It's Not Just the Task — It's the Tone: The Emotional Rigging Most Leaders Miss
Reading time: ~4 minutes
You’ve delegated the task. It was completed. Nothing technically went wrong — but something still feels… off. The outcome is there, yet the process felt clunky. Maybe it was the awkward pause before giving the instruction, unsure how it would be received. Perhaps the sting from a past defensive tone. Or maybe there's silence lingering after a misstep that should’ve been a simple course correction.
This isn’t about broken systems. It’s about under-developed communication rigging — the often invisible layer that determines how you each trust, respond, and interact under pressure.
Even elite teams don’t arrive with emotional safety — they cultivate it through consistent tone checks, timing alignment, and trust-based feedback loops.
When emotional cues go unrecognised or are mishandled, feedback becomes loaded, and confidence erodes quietly. You might hear “it’s all good” when it’s anything but.
The most competent EA in the world can’t operate at their highest level if they’re constantly guessing how their Executive feels. And Executives — for all their professional capability — can lose influence by sending unclear emotional signals that shut down their support partners initiative.
Common Signs of Emotional Misalignment:
- Over-apologising or silence after small errors
- Hesitation to speak up, especially under time pressure
- Defensive responses to feedback
Each of these creates tension that builds over minor misunderstandings.
The Problem in Context: This is often the invisible issue behind partnerships stuck at
Level 2 – Reactive Support (like a Submarine).
Both sides are showing effort, but it’s beneath the surface — hard to see, even harder to align with. Emotional safety hasn’t been rigged in, so performance feels, unpredictable, inconsistent and strained.
Think of it like this: when a captain of a racing yacht makes adjustments, it’s not personal that the previous instruction no longer applies — it’s that conditions have changed. It’s time to tack or even change the sail type entirely.
A great crewmate not only anticipates this possibility but is also prepared for it — readying the sails or redirecting a task to someone in a better position to stay in a posture of readiness.
This type of agility and reliability isn’t gained on the first voyage. It’s learned through trial, error and debriefs. As well as checking assumptions.
I once told a new executive I supported: we wouldn’t have a great partnership until we’d had a mishap. Not just to fix it — but to learn how we both responded. That would be the moment we could move up the ladder toward a high-performing duo.
It wasn’t just inevitable — it was necessary.
Together we adopted the view that anything going awry was an opportunity to work better together, by developing the skills as they cropped up. Plus it reframes in advance the reality that perfection is impossible (sorry Martha Stewart - I will not subscribe to your unrealistic fallacy).
The Shift:
Emotional rigging isn’t fluffy — it’s functional.
Start by identifying the necessary skill levels before a new task or project.
Then in your weekly sync, ask: How are we working well together — not just doing what needs to be done?
This builds the muscle of decoding expectations.
When something does go wrong, don’t panic, blame or derail — address and adjust the skill quickly, whilst speaking without stress.
You are both human, and coming across new scenarios enables the skillset and trust to expand. Plus ownership of missed objectives is much easier to identify what help or adjustments are needed.
This is one leg of the Triple S Co-Captains System — Skillset, Toolset, Mindset — designed to realign executive partnerships from reactive to high-performance.
🧭 Ready to move from tension to trust in your partnership? Download the HPEP White Paper