Stop Treating the Office Like Kindergarten

Corporate leadership training has traded accountability for therapy circles. It’s infantilizing employees and eroding respect for management.

Walk into a corporate training session today and you’re likely to be greeted not with a discussion of strategy, execution, or accountability but with something closer to a group therapy session.

“Let’s go around the room and share how we’re feeling today.”
“Hold up a color card that represents your mood.”
“Let’s celebrate each other with affirmations.”

This is not a wellness retreat. These are sessions for highly compensated professionals responsible for real budgets, clients, and teams. And yet the tone is increasingly indistinguishable from a kindergarten classroom.

The Feminization of Corporate Culture

The shift is not a coincidence. Human Resources has quietly become the cultural command center of corporate America. HR departments are disproportionately staffed and led by women, and increasingly, younger women. This demographic shift has reshaped the way corporate leadership itself is defined.

Where earlier models of leadership training leaned on military or athletic metaphors—competition, decisiveness, command—the new model emphasizes nurture, vulnerability, and emotional disclosure. The tone is not that of a general rallying a regiment, but of a teacher coaxing pupils into good behavior.

There is nothing wrong with empathy, and nothing wrong with women shaping workplace norms. The problem is when the posture crosses into infantilization. When adult professionals are asked to color-code their moods, share their “feelings” before a performance review, or act out empathy in scripted role-plays, the implicit message is not inclusion but condescension: you are not trusted to manage your own emotions without supervision.

From Leadership to Liability Management

Behind the soft language lies a harder calculation. Much of this “feelings-first” training isn’t about producing better managers at all. It’s about protecting the company.

If every manager has been instructed to ask about emotions, lead inclusivity rituals, and construct “psychological safety,” HR can later point to the program as proof that the company did everything right should a lawsuit arrive. Training sessions become less about leadership and more about liability insurance.

The consulting industry has seized the opportunity. A billion-dollar market now churns out glossy “emotional intelligence” modules, “inclusive leadership” seminars, and “resilience workshops.” These packages are marketed as the cutting edge of management science but are, in practice, elaborate scripts designed to keep HR departments busy and executives covered.

Infantilization as Control

Tone matters. When a 26-year-old HR facilitator leads a room of senior engineers or seasoned executives in exercises that echo elementary school, the experience is not neutral. It communicates who holds authority, and how.

Soft power can still be coercive power. The gentle, sing-song cadence of the facilitator may sound nurturing, but its purpose is directive: to shape behavior, to impose conformity, to dictate the acceptable boundaries of workplace interaction. The velvet glove conceals the same fist of control that old-school management once exercised through barked orders and rigid rules.

Older professionals especially bristle at this reversal. They did not climb corporate ladders to be asked to describe their feelings in front of peers. They came to work to solve problems, make decisions, and deliver results. Leadership training that treats them like fragile schoolchildren does not inspire confidence. It breeds resentment.

The Gendered Dimension

It would be dishonest to ignore the gender dynamics here. The feminization of HR has produced a style of authority that draws less from business and more from education and therapy. That approach resonates with some employees, particularly younger cohorts raised in environments where emotional validation was normalized.

But it risks alienating others. To men, to older workers, and to many women who reject being patronized, the new tone feels less like progress and more like regression: from being treated as responsible adults to being managed like delicate adolescents.

Worse, this infantilizing posture risks reinforcing the very stereotypes professional women have fought against. If authority exercised by women in corporate settings is persistently associated with softness, scolding, and therapy-talk, it undermines respect not only for HR but for women in leadership more broadly.

The Pandemic Effect

The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated this shift. Remote work, isolation, and burnout prompted companies to emphasize mental health more explicitly than ever before. Emotional check-ins and “safe spaces” were introduced as emergency measures to hold teams together.

But what began as a temporary accommodation hardened into doctrine. Three years later, the therapy language has become permanent—even in contexts where it no longer makes sense. Managers who once delivered quarterly results are now expected to facilitate “vulnerability exercises.” Professionals who once debated strategy are now asked to hold up a Post-it note to symbolize their mood.

Adults at Work, Please

Workplaces are not families. Colleagues are not children. Managers are not therapists. The office is where adults come together to create value, and they deserve to be treated accordingly.

Yes, empathy matters. Yes, mental health should be acknowledged. But corporate leadership has overcorrected. By turning manager training into a permanent counseling session, companies drain seriousness from the enterprise. They reduce the role of leadership to that of classroom facilitator. And in the process, they erode the respect employees must have for authority to function effectively.

The Way Back

Restoring balance requires a re-centering of corporate culture:

• Re-focus on competence. Leadership training should emphasize judgment, execution, and accountability, not mood management.
• Respect autonomy. Adults don’t need icebreakers to express themselves. They need clarity about goals, resources, and consequences.
• Diversify authority. HR cannot be the sole architect of management philosophy. Operational leaders who actually deliver results must help define what leadership looks like.

The modern workplace doesn’t need to return to the caricatured command-and-control styles of the past. But neither should it reduce serious work to circle time.

Treat employees as adults. Expect managers to manage. Save the therapy language for therapy.