Most experienced leaders believe they know how they behave under pressure.
I am not sure that is always true.
Pressure rarely announces that it is changing us. It does not usually feel like we are becoming less collaborative, less tolerant or less transparent. From inside the experience, it feels as though we are responding appropriately to circumstances that have become more demanding.
We shorten a discussion because a decision is overdue. We involve fewer people because the situation is sensitive. We challenge an objection more firmly because the team needs direction. We postpone a difficult conversation because there is already enough disruption.
Each choice can be explained. Taken together, however, they may describe a change in the way we are leading.
What pressure looks like from the inside
When the stakes rise, speed can begin to feel more important than participation. Certainty becomes more attractive than curiosity. Questions that once improved our thinking can start to sound like resistance.
The leader may still believe they welcome challenge. They may still describe themselves as open, measured and collaborative. Those qualities have not disappeared from their identity. But they may be appearing less often in their behaviour.
That gap matters because people do not work with our self-image. They work with what we say, what we do and what becomes more difficult to say in our presence.
Recent research from Insights gives the gap some scale. In a study of 880 HR and people leaders across 11 markets, 81 per cent said they had observed senior executives behaving differently during their organisation's most recent significant change.
Many of those changes were positive. Leaders can become more visible, decisive and communicative when the situation demands it. But the research also found reduced collaboration, less tolerance of different opinions, more conflict, avoidance of difficult conversations, faster unilateral decisions and reduced transparency. Among the leaders whose behaviour was seen as becoming more negative, 44 per cent appeared unaware that it had changed.
The finding is uncomfortable because it suggests that experience alone may not tell us what pressure is doing to our leadership.
Why good intentions are not enough
Pressure narrows attention. We become more alert to whatever feels most at risk: the deadline, the client, the numbers, the credibility of the plan or confidence in our leadership.
Once that happens, our responses can become automatic. In my Leading Unmasked approach, I call this the Mask. It is the learned pattern that reacts when something feels psychologically dangerous, often before we have consciously decided how to respond.
Under pressure, the Mask can make tighter control feel necessary, disagreement feel obstructive and uncertainty feel unsafe to reveal. Its instructions usually sound responsible: decide now, hold the line, do not create more concern, keep this contained.
The behaviour does not arrive labelled as defensiveness or avoidance. It arrives as leadership.
This is why intention is an unreliable measure of impact. We may genuinely intend to create clarity while other people experience less room to contribute. We may intend to protect confidence while they experience less honesty. We may intend to accelerate execution while they learn that challenge is no longer welcome.
The greater the pressure, the easier it is to explain each decision and miss the pattern they create together.
Self-awareness needs current evidence
The answer is not simply to think harder about whether pressure has changed us. Introspection still begins with the person whose perception may have narrowed.
We need evidence from the people experiencing our leadership now.
A useful question is not, 'Am I leading well through this?' It is:
What have you noticed changing in the way I lead since the pressure increased?
Ask people who see you in different situations. Then listen for repetition. One observation may be a preference. The same observation from several people is evidence worth examining.
The difficult part is resisting the urge to explain why the change was necessary. An explanation may be accurate and the effect may still be real.
Pressure does not automatically make leaders worse. It can bring out courage, focus and resourcefulness. But it can also strengthen the responses that feel safest to us while making their consequences more visible to everyone else.
The people around us may notice that shift before we do.
That is not a failure of leadership. Refusing the evidence might be.
Until next week,
Gavin
Source: Insights, New research reveals how leadership behaviour impacts productivity during change (2026).