a role, relationship, or organization. In civic leadership, this can mean listening, reassuring, mediating, absorbing frustration, maintaining composure, and sustaining relationships even in difficult or conflictual situations. For women and non-binary civic leaders, this work can be especially significant because leadership is often shaped by gendered expectations about what “acceptable” leadership looks like. Women may be expected to be empathetic, patient, accessible, calm, and caring, while anger, assertiveness, ambition, or emotional distance may be judged more harshly. Emotional labour is therefore closely tied to stereotypes about appropriate women’s behaviour and the narrow range of leadership styles that are often considered legitimate.
Here emotional labour includes both the outward work of supporting others and the inward work of regulating one’s own responses. It can involve helping people through uncertainty, managing conflict, responding to criticism, maintaining morale, and creating a sense of connection within organizations and communities. This labour can build trust and strengthen civic relationships, but it can also be demanding, unevenly distributed, and easily overlooked. The profiles gathered here explore how civic leaders experience and make sense of this often-unrecognized dimension of leadership, and what emotional labour reveals about care, responsibility, power, gendered expectations, and the everyday work required to sustain community life.