The approach to take in any high-stakes situation will depend on your personality, skills and learned behaviours. Having worked with hundreds of leaders facing pressure, there are three things that the high-performers do differently and do well.
They have acute self awareness.
Imagine you’re an emerging leader thrown into a high-pressure situation – executives are depending on you – what mode do you adopt?
Are you going to hold your input back so as not to risk putting your neck out and getting something badly wrong? Are you going to overestimate your importance to the situation and overstep the mark? Or are you going to play your role with finesse?
I’ve seen this go right and horribly wrong. When it goes right, the leader inserts and extracts themself from the pressure situation with ease.
An example of it going wrong is when the emerging leader sees it as an opportunity to force their way into the executive huddle. While the group wants them to step up – yes – they are not necessarily inviting them to belong.
The self aware leader understands their natural strengths, impacts on others and default tendencies.
Another stand-out trait is being comfortable in saying what they don’t know.
They quickly grasp situations.
High-pressure situations require cool heads and I’ve admired how the good operators cut through the noise to work out what’s at stake, who to bring in and what type of response is required.
They will assess the situational ‘type’ and act accordingly. Is it an operational issue, a strategic matter, an existential crisis or cultural concern?
They know who will be valuable, who they must influence and who to keep informed. When they are driving the decision they prioritise coherence over reaching for consensus.
Quickly grasping the situation sets them on the right path.
They bring depth of process.
In any high stakes situation, there is a danger of being purely reactive and not using the time and space available to make well-considered decisions.
That’s not to say there won’t be time-critical decisions – whatever the situation, having a bulletproof process that takes advantage of whatever time, information and expertise exists is paramount.
They consider alternative options and stress test them. They make use of AI generated inputs and outputs as needed in a sensible way.
Their decisions aren’t flippant, they’re robust and defensible.
What’s the big take away?
What strikes me most watching this play out again and again is that they don’t pretend to have the answers before walking into the room.
It’s about how they carry themselves once they’re in it: aware of their own impacts, quick to read what’s actually needed and disciplined enough to avoid knee-jerk responses.
That combination supports ‘adaptability’ in practice: bouncing forward from pressure situations rather than getting weighed down inside them.
The leaders who get this right aren’t the loudest or the most confident in the room – they’re the ones still standing and thinking clearly where others have faltered.
Phil Preston is a keynote speaker and provider of strategic facilitation and stakeholder engagement services. He draws on decades of experience in corporate and community leadership roles to help guide leaders, teams and organisations through disruption and change. He can be contacted via phil@philpreston.com.au
