To lead under pressure, you need to train with pressure
In high-stakes business leadership, pressure is inevitable and can distort judgement, but like elite athletes and military professionals, leaders must train under pressure to perform effectively when it matters most, says George Hutchinson
The corporate world, like politics, is full of examples of leaders whose response to an event leaves an impression of incompetence, indifference, stupidity or even callousness. Whether through an unscripted remark or a tone-deaf statement, perceptions are established from which reputational recovery may be impossible.
Is poor behaviour or judgement inevitable, intentional, or just a human response to extreme pressure?
In elite business, chronic pressure is par for the course and many thrive on it. There is a widespread assumption that senior leaders can – or should be able to – handle any level of pressure. But even people whose temperament or character is suited to moments of high drama don’t leave crisis response to chance.
Top leaders ensure their organisation prepares for the worst; teams develop detailed plans and processes, they are tested thoroughly at least once a year, and consequently we all rest easy. At least, that’s the theory.
In reality, no ‘open in case of emergency’ protocol can prevent poor decisions being made. Plans may tell leaders who should respond and when but they don’t, and can’t, tell them the exact decisions to take or what will be the best (or simply least bad) outcome in complex, dynamic situations.
When the worst happens, behind the scenes leaders will try to organise themselves and apply experience. Except now, the context is transforming and the environment can be alien. There is often no time for forensic decision-making or sessions with experts spending days weighing up pros and cons on a course of action. The command centre is no longer the safe haven to get to the best decision. It swiftly becomes a defensive bunker, with leadership under threat.
Do we stick to our plan no matter what? Are we doubling down on being economically rational? Do we fold and reassess, constantly trying to make sense of the storm?
It is in these moments that leaders can crack, and basic psychological and physiological processes interrupt clear thinking. Scientifically, we know that no-one is immune to pressure. But what causes pressure, and how we react to it, is different for each of us. Under enough pressure, everyone’s performance declines but how (and the extent to which) we break down is different from individual to individual. Most often, under pressure, it is the characteristic strength that helped us climb so high, that becomes overplayed – and destroys us.
At River Effra, we have witnessed the effects of pressure first hand, standing alongside leaders facing crises. We know that understanding personal responses to extreme pressure is vital. Our scientific team has conducted decades of research and applied work in elite sport and the military; creating development programmes for those at the cutting edge of world-class performance.
Chronic vs acute pressure
Elite sportspeople and the military train for pressure, with pressure. It is not enough in business to say, “pressure is the day job”. That is the equivalent of a footballer saying, “I just play matches, I don’t train”. Yet, too often, the chronic pressure of the day job obscures the need to prepare oneself for moments of acute pressure.
Under acute pressure, instinctive biases kick in. One of the most common is ‘persecution bias’ – a sense of injustice: “Don’t you understand how hard my job is? How unfair this is?” Objectively, the situation might even be unjust, but from the outside, from the perspective of customers, regulators, or the media, it won’t be seen as such. Persecution bias can blind leaders to wider context.
It might be hard to feel sympathy for the powerful and highly paid when things go wrong. Consider the chief executive of Heathrow whose technical plans might have worked, but whose ability to respond had been literally silenced. Or the Archbishop of Canterbury who, forced to depart amid a crisis of confidence, made an ill-judged joke in the House of Lords. Or consider BP’s Tony Hayward, who told journalists after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, “I just want my life back.” Our reaction to these situations? Schadenfreude, incomprehension, or even disgust.
The truth is we can train for pressure, but that means training with pressure. The scientists call it hierarchical stress inoculation training but simply put it boils down to awareness, acceptance, and action. Awareness and acceptance involve deeply understanding the nature of pressure for you as an individual; what causes or triggers it and what your reactions to it are. Action is identifying then developing the specific skills and strategies that enable you to lean into your characteristic strengths and prevent them becoming a weakness, when overplayed. Those newly acquired strategies are stress-tested in a hierarchical manor; deliberately and gradually exposing individuals to progressively more stressful situations while iteratively improving their coping strategies to manage their thoughts, behaviours, emotions and bodily responses.
Can you really induce pressure in training? We all have our pinch-points. Our scientific team have worked with World Cup winning players who can face a crowd of 100,000 and deliver, but become acutely stressed when the consequence of failing a training drill is to deliver a lecture-style presentation, on a topic they know little about, to people they truly respect. Therefore, once we know an individual’s pressure triggers, we can use as-real safe-to-fail exercise environments to mimic them.
Flight or freeze
For the technical CEO – high in perfectionism and sensitivity to threat – who wants to carefully and structurally work through an answer, we accelerate the time demands of the task to apply pressure; for the grandiose confident business leader – high in impulsivity and low in conscientiousness – we may bring in a professional journalist to ask questions they weren’t expecting and don’t want to answer; for those who struggle with the regulation of their emotions and are predisposed to ‘fight’ (not ‘flight’ or ‘freeze’), we might even bring in actors to role-play ‘on edge’ family members who emotionally demand answers about their loved ones; and for the individual resistant to change – low in creative thinking and high in concerns over mistakes – we might set off a few curve balls to see how they react.
The ultimate form of preparation is not planning for a specific scenario, but a mindset and ability to handle uncertainty combined with a lived-experience of the predictable. Yes, we make training realistic (as the scientists say, to maximise transfer from the training domain to the performance domain), and we hierarchically ramp up the pressure in a safe environment (because experiencing pressure is one of the few predictable elements), but none of this is a game. If people are hurting in the real world, they want immediate answers, they ask difficult questions, they care about their loved ones, and a crisis never happens in a predictable and structured way. For the most senior people, used to being in control and operating in structured environments, that always causes pressure. The key is what you do about it. Don’t assume you are immune to the debilitating effects of pressure, no one is at the extremes.
A leader’s characteristic strengths are often what makes them great at the day job, but – when the pressure really hits – overplayed, or wrongly channelled, they can be destructive. In elite sport and the military, the very best train to develop the awareness and actions to thrive under the highest of pressures, and business leaders should, too.
George Hutchinson is CEO and Founder of River Effra Reputation Risk and Crisis Advisory Firm