Hi {{first_name}}

A leadership team can become quieter at exactly the moment a leader most needs to hear what it knows.

The difficult questions arrive later. The team softens emerging problems before they escalate to the top. People leave meetings with concerns they decided not to voice. The leader sees greater alignment. The organisation may actually be losing candour.

It is tempting to explain this as a problem with the team. Perhaps people need to be more courageous. Perhaps they are resisting change or avoiding accountability.

But there is another possibility. Pressure may have changed the way the leader is behaving, and that change may influence what other people are willing to say and do.

What’s more, the leader may be the last person to notice.

From inside the pressure, very little feels unusual.

You shorten the discussion because a decision is overdue. You involve fewer people because the situation is sensitive. You challenge an objection more firmly because the team needs direction. You postpone a difficult conversation because there is already enough disruption.

You can defend each decision. Together, they can create a condition nobody intended: people become more careful around the leader.

They anticipate which questions will receive a positive response, which concerns the leader will view as resistance, and how much bad news the leader can handle at the moment. Nobody needs to be explicitly silenced. They simply edit themselves before speaking.

Recent research from Insights found that 81 per cent of 880 HR and people leaders had observed senior executives behaving differently during significant organisational change. Among the leaders whose behaviour was seen as becoming more negative, 44 per cent appeared unaware that it had changed. Reported changes included less collaboration, reduced tolerance of different opinions, faster unilateral decisions, and less transparent communication.

That does not mean every behavioural change under pressure is harmful. Greater visibility, pace, and decisiveness may be exactly what the organisation needs. The important question is what those changes make possible, and what they quietly prevent.

Pressure narrows attention towards whatever feels most at risk: the deadline, the client, the numbers, the credibility of the plan, or confidence in our leadership.

Our response can then become automatic. In my Leading Unmasked approach, I call this the Mask. It is the learned pattern that reacts when something feels psychologically dangerous, often before we have consciously decided what the situation requires.

The Mask rarely presents its response as fear or defensiveness. It supplies a leadership justification for it.

Tighter control becomes decisiveness. Limiting discussion becomes protecting momentum. Withholding uncertainty becomes maintaining confidence. Avoiding a difficult conversation becomes choosing the right time.

The justification may contain some truth. That makes the pattern difficult to recognise. The decision can be reasonable while its cumulative effect is damaging.

A leader may genuinely intend to create clarity while other people experience less room to contribute. They may intend to accelerate execution while making it less likely that inconvenient information will reach them. Their intentions remain intact. Yet, the decision environment around them may have changed.

Leaders cannot resolve this simply by thinking harder about whether they have changed. Introspection still begins with the person whose perception may have narrowed.

They need current evidence from the people experiencing their leadership.

One question can reveal more than a general request for feedback:

What has become harder to raise with me since the pressure increased?

The question is useful because it moves beyond whether people like the leader's style. It asks whether the flow of information has changed.

If somebody answers, ask for an example and then ask what effect it is having. Do not explain why the behaviour was necessary. The explanation may be accurate, and the effect may still be real.

One observation may reflect a personal preference. Similar examples from several people suggest a pattern worth examining. The task is not to become less decisive or to remove pressure from leadership. It is to decide deliberately which adaptations are helping the organisation and which are narrowing its ability to think, challenge and execute.

Pressure can bring out courage, focus, and resourcefulness. It can also make the responses that feel safest to us look like the only responsible way to lead.

Under pressure, the leadership question is not simply whether you are coping. It is whether the organisation can still tell you what you need to know.

Until next week,

Gavin

Insights, New research reveals how leadership behaviour impacts productivity during change (2026)