Containment: The Missing Piece of the Leadership Puzzle
By Claudia De Silva, an organisational consultant specialising in systems psychodynamicsLeadership has changed significantly in recent years. Where leaders were once expected to remain removed from the organisation, cultivating distance and an imagined strength, modern leadership has taken on a very different meaning. Today, leadership is less about power and authority and far more about authenticity, connection and empathy.
Modern leaders are required to be visible in ways they never have been before, bringing much more of their whole selves into the role. We increasingly value leaders who are honest and authentic, who show us their humanity and vulnerability, whether that appears in a LinkedIn post acknowledging nighttime anxiety or a podcast episode sharing hopes and fears.
In many ways, this shift is positive. It allows employees to better understand those who pay their salaries and helps clients connect more deeply with brand, purpose and values. However, this visibility also comes at a cost, both to the leader and to the organisation.
The reality of modern leadership is one of profound uncertainty. The world is changing at an alarming pace and ambiguity is everywhere. At the same time, heightened visibility and porous boundaries contribute to emotional overwhelm, more commonly referred to as burnout. Leaders are operating without the traditional buffers that once provided a sense of psychological safety.
Burnout has been described as a silent epidemic, believed to affect up to seven out of ten leaders. This is critically important not only because it impacts physical and mental health, but also because it leads to reduced productivity, impaired decision-making and organisational instability. In such cases, employee turnover escalates dramatically as systems begin to fracture.
This raises a pressing question. The UK executive education and leadership development market is valued at several billion pounds, yet burnout rates continue to rise. Something feels fundamentally disconnected. What training need is being missed by so many providers?
Leadership training is missing a crucial piece of the puzzle
Leadership and senior management development has historically focused on skills, behaviours and strategy. While these areas are important, they often overlook something far deeper and more foundational: the leader’s capacity for containment.
As a consultant working with a systems psychodynamic lens, I focus on what sits beneath behaviour, emotion, anxiety and unconscious dynamics. From this perspective, containment emerges not as a “soft” concept, but as a critical leadership function.
What Is Containment?
Containment is a concept rooted in psychoanalytic theory, most notably defined by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion in the 1960s. At its core, containment refers to the capacity of an individual to receive overwhelming emotional material that is projected unconsciously, make sense of it, and return it in a form that can be tolerated.
The challenge is that containment is rarely taught or explicitly understood. As a result, many leaders are unable to recognise when they are not containing effectively. Without containment, anxiety floods the system. Imagine a leaky vase or a cracked roof. When boundaries are weak or poorly held, the inside spills out and the outside pours in, both equally damaging the surrounding environment.
In psychoanalytic theory, containment originates in the relationship between mother and infant. The infant projects unbearable anxiety through crying or distress. The mother receives this anxiety, processes it, and responds in a way that restores safety and meaning. If, instead, the mother becomes equally distressed, anxiety overwhelms and thinking collapses.
The same principle applies to leadership.
Fundamental to the role of leader, just as it is to the role of parent, is the ability to contain. This begins with an internalised capacity to manage one’s own anxiety. If a leader cannot contain their own fears, the sleepless nights, the terror of business failure, the sense of inadequacy, there is little capacity left to contain what is projected into them by the organisation.
When leaders become flooded, anxiety dominates and burnout is not far behind.
Organisations as Emotional Systems
Systems psychodynamics views organisations as emotional systems. They are filled not only with the anxieties and defences of individuals, but also with the collective emotional life that emerges when people come together. Anxiety in organisations is inevitable and highly contagious.
In this context, a leader’s role is not simply to direct or decide, but to contain collective anxiety. When anxiety rises, it is common to lose our capacity to think, and this can be seen in both individual and group behaviour. Individuals and organisations retreat into defensive patterns, paralysis or reactivity.
Leadership, therefore, requires the ability to notice what is happening emotionally in the system and to make sense of it, rather than becoming overwhelmed by it.
The leader must be able to remain thoughtful under pressure and prevent anxiety from overwhelming organisational functioning.
Why Containment Matters More Than Ever
Contemporary leadership brings unprecedented challenges, including high visibility, expectations of vulnerability alongside strength, hybrid and remote work, and increasingly porous boundaries. Technology has stripped away many of the structures that once offered psychological containment, with little consideration or understanding of the unconscious impact of this loss.
Without boundaries, the child is forced to find ways to contain itself, often through defences and adaptive strategies that prioritise survival over development. The same is true of organisations.
When containment is absent, systems harden. Creativity declines, trust erodes, behavioural issues increase and people burn out, not because they lack resilience, but because the system has failed to hold them.
The Quiet Power of Containment
Containment is the quiet power of leadership. It allows leaders to remain connected without being consumed. It is a form of authority that protects against psychological attack, both internal and external, and creates the conditions in which thinking, performance and sustainability are possible.
What might change if leaders were valued not for certainty, but for their capacity to hold uncertainty well?
