“I often feel like an emotional washing machine,” said one manager I met recently. Here is one vital job leaders do, whether they like it or not: take a tangled load of emotions from team members and run them through a cycle so staff can return, rinsed and refreshed, to the task in hand.

Sometimes, though, managers still handle that job like a machine — and it is the staff who get hung out to dry.

“If I let myself feel their problems, I’d never get anything done,” one manager told psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby. “It would be impossible to deal with the people.” He surveyed 250 managers for a Fortune article — “The Corporate Climber Has to Find His Heart”. Daniel Goleman made it an example in his bestseller Emotional Intelligence. “Such attitudes are outmoded, a luxury of a former day,” he wrote.