Your team is busy, people are putting the hours in, and yet something isn’t working. Decisions still feel slower than they “should” be. Good people keep leaving. Managers are drowning and nobody really knows why. Everyone says they’re overwhelmed – but when you actually look at their workload, there doesn’t seem enough to justify it.
The root cause: uncontrolled pressure is contorting your team and distorting the picture around you – below, I’ll explain how to control leadership stress in your managers, so you can lead your team more effectively and get the growth you want.
It’s not the workload – it’s leadership stress
When I sit with a founder describing all of the above, the first thing I tell them is that the workload is irrelevant. I know that’s hard to hear when everyone around you is saying they’re stretched (including you!) but the workload is just what people reach for as an explanation because it’s the most familiar language.
“I’m really busy.”
“I’m stretched.”
“I’ve got too much on.”
They’re not lying – they’re using the most common phrases they know to describe a feeling. The problem is that the language assumes that the symptom (overwhelming workload) is the root cause of the problem… and it isn’t.
What’s actually happening: people are operating under sustained, unregulated stress, and when the brain is under sustained stress, it releases cortisol.
Cortisol is your survival mechanism. It exists to get you through a crisis – it narrows your focus, speeds up your reactions, and fixes all of your attention on the immediate threat in front of you.
The problem is that the brain cannot distinguish between a physical threat and a professional one. Tight finances, constant change, uncertainty at the top – it all registers the same way, so the brain goes into self-preservation mode.
What does that mean in practical terms? Your primitive brain makes decisions based on emotional reasoning with the end goal of ensuring your survival – and survival means getting from one minute to the next.
Not thinking about what the repercussions will be next week or next month or next year. Not considering that long-term goal you have. Not thinking about the picture – that’s not its job, it can’t risk you thinking like that, because it doesn’t believe you’re going to survive until the end of the day.
So it makes you short-term. It makes you forget strategy, and focus only on what you can see right in front of you: the immediate problem, the immediate threat, the thing that needs to be dealt with right now. Everything else falls away.
That’s the thing that’s really driving the behaviour around you right now. Leadership stress is in control, not strategy..
Not bad attitudes either. Not workload. A biological response to sustained pressure, playing out at every level of your business.
I spoke about this topic in my last blog on reactive leadership, and looked specifically at how it impacted strategy, SLTs and higher-level decision making.
Today though we’re looking at middle managers and how pressure shows up in their world – as well as how to start treating it effectively.
What does leadership under stress look like in practice?
Once you understand the mechanism, the symptoms make complete sense. Let’s look at three common scenarios…
1. The manager who can’t let go
They’re not a control freak by nature, they’re just trapped in fight or flight. They’re in self-preservation mode, which means trusting someone else to do something genuinely feels dangerous. What if it goes wrong? What if the client complains?
The perceived risk of handing something over is bigger than the cost of holding onto it. So they hold onto everything, the work backs up, they’re permanently overwhelmed, and they tell themselves they can’t trust anyone to do things properly.
Except here’s the question I always ask: when they stepped into that new leadership position, did you actually sit down and explain to them what would change? For example, what you now want them to focus on, how their workload should change, what they’ll be held personally responsible for, what you expect of them, what work is deemed as valuable at their level and so on?
Because in most cases, the answer is no. Usually through the guise of a busy schedule, directors rush the handover, assume the other person will figure it out, and then blame the output.
Problem: you can’t delegate properly in a self-preservation state, because cortisol doesn’t have the patience for it. How this translates on the outside: “If they do it I’ll spend ages fixing their work as they learn. If I do it, it’ll take 10 minutes”… but those 10 minutes stack up, don’t they? So you end up in a cycle: rushed delegation, disappointing results, reinforced belief that no one else can do it.
The workload never shrinks, because the stress never lifts.
2. The manager who avoids every difficult conversation
When it comes to difficult discussions, your primitive mind is doing a risk calculation – and in that state, the fear of what might happen if they say the wrong thing, or lose the client, or upset the person, feels bigger than the cost of saying nothing… so often, nothing gets said.
Problems compound.
Communication shuts down even further.
Small issues become large ones, because nobody addressed them when they were small.
Or worse – directors get dragged in to handle things and now there’s a precedent to keep doing it.
Your brain can’t distinguish between running from a tiger and running from an awkward conversation – when a threat comes in, it’s dealt with in the same way… unless you have a protocol in place for handling it.
3. The manager who doesn’t bill for billable work
This sounds like a process problem – on the surface it is, but the root cause is a fear-led decision making. Let’s play out the classic “scope creep” scenario where this comes up. A client wants something and either assumes or asks “can you just include that in our regular retainer”. In that moment, your manager has a choice: to bill, or not to bill… and this is where their threat response takes hold.
Everyone’s brain has a default response – they may not have designed it intentionally or strategically, and it may not give them the result they even want, but in times of stress, that default comes racing to the rescue.
Most people also have a natural tendency to want to be liked (it’s what kept us alive in social groups), and so becoming a people pleaser under stress is a common side effect – their default in this scenario may be to think about the fear of losing the client, of them pushing back, of having to justify the cost – all of that registers as a threat.
Cortisol, adrenaline and everything else designed to get you up and running away from that bear charging towards you releases into your system and signals get sent to the brain telling you to avoid the threat… and so the work goes unbilled.
The business undercharges. Revenue leaks, and nobody understands why. They try to fix it by having easy docs for quick quotes or tighter contracts… but all the process tweaks in the world won’t fix a mental block.
How does leadership under stress affect your team?
The thing about a stress-led leadership team is that the behaviour doesn’t stay at the top. It trickles down throughout the whole business, because the behaviour patterns of the people in charge set the standard for everyone below them.
When managers are overwhelmed and can’t delegate, everyone below them becomes dependent. The manager feels chaotic, so they try to exert control over the only things they can, but they over-play it, and everyone else feels it.
Their direct reports stop making decisions themselves because every time they’ve tried, they’ve been second-guessed or overruled. They escalate everything, which means the managers who were already overwhelmed are now fielding every decision in the business, turning themselves into bottlenecks, trusting people less, and delegating even less than that. The cycle tightens.
When c-suiters keep changing business direction at a higher level, it’s much the same thing, but instead of control being the issue, it’s uncertainty. If a senior leadership team pivots again and again and again out of market fear, the wider team never knows what they’re supposed to be doing.
They can’t commit to a plan because the plan changes.
They can’t build confidence in their own judgement because the goalposts move.
They live in a state of permanent uncertainty – not because their workload is too heavy, but because they have no stable ground… and living in permanent uncertainty is exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with how many tasks are on a list.
What you end up with is a culture nobody designed.
Victim mindsets everywhere – people who won’t take action without being told to, because independent action and proactivity stopped feeling safe a long time ago.
Hero managers drowning in their own self-imposed workload.
An SLT pulling in different directions, and a business that can’t understand why it feels so hard to move forward.
Why changing the structure doesn’t fix leadership stress
When things feel stuck, the instinct is to go operational – mainly because humans love measuring things. Focusing on what’s tangible, what they can see.
Restructuring.
Redistributing workload.
Improving processes.
Running a team away day.
Don’t get me wrong – sometimes, genuinely, some of those things are a tactical part of the solution – but when done in isolation where the underlying issue is that people are operating from a place of self-preservation, none of that fixes the actual problem.
The stress response isn’t a structural issue. It’s embedded in every single one of your people.
While you can reorganise a business perfectly on paper, you’ll often end up watching the exact same patterns re-emerge, because you’ve moved the people around without changing what’s driving their behaviour.
How to manage leadership stress
To effectively manage leadership stress, we need to build resilience into the very culture and foundation of the business. We need solutions both for organisational pressure and individual stress responses.
Thing is, the only way to get around a stress response like this is to learn to work with it, not try to override it. While that’s going to be very unique to your company, there are some core principles to keep in mind, so here are three simple steps to help you move forward…
1. Look under the hood
Before anything else, you need to map where the stress lives within your business.
Which people are carrying it?
Is it in certain layers of the business or departments?
How is it showing up in the way they work?
Can you see it in the way they communicate?
Are the decisions they’re making long-term and intentional or short-term and reactive?
These questions are a starting point for a session you can run either on your own as a founder or with your leadership team – but you’ve got to be honest and specific, because you can’t address something you’re describing in generalities and trying not to offend one another.
This means looking at yourself too.
Founders and senior leaders are some of the biggest culprits for stress-led thinking because they feel the weight and impact of their decisions if they get it wrong.
The weight of responsibility makes them more susceptible to it, if anything, and because they set the tone, their stress response has the most reach of anyone in the business.
2. Get people involved in the solution
Once you know where the stress is coming from, the next step is working out what needs to change – and the crucial thing here is that it has to be worked out with the people who are going to execute whatever action it is.
It cannot just be passed down to them – and this isn’t just good management practice for generating buy-in, it’s based on how the brain works.
The brain is far more likely to act on something it feels it had a hand in creating. When people are involved in identifying the problem and shaping the answer, they become advocates for the change rather than resistors of it.
You’re not the one who came up with it. They did. That makes all the difference to whether it actually gets actioned.
An organisation is never too big or too small for this – the format might just change a little depending on the size and structure of your time.
It might mean a session with everyone. It might mean managers running their own conversations and feeding back. The format matters less than the principle.
3. Give people the tools to actually make the shift
Here’s where most change efforts fall over…
You identify the problem.
You get people involved.
You agree on a new way forward.
But then you announce it… nothing changes.
Not because people don’t want it to change, but because wanting things to be different and having the tools to make them different are not the same thing.
People are not wired to welcome change. The brain treats the unknown as threatening, which means even a change that everyone agrees is positive will meet resistance, because the brain is pattern-matching it against uncertainty and flagging it as a risk.
Knowing this doesn’t make it go away, but it does mean you can plan for it.
Building in support for the transition, whether that’s one-to-one coaching, group sessions, process changes, or all three, is not optional. It’s the part that makes the difference between change that sticks and change that reverts back to old habits.
Your next step
I realise this is a lot to go through, and if it helps, I’ve put together a full breakdown of what stress does in each of the three core areas of a business – leadership, team, and strategy – along with the science behind why people resist change and these three steps laid out in a bit more detail.
The guide free to share with your team and you can grab it here.
However, even after going through this, you may well still have questions – or maybe it’s one big question around a specific person in your organisation.
Whatever your situation, if you want to work through it with someone rather than trying to navigate this alone just drop me a DM and we’ll get to the root cause together over a cuppa.
