Developing Embodied Managers

• Ethical lapses rarely stem from pure villainy; they often emerge from the accumulation of stressors and the gradual outsourcing of discomfort.
• Somatic literacy, the trained capacity to read the body’s signals under pressure, is both a forgotten and emerging foundation of ethical discernment.
• Faculty can help students develop ethical discernment through classroom exercises such as writing by hand, which helps students feel and regulate their bodies’ physiological reactions.

 
When my management students leave the classroom, the floor and their desks are covered in pencil shavings and scraps torn from spiral notebooks. By the looks of it, one might assume a poetry workshop had just ended.

But this is an ethical leadership class at the Smeal College of Business at Penn State University in University Park. Those scraps and shavings represent students’ collective thinking and feeling made visible before their ideas are tested in public. These students are training to become tomorrow’s managers and decision-makers.

They are also, in the age of generative AI, entirely offline for 75 minutes at a time. When they write out assignments by hand, they practice getting in touch with their emotions and their core values—an ability that will make them better leaders.

You Cannot Prompt-Engineer a Conscience

One of my objectives for the semester is to teach students how to use AI to stress-test arguments, gain new perspectives, and simulate business scenarios. But I also want them to understand that if they habitually turn to AI to outsource high-stakes critical thinking, they risk outsourcing their sense of responsibility.

Today’s AI systems and tools allow leaders to distance themselves from carrying the weight of big decisions. “But AI suggested it” could soon become the next generation of “But everyone signed off on it.”

The risk of ceding responsibility is not theoretical. In nursing literature, this kind of ethical drift is described as a “gradual erosion of ethical behavior that occurs in individuals below their level of awareness.” To avoid this, individuals should practice being aware of awareness, bringing what’s below the surface to the surface. Often what they’ll notice first are the physiological signals—the tightening of the chest, the heat in the face. People should not see these signals as discomforts to avoid but as data to understand.

Executives Under Pressure

Today’s middle managers are caught in a relentless pincer movement. They are asked to execute tasks at an AI-accelerated pace while simultaneously leading and mentoring large teams. And the act of leading can be overwhelming: Research suggests that 21 percent of managers avoid giving feedback to employees altogether due to the anticipated stress caused by the conversations.

The press of global events adds another layer of anxiety. Managers may find their nervous systems so depleted that they fail to notice their own physiological signals—let alone the visible stress responses of their colleagues and direct reports.

Students need to understand that if they habitually turn to AI to outsource high-stakes critical thinking, they risk outsourcing their sense of responsibility.

While Hollywood often paints a simpler picture, ethical lapses are usually complex, stemming from multiple elements. These include accumulated microstressors, pressure from superiors, cultural expectations, slippery slopes, and the compounding urge to avoid dealing with challenging emotions. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, touches on this point: “When you have a persistent sense of heartbreak and gutwrench, the physical sensations become intolerable and we will do anything to make those feelings disappear.”

The body sounds the alarm. The intellect engineers around it.

The Body as Bellwether

These ideas are nothing new. In 1924, psychology professor Robert Chenault Givler argued in The Ethics of Hercules that “ethics and physiology can no longer be studied apart”—that the structure and functions of the human body determine our ethical values. In 1976, Thomas Hanna coined the term “somatics” to describe the body’s internal perception as a form of knowing.

And yet, more than 100 years since Givler’s work, most ethical leadership guidance minimizes the value of gut feelings or emotions in general. Instead, leadership experts promote intellectualized frameworks that, as one of my MBA students put it, “no serious manager will ever have the time to use.”

The pendulum has swung too far toward the intellect. Whereas managers once relied only on gut instinct, many now rely only on analytical frameworks. What we need are embodied managers—those capable of bringing the wisdom of body and mind together to achieve insights they could not uncover using either on its own.

A report from The Workforce Institute suggests that managers have a greater impact on employee mental health than doctors or therapists, about the same as spouses or partners. The managers playing this outsized role in their teams’ well-being cannot afford to be strangers to their own inner states.

I refer to the skills required here as somatic literacy—a term Paul Linden introduced decades ago in physical education literature. In the business world, I define it as the ability to read the stories the body tells through tension, breath, posture, and other felt senses.

Somatic literacy rests on the premise that difficult decisions are not just mental calculations; they are biological events. The mind may prioritize one stakeholder. The body may signal concern for another. That signal should not be discarded simply because it is associated with emotional states often looked down upon in business.

Writing as Disciplined Thinking

To move my students toward embodied management, I have them write. On paper.

Writing by hand has been shown to improve content processing, emotional health, and brain structure. Students don’t receive those same benefits when they use a keyboard or outsource writing tasks to AI tools.

While generative AI excels at producing language and summarizing risks, it cannot build the inner machinery of integrity: the ability to feel and regulate the body’s intensifying signals while under pressure, notice the mind’s rationalizations, and then choose values over expedience.

What we need are embodied managers—those capable of bringing the wisdom of body and mind together to achieve insights they could not uncover using either on its own.

Character is developed slowly, through purposeful friction. When students compose by hand, they don’t just improve their writing proficiency. They learn ethical discernment.

Every time I provide students with a challenging writing prompt, I sit in front of the classroom and work on the same assignment. When they look up from their papers, they see me grimacing and furrowing my brows and otherwise engaging in the same struggle. As Malavika Sundararajan and Binod Sundararajan observe, “If educators are serious about training ethical leaders, they must act as role models.” I believe modeling the discomfort of genuine thinking is itself an ethical act.

I run these writing exercises in every session of the Business, Ethics, and Society course, which enrolls mostly senior management majors. In the first few weeks, students’ hands cramp and their eyes dart around as they look for a distraction or a way out. When I present a prompt—such as “How does arrogance take root in the workplace and what habits might keep it in check?”—many want a digital crutch. For some, the space and silence required for deep focus feel unfamiliar, even threatening.

But we stick with it, and slowly the atmosphere shifts. Students who once didn’t know where to look during the thinking process now comfortably close their eyes, tuning out one sensory input so they can turn on others. The pens and pencils give them time to bridge gaps between what they want to say and what they mean, between what they feel and how that feeling connects to a value.

When the writing stops, the discussion starts—but the tone has changed. Students don’t sound as if they’re reciting passages from the internet or the textbook. They speak with the confidence that comes from having arrived at insight the hard way.

For most of these writing sessions, I present a challenging scenario and ask students to write about how they would handle it, how they would feel doing so, where their feelings might come from, and what those feelings might mean. For instance, in a recent session, I asked students to imagine leading a large team following a divisive public event—one that left colleagues distressed and the atmosphere notably affected. The prompt: “How do you approach the team’s first meeting, and what do you experience internally during that moment?”

This assignment is challenging, and it is made even more so by a linguistic void. In 1992, philosopher Eugene Gendlin noted that we lack a common word for the “bodily sense of the intricacy of our situations.” Gendlin observes that the word kinesthetic covers movement and proprioceptive refers to muscles, but nothing points to the body’s ability to rapidly weigh “more alternatives than we can think separately.” In my classroom, we write to bring this wordless intricacy to the surface.

Five Ways to Practice Embodiment

The ability to deal with emotion is becoming a critical management skill as some of the old masks of workplace professionalism are breaking. Employees—particularly those in the rising generation—increasingly expect their managers not only to provide them with work-related tasks and mentorship, but also to hold space so they can share when part of their world is on fire. Middle managers who can feel and navigate hard things rather than avoid them are the ones their teams will follow through genuine difficulty.

By contrast, managers who always ignore the heavy air in the room under the guise of being “professional” are displaying a failure of somatic literacy. They might be trying to maintain an aesthetic of composure by stuffing down the reality of a world in chaos. But this reaction only trains their nervous systems to ignore the critical data they will need if they’re going to lead diverse teams.

The ability to deal with emotion is becoming a critical management skill. Employees expect their managers to hold space so they can share when part of their world is on fire.

To help students develop managerial excellence in this new era of emotional sensitivity, business faculty should teach students how to stay present when the room gets heavy. Instructors can introduce five practices that can help students manage themselves and others in complex work situations. These are especially helpful for managers who hold frequent online meetings, because research suggests that these can be particularly draining.

1. The 25-Minute Rule: Shorten 30-minute meetings by five minutes so participants have time to conduct “somatic audits”—noting where tension has migrated in their bodies—before their next meetings begin.
2. The Analog Draft: Draft a stressful message by hand first. The physical resistance of the pen on the page may make it easier for you to say exactly what you mean.
3. The Shared Pause: In a team meeting after a significant world event impacting colleagues, replace weather-based small talk with 60 seconds of silence. This acknowledges the heavy air without forcing people into conversations they aren’t ready to have.
4. The Act of Grounding: During video calls, touch your desk and soften your gaze so you are looking beyond your screen to your physical surroundings. These small acts can improve present-moment awareness and prevent emotional detachment.
5. The Moment of Feeling Feedback: After receiving challenging feedback, take a moment to process it. Find time to lie flat on the floor, arms and legs extended, and let the feelings run through you. This can help you discharge physiological stress and put you in a better decision-making mindset.

Putting on the Brakes

As educators, we often say we are “meeting students where they are.” But where they are is in their bodies. If our goal is to prepare our business students for the future world of work, we must guide them toward becoming the kinds of managers best equipped to develop others. This doesn’t mean we should provide them with more stimulation and less silence. It means we should help them understand their own emotions and the emotions of their colleagues.

In today’s scroll culture of “rage-bait” content, it’s easier than ever for the ethical compasses of the next generation of leaders to blow with the winds in their social media feeds. When students practice embodiment—especially through device-free, in-class writing practice—they are able to recognize the roots of their own value systems and use their physiological signals as trailheads pointing to their core beliefs.

Our students are entering into all-gas-no-brakes workplaces where machines quickly make major decisions. But brakes serve a purpose. Discernment and responsibility require braking and sustained attention, two capacities that are at once under attack and entirely teachable. Business schools can help students slow down, acknowledge their feelings, take responsibility for their actions—and lead.