Why Good Leaders Sometimes Behave Like Poor Leaders Under Pressure

Most organisations have experienced a version of the same leadership puzzle. A leader who is thoughtful, collaborative and commercially astute in ordinary circumstances becomes unusually directive during a difficult restructure. A manager who normally creates space for debate starts shutting down challenge as a deadline approaches. An executive known for high standards begins inspecting work at a level of detail that slows the team down.

These moments are often interpreted as evidence of a leadership gap. Sometimes they are. But capability alone does not explain why the same person can demonstrate sound judgement on Monday and behave in ways that undermine their team on Friday.

Leadership performance is partly a question of access. Leaders bring knowledge, experience, emotional intelligence and learned behaviours to their role, but their ability to draw on those resources changes with context. Pressure, uncertainty, threat, fatigue and competing demands can reduce access to the very capabilities organisations have invested years developing.

For organisations navigating transformation, this distinction matters. Leadership behaviour becomes particularly consequential when conditions are difficult. Those are also the conditions in which consistent access to good judgement becomes harder.

Leadership behaviour is more variable than leadership capability

Leadership development often works from an understandable assumption: identify the capabilities required, build them and encourage leaders to apply them. The model is useful, but incomplete.

A leader may already know that they need to listen before responding, invite challenge, delegate appropriately or approach conflict with curiosity. The problem can emerge several seconds before the behaviour itself. Faced with a difficult conversation, perceived threat or unexpected challenge, the leader loses enough cognitive and emotional capacity that the behaviour they know would be useful becomes harder to access.

Amy Arnsten’s work on [how stress affects prefrontal cortex functioning] stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex function provides part of the neurological explanation. The prefrontal cortex supports higher-order functions including working memory, behavioural inhibition, flexible thinking and regulation of attention. Under significant stress, the neural systems supporting these capabilities can become less effective. Her later work describes how stress can weaken the networks involved in higher cognition, while more habitual and emotionally driven responses become increasingly influential. Nature Neuroscience’s review of stress and higher cognition

The practical consequence is familiar to anyone who has worked with senior leaders. Pressure can narrow the range of responses a person considers. Complexity begins to look like something that needs to be controlled. Ambiguity feels uncomfortable. A leader who would normally ask three questions before forming a view may reach a conclusion early and then defend it.

This does not remove accountability for behaviour. It gives organisations a more useful explanation for why behaviour can vary so markedly across situations.

Under pressure, strengths can become liabilities

Some of the behaviours that cause problems in leaders begin with qualities the organisation genuinely values.

Decisiveness can become impatience. Attention to quality can become excessive control. Confidence can reduce openness to dissent. A strong sense of ownership can make delegation more difficult. Drive for results can reduce attention to how those results are being achieved.

The [Center for Creative Leadership’s long-running work on executive derailment] CCL research on leadership derailment is useful here. Its research has repeatedly identified situations where successful leaders encounter difficulty as circumstances change and qualities that previously contributed to success are applied too rigidly or excessively. One of CCL’s early studies of executives found that some leaders became abrasive or intimidating under stress, while others struggled because strengths suited to earlier roles became liabilities as their responsibilities grew more complex. CCL’s research on why successful executives derail

This gives organisations a different way to interpret inconsistent leadership behaviour. The leader who takes over a tense meeting may not have forgotten how to facilitate. Their preference for action may have intensified as uncertainty increased. The highly analytical executive who continues requesting information may not lack decision-making capability. Under perceived risk, their normal desire for rigour may have become difficult to regulate.

The developmental question therefore becomes more precise: what happens to this leader’s behaviour when the pressure rises, and what helps them regain enough perspective to choose differently?

The moments that matter rarely happen in the training room

Formal leadership development remains important. Well-designed programs can build knowledge, broaden behavioural repertoires, create shared leadership language and give people opportunities to practise. The challenge is transferring those capabilities into live organisational situations.

The [CIPD’s evidence review of leadership development] CIPD evidence review on leadership development found that leadership training is more effective when learning is supported through practice, spacing, feedback and organisational reinforcement. It specifically cautions against treating leadership development as a one-off event and highlights the importance of workplace conditions that support the application of new skills.

That transfer problem becomes especially important under pressure.

A leader can practise giving developmental feedback in a workshop and understand the framework perfectly. Six weeks later, they need to address an underperforming executive who is also critical to a major project. The relationship matters, time is short and the leader is worried about delivery. The behavioural choice now carries consequences that were absent during practice.

This is where development frequently loses momentum. The organisation has provided the capability, yet there is little support available at the point where the leader has to access it.

Executive coaching helps close this gap for some leaders, particularly where deeper patterns or complex relationships require sustained exploration. Managers, mentors and peers can also play an important role. The difficulty is availability. Many consequential leadership moments occur between coaching sessions, after the workshop has finished and when another person is not conveniently available to help the leader think.

Small behavioural moments can become organisational conditions

The behaviour of one leader rarely remains isolated to that individual.

A transformation leader who becomes defensive when challenged teaches people something about whether dissent is genuinely welcome. A senior executive who repeatedly intervenes in delegated decisions teaches managers how much autonomy they really have. A leader who becomes abrupt as pressure increases can change the emotional conditions of an entire team.

This is particularly important during transformation, because employees often look to leadership behaviour for evidence about what the organisation truly values. McKinsey’s work on the [behavioural building blocks of organisational change] McKinsey’s four building blocks of change emphasises role modelling alongside skill development, reinforcement and understanding. Leaders’ actions become part of the environment through which employees interpret change.

More recent [McKinsey research on sustaining organisational transformation] McKinsey research on transformation performance similarly identifies leadership role modelling and mechanisms that support the application of new skills as important features of successful transformation efforts.

For HR, OD and transformation leaders, this means leadership capacity under pressure deserves attention as an organisational performance issue. When senior leaders lose access to curiosity, perspective or behavioural flexibility at critical moments, the consequences can appear downstream as slower decisions, unnecessary escalation, reduced psychological safety, change resistance or weakened accountability.

The individual behaviour and the organisational system cannot be separated entirely.

Leadership development needs support closer to the behavioural choice

If behaviour changes with context, development needs to move closer to context as well.

One useful developmental intervention is remarkably simple: creating enough space between stimulus and response for the leader to reconsider what is happening.

Before a difficult conversation, that might mean examining what outcome they are trying to achieve, what assumptions they are bringing into the room, how the other person is likely to experience their approach and which of their usual strengths could become unhelpful if overused.

After a difficult interaction, it could involve reconstructing what happened while the details are still available. What triggered the shift in behaviour? What did the leader notice in themselves? What alternatives were available? What would they repeat or change next time?

These are small acts of reflection, but their timing matters. They convert everyday leadership experience into developmental material.

Harvard Business Review’s discussion of  Leading Through Anxiety similarly points to the value of leaders developing awareness of their own patterns and establishing ongoing sources of support, particularly during periods of uncertainty.

The organisational opportunity is to make this kind of reflection more accessible without expecting every leader to have a human coach beside them each time a difficult situation arises.

AI coaching can occupy the space between knowing and doing

This is where AI coaching becomes particularly relevant to leadership development.

Its value is not primarily in supplying leaders with more leadership content. Most experienced leaders already have access to an abundance of frameworks, books, models and training.

A well-designed AI coach can create a structured pause close to the moment of action. A leader preparing for a contentious stakeholder conversation can test their assumptions before entering the room. Someone who has reacted badly in a meeting can examine what triggered the response while the experience is still fresh. A manager facing uncertainty can work through several possible approaches before defaulting to the one that feels most familiar.

Emerging evidence is beginning to explore this territory. In 2026, IMD researchers reported an experiment involving 167 executives using AI-supported feedback to examine leadership communication. They found that 55% of the AI feedback assessed by participants sat within what the researchers called a “zone of learning”: feedback that was both useful and sufficiently surprising to challenge existing assumptions. Importantly, the researchers also highlighted limitations around confidentiality, accuracy and interpretation, arguing that AI-supported development works best alongside sound frameworks and human judgement. IMD’s research on AI-supported leadership coaching

That qualification is important. AI coaching does not remove the need for executive coaching, leadership programs, skilled managers or psychologically safe development environments. It can extend those investments into the intervals between them.

A leader might explore a recurring behavioural pattern deeply with a human coach, learn a new approach through a leadership program and then use an AI coach to practise applying that thinking during the dozens of smaller moments that follow.

This is the role momentLeader is designed to play: supporting leaders close to the point of behavioural choice, when they need to regain access to the capability they already possess and apply it deliberately to the situation in front of them.

At scale, these moments create a different kind of organisational insight

There is a second implication for organisations.

When leadership development exists largely through workshops and individual coaching, organisations can struggle to see where leaders are finding the work difficult in practice. Surveys and 360-degree feedback provide important perspectives, but usually at intervals and retrospectively.

AI coaching creates the potential for a more continuous developmental layer. With appropriate privacy, governance and aggregation, patterns across coaching interactions can help organisations understand the situations in which leaders are experiencing friction: difficult conversations, competing priorities, uncertainty, delegation, change resistance, stakeholder conflict or decision pressure.

That information changes the conversation from whether leaders completed a development program to what they are encountering when they attempt to lead.

For a transformation team, recurring patterns may reveal where the operating environment is placing leaders under unusual pressure. For L&D, they may identify where a leadership program requires reinforcement. For senior People leaders, aggregated behavioural insight can help connect capability investments more closely with the organisational conditions influencing performance.

The value lies in treating these signals as information about the system as well as the individual.

Better leadership depends on access as well as capability

Good leaders can behave poorly without suddenly becoming poor leaders.

Sometimes the behaviour reflects a genuine capability gap that needs development. Sometimes it reflects an unresolved interpersonal pattern. Sometimes the organisation itself is creating conditions that make effective leadership unnecessarily difficult. And often pressure is simply reducing the leader’s ability to access the judgement, perspective and behavioural flexibility they demonstrate more readily elsewhere.

That distinction should influence how organisations approach leadership development.

Building capability remains essential. The next frontier is helping leaders access that capability reliably when circumstances make doing so difficult.

For organisations investing heavily in leadership programs and transformation, those small moments of behavioural choice deserve greater attention. They are where leadership becomes visible to employees, where culture is reinforced, where trust can strengthen or weaken and where strategic intent is translated into everyday organisational experience.

AI coaching gives organisations a practical way to support more of those moments at scale. Used thoughtfully alongside human coaching and formal development, it can help leadership investment travel further into the work itself, where what a leader knows finally has to become what a leader does.