Leadership Blind Spots: Would You Know If Pressure Changed the Way You Lead?

I once worked with a leader who talked a lot about inclusion, equality, openness and psychological safety. And, for a while, that was largely what people experienced.

Then the rubber hit the road. The economy became tougher, targets became harder to hit and the pressure on the business increased. The leader started to withdraw, increasingly appearing when something needed to be actioned rather than being present in the normal conversations around the work.

Transparency started disappearing. People had less information about what was happening, decisions became harder to understand and the politics inside the team became much more visible. People were thrown under the bus, favouritism became more obvious and those who were particularly good at navigating the politics seemed to do rather well out of it.

The team adapted, just not in a particularly useful way.

When information disappears, people don’t stop looking for it

One of the things I remember most clearly was the increase in rumours. People didn’t suddenly become comfortable knowing less because the leader had become less transparent. They still wanted to understand what was happening, who was safe, who was favoured and what decisions were being made behind closed doors.

Information kept moving, but it started moving differently. Instead of questions travelling upwards, speculation travelled sideways. People gossiped, compared notes and tried to fill in the gaps themselves, occasionally with all the forensic rigour of three people standing beside a coffee machine who had each heard a slightly different version from Dave.

Trust started falling apart and the work developed more friction around it. Energy that could have gone into solving the actual business problems was now also being spent navigating the environment around them.

I’ve written previously about what happens when people stop challenging how work gets done. People don’t necessarily stop seeing problems; sometimes they simply stop believing that raising them will achieve very much. What I hadn’t really considered at the time was what that also meant for the person trying to lead them: as the team became quieter, the leader was losing information too.

The leader you intend to be isn’t necessarily the leader people are getting

I’ve written before about the difference between internal and external self-awareness. Internal self-awareness is partly about understanding yourself: what you’re feeling, what matters to you and what drives your behaviour. External self-awareness asks something considerably less comfortable: how do other people actually experience me?

Those views aren’t necessarily the same. A leader can genuinely value transparency while their team experiences them as increasingly unavailable. They can believe they encourage challenge while people around them become increasingly careful about what they say. They can care deeply about fairness while half the office appears to be running its own amateur intelligence agency trying to establish who is currently in favour.

I don’t know whether the leader I worked with realised their behaviour had changed. I have absolutely no idea what was going on inside their head, and pretending otherwise would make for a neater article but a considerably less truthful one. What I could see was what happened around them as the pressure increased. I’ve also experienced the opposite, which is why I don’t think pressure automatically has to produce this result.

Pressure doesn’t have to make the business harder to understand

I worked with another leader through a difficult period who responded differently. As things became harder, they doubled down on transparency, remained available and encouraged questions.

That didn’t magically fix everything. There were still difficult conversations and plenty of uncertainty. The leader didn’t suddenly have all the answers; they simply kept enough information moving for people to have a reasonable idea of what was happening.

Difficult conversations could still happen, and afterwards people could get back to dealing with the problem. There was a sense that we were in it together rather than each person separately trying to work out what was actually going on.

The pressure hadn’t disappeared. The environment simply remained understandable enough for people to operate inside it.

Strain changes human behaviour

This is one reason I’ve found the Reactive and Creative leadership model from Scaling Leadership useful. I’ve written about Reactive and Creative leadership before, so I won’t drag you through the whole model again.

Reactive leadership isn’t simply another corporate synonym for being a bad boss. Sometimes you need someone to react. If something has gone horribly wrong, nobody necessarily needs a three-day off-site exploring our collective relationship with the problem while Derek prepares a Miro board. Occasionally someone just needs to make a bloody decision.

The problem is when reactive behaviour becomes the default. Strain changes human behaviour, a line I’ve increasingly used in my speaking work because when we have enough capacity, information and room to think, it’s easier to make decisions around what creates the most value. As strain increases, the questions become much more immediate: does this protect my target, my team, my budget, my bonus or my job?

That’s not an excuse for poor leadership. The consequences of our behaviour don’t disappear simply because we can explain where the behaviour came from, but leaders are part of the system too. Pressure doesn’t necessarily expose some secret “true self” lurking underneath the leadership training; it can change which behaviours we have easiest access to when our capacity is being tested.

How leadership blind spots damage the feedback loop

Imagine pressure causes you to become less available. You communicate less because you’re busy dealing with the problem, involve fewer people because decisions need to happen quickly and become more directive because things need to get done.

Individually, those decisions might make perfect sense. Together, they change the environment around you: people become less certain about what’s happening, asking questions starts to feel riskier, bad news gets softened before it reaches you and conversations that once happened with you start happening without you.

You can end up with a fairly nasty little loop:

Pressure rises → your behaviour changes → the team adapts to your behaviour → information starts moving differently → you receive less useful information about what is happening → your blind spot grows.

The mechanism you need to discover that your leadership has changed can become weaker because your leadership has changed.

There is research behind the importance of this feedback. Research into leadership blind spots and self-perception suggests feedback can help leaders develop a more accurate view of themselves and reduce blind spots, while also explaining why feedback that conflicts with an established self-image can be harder to integrate. SA Journal of Human Resource Management

But telling everyone that your door is always open isn’t much of a feedback system. If people have learned that walking through that supposedly open door carrying bad news is career roulette, the architectural status of the door is largely irrelevant.

You need to notice the change while it’s happening, not six months later when an engagement survey finally confirms that everything has gone sideways.

1. Know your pressure tells

Most leadership exercises spend time asking what kind of leader you want to be. I’d add another question: what kind of leader do you become when you’re stretched?

Think about the qualities you value and what happens to them under pressure. If you value transparency, what happens when you don’t have an answer? If you value collaboration, what happens when the deadline becomes ridiculous? If you pride yourself on being approachable, what changes when you’re tired, behind target and your calendar appears to have been assembled by someone with a personal grievance against free time?

You probably won’t find all the answers by thinking harder about yourself, so ask people who have actually seen you under pressure: What do I start doing when I’m stretched, and what do I stop doing?

Knowing your pressure tells gives you something observable to watch for before you’re buried deeply enough in the situation for everything you’re doing to feel perfectly rational.

2. Protect the feedback loop before you need it

Waiting until you’re under significant pressure and then asking, “Does anyone have any feedback for me?” is optimistic, particularly if your own behaviour has already made giving you feedback feel less safe.

Build the mechanism before you need it. Identify the people who can tell you when you’re changing and ask about observable behaviour rather than whether you’re being a “good leader.”

Ask things like: I’ve been less available this week; what has that made harder for you? What are you having to work around because of how I’m operating at the moment? What aren’t we talking about now that we were talking about a month ago?

Then show people what happened to what they told you. Research into leader feedback-sharing found something useful here: leaders openly sharing criticism and suggestions they’d received about their own performance was associated with greater psychological safety, and an experiment found a lasting positive effect when leaders were assigned to share feedback. Simply asking people for feedback didn’t produce the same result in that experiment. PubsOnLine

Asking isn’t the whole job; people need evidence that telling you the truth actually does something.

3. Watch what changes around you

Your behaviour leaves evidence in the system. If questions start disappearing, don’t immediately congratulate yourself on finally explaining everything perfectly; if bad news starts arriving later, ask why.

Pay attention to where communication is travelling. Are people bringing problems upwards or moving them sideways through gossip? Are the same two people always willing to challenge you while everyone else has become remarkably supportive of every idea you’ve had since Tuesday?

And look at the work itself. Are people solving problems, or increasingly spending time managing relationships, perception and politics around the work? If meetings become suspiciously agreeable while the conversation afterwards sounds like a parliamentary inquiry being conducted in a pub, there is probably information in the difference.

Self-awareness isn’t only introspection. Sometimes the clearest information about your leadership is sitting in what everyone else has started doing differently.

Leadership needs an early-warning system too

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about early-warning systems in businesses. We measure revenue, output, performance and targets because discovering a problem once it has already done the damage isn’t particularly useful.

Leadership deserves the same attention because pressure can change your behaviour, your behaviour changes the environment around you, and that environment can make it harder for the information you need to reach you.

I’ve seen both versions. Pressure can reduce transparency until politics and rumours start occupying the space open conversation left behind. I’ve also seen a leader under pressure keep enough availability, transparency and questioning alive that people could continue dealing with the problem together.

Knowing what kind of leader you want to be is only half the job. You also need a way of noticing when pressure means that isn’t the leader everyone else is getting.