Recently, alongside my usual coaching work, I took on a four-month contract in a Subject Matter Expert role, working inside a team.
It’s always a revealing exercise to step back into the trenches. During those four months, I came across two different leaders, in the exact same high-pressure environment. Watching them side by side taught me more about leadership under stress than almost any executive engagement I’ve had.
I want to be upfront about something before I go further: this isn’t a story about a “bad boss.” Names, details and specifics have been changed, and honestly, I don’t think of this as two types of leader, I think of it as two responses to pressure. In over a decade of coaching executives, I’ve come to believe almost every leader carries a bit of both inside them. Which one shows up tends to depend on how much pressure they’re under, and how much support and self-awareness they have to draw on.
What follows is what I noticed, and more importantly, what tends to help.
Two responses to the same pressure
One leader, when the workload intensified, began surfacing performance data to the whole group, starting with whoever was struggling most. Team members occasionally slipped through the cracks entirely, left off updates or forgotten in the shuffle. Feedback often carried an edge of urgency that read as panic. And presence dropped away — fewer check-ins, less visibility, a sense of a leader who had quietly stepped back just when the team needed them most.
The other leader, under identical pressure, did the opposite. She delegated real ownership and trusted people to rise to it. She protected ten minutes a week for a genuine, human 1:1 with each of her fourteen team members, a small habit that made a disproportionate difference to how supported everyone felt. When she needed to raise a mistake, she did it privately, and she framed it around the process, never the person. Because nobody’s ego was on the line, the feedback landed, and performance improved almost immediately.
Same pressure. Same team. Two very different outcomes. That gap is what I want to unpack. Not to score points, but because I think it’s genuinely useful for any leader to see themselves in both descriptions.
What’s actually driving it, and what helps
When leaders surface poor performance publicly, it rarely comes from malice. More often it’s a rushed belief that visibility drives urgency, or, underneath that, a leader deflecting scrutiny from their own performance by pointing at someone else’s. The fix isn’t just “praise in public, correct in private,” though that’s a good starting habit. The deeper work is helping a leader feel secure enough in their own role that they no longer need a public display of control to feel in charge.
When team members get overlooked or forgotten, it’s almost always a bandwidth problem, not a character one. Under load, leaders gravitate toward whoever is loudest or most visible, and quieter people drift out of view. Nothing personal, just human attention doing what human attention does under strain. Structural habits close this gap far more reliably than good intentions: a 1:1 rota, a round-robin check-in, a two-minute “who haven’t I spoken to this week?” review before meetings. 360-degree feedback also helps enormously here, because it’s often the first time a leader sees their own blind spot named out loud.
When pressure gets pushed downward onto an already-stretched team, it usually comes from leaders who got promoted because they perform well under pressure, and who quietly assume everyone else works the same way. The Yerkes-Dodson law is a useful reframe here: performance rises with pressure only up to a point, then collapses. But the real shift happens when a leader recognises that pushing pressure down is usually about their own need to regain control — and that there are better levers for that: clarifying priorities, removing blockers, or simply naming the pressure honestly instead of transmitting it silently.
When a leader becomes hard to find, it’s rarely indifference. It’s often the signature of the “accidental manager” — someone excellent at their previous job, promoted into people-leadership, and never actually taught what the job now requires. Overwhelmed by firefighting and quietly avoiding conflict, leadership becomes the first thing that slips. What helps most is making presence structural rather than optional. A 1:1 that’s genuinely never cancelled, visible office hours paired with coaching that gently explores what’s actually being avoided — which is very often the fear of a difficult conversation, or of being seen as not having the answers.
The common thread
Underneath all four patterns sits the same short list: low self-awareness, unmanaged stress, pressure cascading down from above, and an absence of honest upward feedback. None of these are character flaws. They’re the predictable result of capable people being put into people-leadership roles without the training, support, or feedback loop to do it well.
That’s exactly where coaching earns its place. You can’t change a behaviour you can’t see — which is why 360 feedback is so often the real turning point; it’s frequently the first time a leader hears, unfiltered, how their behaviour actually lands. From there, coaching gives leaders a confidential space to build the self-awareness and emotional regulation that these moments demand.
Because at their root, public correction, downward pressure, and quiet withdrawal are not about a lack of care. They’re coping mechanisms for a leader who hasn’t yet built the confidence to have the hard conversation directly, to sit in short-term discomfort, and to trust their team enough to let go a little.
Build that self-belief, and most of these behaviours resolve on their own. You rarely need to fix the symptom once you’ve addressed what’s underneath it.
Good leadership isn’t an accident, and neither is poor leadership a fixed trait. Both are what happens when pressure meets a particular level of support and self-awareness — and that second part is entirely something we can build.
