The Invisible Cost of Staying Composed

What your team sees as calm, and what it actually takes to hold that line.

The Feedback That Stung

A few years into my time at Jam City, I received 360 feedback that stopped me cold. People said I had too much on my plate. That I was forgetting conversations. That I seemed stretched.

What they did not know was that I was deliberately absorbing a significant portion of what should have been their stress. Covering for gaps so the team could stay focused and keep executing. Taking on context they did not need to carry so they could do their best work without the noise of everything happening above and around them.

They read it as me dropping balls. It was actually me catching theirs.

I did not say that in the feedback session. Explaining it would have undermined the whole point. But sitting with that misread was one of the lonelier moments of my leadership career, and it taught me something important about what the composed exterior actually costs.

Two Worlds, One Approach

I came into games from consulting, which is not a typical path. Consulting is essentially a masterclass in professional presence. You learn early how to walk into a room with a C-suite and command it, how to deliver difficult news without losing composure, how to separate your personal reaction from your professional response. Business school reinforced all of it, framing emotional regulation not as suppression but as a genuine leadership skill.

When I got to games, I brought that with me into an industry that runs on creative passion, informal culture, and a deep suspicion of anything that feels corporate. The friction was immediate.

My team often read me as cold. Hard to connect with. Leadership, on the other hand, loved it. I was the adult in the room. The person with a plan when everything felt uncertain. The one who did not visibly panic.

Both reads were partially right and completely incomplete.

What the Exterior Actually Is

Staying composed is not the same as not feeling things. I am not built differently from anyone else. There are days when I am genuinely overwhelmed, when the pressure is real, when I am carrying more than I would like anyone to know. I just do not show it in the room.

That is not coldness. It is a practiced skill, and it took years to develop.

And it is not the opposite of vulnerability. In a previous post I wrote about why great leaders need to embrace vulnerability — being transparent about uncertainty, naming what you do not know, inviting people in. That still holds. But composure is what makes genuine vulnerability possible on your own terms. When you have not built the exterior, vulnerability can quickly become instability. The room reads your uncertainty as a loss of direction rather than an act of trust. The composed exterior is what gives you the choice of when and how to let people in, rather than having that choice made for you by the pressure of the moment.

The structural reality of senior leadership is that you exist in a strange isolation. You cannot unload on your team because you are there to steady them. You cannot show cracks to your executives because they need to see a plan and a person who has one. You become a container for other people's uncertainty, and there is no natural release valve built into the role.

What that creates, if you are not careful, is a loneliness that is hard to articulate to anyone who has not experienced it. You are surrounded by people and still carrying things alone. Developing composure without building a support structure around it is one of the quieter mistakes leaders make, and I made it for longer than I should have.

What I Changed After That Feedback

The 360 was a turning point not just emotionally but operationally. I realized that absorbing everything on behalf of the team was not actually protecting them. It was shielding them from the discomfort of being held to a higher standard, and it was costing me in ways that were starting to show.

So I changed how I lead.

I set clearer expectations and stopped picking up work that was not mine to carry. I pushed harder. I became more disciplined about what I would tolerate and what I would not. When someone was not meeting the bar, I stopped extending grace indefinitely out of empathy and started having the harder conversation sooner. That included performance managing people I would have previously held onto longer because I felt responsible for their growth or did not want to be the person who gave up on them.

It probably looks cold from the outside. I know that. But the people who rise to meet those expectations come out better, more capable, and more aligned with how I lead. And I come out with the energy to actually do my job rather than quietly doing everyone else's.

This is the thing I would tell any leader stepping into this for the first time: know your line before the cost of not having one becomes visible in your performance. Compassion is a genuine leadership strength, but compassion without boundaries is just absorption. You will end up carrying things that were never yours to carry, and eventually something will give.

Figure out what your role is actually accountable for. Be disciplined about holding that line. And do not confuse empathy with taking on other people's responsibility for their own growth.

You Cannot Do This Alone

The boundary work is one piece of it. The other is building somewhere to put everything you are still holding after you have drawn those lines.

For me that has been a peer group of other senior female leaders who understand the specific texture of this role, who are navigating similar pressures, and with whom I do not have to perform composure. That group has been more valuable to my sustainability as a leader than almost anything else I have done.

If you do not have something like that, treat building it as a genuine priority. Some places to start:

1. Chief is a professional network built for senior women in leadership.
2. Women in Games and Women in Product offer community within the industry or role.
3. And sometimes the most valuable thing is simply finding two or three peers at a similar level and committing to meet regularly without an agenda.

The composed exterior is worth building. Just make sure you are also building the structure that makes it sustainable. Know your line, hold it, and find the people you can be honest with about the cost of doing so.

If this resonates, it is worth reading alongside my post on clarity and vulnerability, which gets at the other side of this: why letting people in, on your own terms, is what turns composure from a defense mechanism into a genuine leadership asset.