When a leader is stuck in a stress bubble, it can be difficult for them to pinpoint the root cause of problems in the team.
It’s something most of us who lead teams know well. We’re not going on the rampage, we’re just slightly more… present in everyone else’s work than usual.
A few more check-ins and requests to be cc’d into emails. Opinions offered as casual observations, when everyone knows they’re actually instructions.
Our standards can get very loud when we’re stressed!
The thing about stress is that it starts fairly innocuously: the business feeling some pressure, clients are twitchy, margins are thinner than we’d like. Maybe someone good has left, or there’s a disruptive behaviour that’s been unsettling the team for months. We’re the one holding it together, feeling like we’re doing a great job and not realising that what we’re actually starting to do is take over.
Without meaning to, we start to micromanage. I’m not judging. I’ve seen it up close in leadership teams, and I’ve done it myself too. Stress is universal, after all.
But stress doesn’t stay inside us. It spills out and over everything: how we make decisions, how we speak to people, what we tolerate, and what we avoid. Once it’s “on everything”, we start calling the symptoms “team issues”, when quite often the root cause is nearer to home.
Under sustained pressure, the prefrontal cortex, the part that helps us plan, prioritise, hold complexity, and weigh options, gets overloaded. An overloaded prefrontal cortex doesn’t make us incapable, but it does make our thinking and behaviour narrower.
At the same time, the brain’s threat response becomes more active. In threat mode, we start craving three things in particular: certainty, autonomy, and status. Certainty because ambiguity feels unsafe, autonomy because constraint feels like danger, and status because criticism lands harder than it should.
This is why leadership stress so often turns into control, sharpness, or indecision. It’s not a personality flaw; it’s a universal human pattern.
Because stress can be difficult to recognise, we still feel rational and can still justify our decisions. But what makes the difference is the flavour of those decisions.
Under pressure, we prioritise what’s loud over what’s important. We make decisions that reduce discomfort quickly, rather than decisions that protect the long-term health of the business.
Sometimes we speed up, which can look decisive, but more often that’s the threat response trying to shut down uncertainty.
Other times we stall. Decision paralysis creeps in because the decision has become a complex bundle of issues, so we delay, or keep mulling it over, or constantly change our minds, revisiting something until the team can’t tell whether it’s really decided at all.
If we’re leading as a group, stress does something else: it makes people cautious with each other. There’s less challenge and candour, and more mood-management. Lots of talk, plenty of motion, but not much clarity.
We might not recognise that we’re stressed, but our team does. They might not call it stress, they’ll call it a mood, but they adapt to it.
They adapt to our tone, our impatience, what we’ll pounce on and what we let slide, then months later we wonder why the team dynamic feels so stuck.
The most common pattern is a control reflex. Micromanagement causes people to hesitate in their own actions. It’s not laziness, it’s because the system is learning that real ownership lives at the top. So the loop closes: stress drives control, control drives dependency, dependency drives more stress.
Alongside control, stress often brings a brittle edge. We’re quicker to interrupt, judge, or land a point with more force than necessary. We see it as efficiency; the team experiences it as a threat, and they speak up less.
Once people sense the atmosphere won’t reward candour, they quietly withdraw: gradually less initiative, less candour.
People start to ask themselves why they should bother.
It’s not dramatic, it’s cumulative.
When things feel messy, most leaders respond with more effort: more hours, more oversight, more meetings, more urgency. It feels responsible, but it also trains the organisation to centralise everything around us. If we step in quickly enough, people don’t have to stretch. If we carry the ambiguity, they don’t have to tolerate it. If we absorb the discomfort, they don’t have to have the awkward conversation.
In the short term, it can look like competence. In the long term, it traps us – which is why burnout often feels less like tiredness and more like being permanently needed.
If trying harder worked, most leadership teams would be living in a state of permanent bliss. But we’re not short on effort. We’re short on space.
Self-awareness creates space, not as a trite slogan, but as a practical ability. Noticing our state early enough to choose our response, rather than letting stress choose it for us.
It’s the point at which, if we catch ourselves thinking, “I have to get involved,” we can ask whether that’s actually true, or whether it’s our threat response chasing certainty, autonomy, or status.
The difficulty is that when we most need to notice our state, we’re least likely to. That’s what makes it a practice, not a one-off insight.
Happily, reinvention isn’t the answer. Instead, we need a few interruptions to the pattern.
1) The internal weather check (60 seconds, twice a day)
Morning and pre-meeting: What’s my internal weather? Pressure? Irritation? Worry? Need for control? Name it. Then ask yourself: If the team experienced me at my best today, what would they notice?
2) The pause protocol (before decisions with consequences)
Take thirty seconds to ask yourself: If I weren’t stressed, what would I do? What would our values look like in action? What’s the second-order impact? It brings the prefrontal cortex back online, even a little.
3) The control audit (weekly)
At the end of a week ask: Where did I pull something upwards that didn’t need me? Where did I “help” in a way that reduced ownership? Hand back one thing properly: outcomes and standards agreed, then you step out.
4) The conversation we’re avoiding (early, clean, values-led)
Name the behaviour, name the impact, set the standard, agree what changes. Don’t be dramatic, but do be clear. Most of the pain is in the delay.
When we do these small things consistently, the organisation changes around us. Decisions get cleaner because there’s less emotional noise. Ownership rises because control reduces. People speak up earlier because the atmosphere is steadier.
Stress will always be part of leadership. But it shouldn’t, and doesn’t have to, be the thing that trains the culture.
If any of this feels uncomfortably familiar – the tightening grip, the overloaded prefrontal cortex, the threat response chasing certainty, and the friction that never quite goes away, we can help.
We use behaviour analytics to make self-awareness tangible: patterns in how we lead under pressure, what we overuse, what we avoid, and where the gaps are between stated values and lived experience.
If you’d like a conversation about that, get in touch. Sometimes one good discussion is enough to turn stress from “something that’s happening to us” into “something we can lead through.”
And if nothing else, take the smallest step from this piece: notice your internal weather – and don’t let it get on everything.
So, when it comes to stress . . . stay curious!
All journeys start with a first step. Take yours today.
Identify your priorities by completing the Clarity Matrix™ Scorecard, or just get in touch. We are happy to arrange an informal chat. This will help you clarify your needs and how we may be able to help you achieve your strategic objectives.
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