How leaders perform under pressure

How leaders perform under pressure: a guide to perfecting your leadership skills and ensuring true enterprise success. 

There’s a key caveat to good leadership that a lot of executives, managers, and directors don’t really appreciate: you can be an excellent leader when things are calm, but if you can’t keep that standard under pressure, your top skills will fall short. 

There are a key group of core behaviours, decision-making habits and mental frameworks that every leader needs if they hope to perform under pressure. 

Let’s dive into what that looks like in day-to-day business:

As you may have read before, pressure isn’t the cause of weakness or strength. It just exposes weaknesses and strengths that already existed. 

Some people take more naturally to pressurised situations than others, but that’s not to say that people who aren’t naturals don’t have a chance. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The real differentiator is whether a person is willing to put the work into their own resilience, systematise it, compare their past responses with possible future scenarios of pressure, identify what they can improve, and rehearse it. 

This is what converts potential chaos into a calculated operation, even for those who are dead sure that they “simply weren’t born to perform well under pressure”.

It’s never a good idea to suppress natural emotions. Any life coach, therapist or other type of counsellor will tell you the same thing. 

The true goal with emotions is to manage them strategically. Even when under pressure and flooded with negative emotions, your agility should allow you to acknowledge that they’re there, recognise their potential, but still make a conscious choice not to let them rule your decision-making. 

Leaders who perform under pressure have taken huge strides in this kind of emotional regulation. And again, while it might come more naturally to some more than others, there will always be a degree of work involved. This takes time and energy, often more than people think. So, if one day you declare that you will no longer let emotions get the best of you under pressure, and then immediately do so at the first sign of urgency, don’t panic. This kind of resilience comes with slow and steady experience, not with any sort of “new-day-new-me” mentality.

Under pressure, top leaders will:

• Slow down to speed up: They resist impulsive choices, instead buying time to assess options. While it’s a challenge in itself, the added hurdle is to bring colleagues down to their level, too. Buying time for calm thinking is challenging when someone close to you is scrambling for immediate action. You need to ensure they don’t convince you, and simultaneously convince them to take a step back. 
• Simplify complexity: They find and focus on the metrics and variables that will influence the final outcome the most. Often, this can be hard to do in a crisis.
• Empower others: They delegate and ensure that each person who receives a task receives the right amount of support as well.

Good leaders who perform well under pressure don’t forget about the basics, and here we’re talking about things that have little to do with governance, and a lot to do with proper mental health regulation. 

Good leaders take time to sleep, rest, exercise and recover. Even during crisis periods, there may well be times when you’re waiting on someone else to do something. Leaders don’t spend this time worrying; they use it to rejuvenate. 

The basic rituals of human needs act as a shock absorber when things get tough. They reduce a leader’s mental volatility so that tiredness, dehydration, restlessness or frustration don’t take over.

Times of crisis are not times for silence, and good leaders know that. When under pressure, good leaders will tend to over-communicate at times, providing more information than would usually be necessary in order to ensure that stakeholders aren’t worried by urgent unanswered questions. 

Over-communication has a few caveats that you should be aware of. While keeping stakeholders informed, you’re not out to scare them with bleak pictures and nothing else. Aside from addressing the problem that creates the pressure, you don’t need to spell “doom and gloom” all the time during what may be an extended period of crisis. 

Similarly, you don’t want to just “give someone your problems” with your communications. Don’t fill hourly updates with “this is what we’re struggling with now” and nothing else. Ensure you include a more rounded communication: “This is what we’re struggling with, and this is our solution”. This key difference will ensure that others have confidence in your ability to perform under pressure.

And of course, throughout this process, listen! Take feedback on board as stakeholders point it out. It’s a valuable resource in a crisis, and it’s not a sign of weakness to act on it.

You’ll see that a lot of the above are qualities that come with experience. That’s what true business resilience is. Your career milestones and your dedicated training are what prepare you for the kind of pressure you’ll face in urgent business situations.