When pressure walks into the room
My last client had just left. The session had been full of contact and energy — the kind of conversation where something actually moves.
It stood in sharp contrast to the rest of my week. Almost every client I worked with was under pressure: restructurings, boards demanding answers, deadlines that don’t move. And that pressure didn’t stay outside the coaching room. It walked right in. I could feel it in the conversations — and in my own body.
I see this pattern in almost every industry, every company, every leadership team right now. Not because leaders are weak. Because pressure does something predictable to people, and to teams.
So the question I keep coming back to is this: What helps leaders stay connected when everything around them pushes them to disconnect?
What pressure does to leaders — and their teams
Pressure itself isn’t the problem. Leadership without pressure doesn’t exist. The problem is what pressure does to how we show up.
Pressure activates our inner drivers. Transactional analysis describes them as deeply learned rules: Be strong. Be perfect. Hurry up. Please others. Try hard. Most senior leaders got where they are partly because of them. Under pressure, they take over. That’s where stress really comes from — not the workload itself, but the version of ourselves that pressure turns us into.
Pressure makes teams rigid. Organizational research calls this threat-rigidity: when groups feel threatened, they take in less information, fall back on familiar routines and centralize control. In a senior leadership team, it looks like this:
- Fewer real conversations, more status updates
- Decisions pulled up to the CEO
- Dissent going quiet — or moving into hallway conversations
- Every function retreating into its own silo
If you’ve read my article on the six success factors of senior leadership teams, you’ll recognize the list. Behavioral integration, psychological safety and productive conflict are the first to go. Exactly when a leadership team needs its full collective intelligence, pressure shuts it down.
The common response is to push harder: more meetings, tighter control, more performance. What helps is the opposite. Don’t become someone else. Stay connected.
PACE: four anchors to stay connected
PACE is the operating system behind how we work at Leading Alive — in offsites, in coaching, and in my own practice. It isn’t a technique. It describes four qualities that keep leaders connected: with themselves, with the person in front of them, and with the situation.
P — Present
Connection starts with yourself — then ripples outward.
Presence means being fully in this conversation. Not in the next board meeting, not in yesterday’s crisis. It sounds simple. Under pressure, it’s the first thing to go.
Why it matters for business: Present teams spot real problems earlier and make better decisions faster. People bring their full intelligence to the table instead of their defense mechanisms.
In practice: Before a difficult meeting, take one minute. Where is my attention right now? What am I feeling? What is my body telling me — shoulders, jaw, breath? Your body registers stress before your mind admits it. Noticing it is your fastest way back to choice.
A — Alive
Your collective energy is your most honest leadership metric.
Energy isn’t a soft topic. Research on organizational energy shows that it’s not only about how much energy a team has, but what kind: productive, or corrosive and resigned. Under sustained pressure, teams easily slide into the latter. High energy plus trust equals aliveness. Depleted energy under pressure breeds burnout.
Why it matters for business: Teams that protect their aliveness adapt faster, innovate more and keep their best people. Your energy is contagious — it either lifts or drains the whole organization.
In practice: Open your next leadership meeting with one question: On a scale from 1 to 10, how much energy do you bring today — and what’s draining it?
C — Committed
The teams that win aren’t the smartest — they’re the most committed ones.
Commitment means radical honesty about direction and shared team norms. Not a strategy slide, but a felt agreement on where you’re going and how you want to work together.
Why it matters for business: Misalignment is expensive. Commitment is the antidote. Committed teams make braver decisions and stay the course when it gets hard. Accountability that sticks comes from commitment, not from rules.
In practice: Ask your team: What have we really committed to — and what are we just saying?
E — Embodied
Your team grows when your leaders grow. Everything else is theater.
Embodied means you don’t just know it — you live it. Insights from a workshop fade within weeks. What lasts is what has become part of you: how you stand, how you breathe, which emotions you allow — and whether all of this radiates what you stand for as a leader.
Why it matters for business: Leaders who embody new ways of leading give their organization permission to change — culturally and behaviorally, not just strategically. Embodied leadership is sustainable leadership.
In practice: Ask yourself: Which posture and which emotional state express my leadership purpose — and which ones contradict it? Then build routines that keep you connected to it: a short mindfulness practice before the day starts, regular sport, a check-in with yourself and your team before key meetings. You’ll find practices for this in Self-Empowered Leadership, the workbook I co-authored.
The prerequisite: the other person is different
PACE keeps you connected. But connection with others rests on one prerequisite that sounds almost too simple: accepting that the other person is different. It’s not about right or wrong.
Under pressure, this is what we lose first. Difference starts to feel like resistance. A different view becomes a problem to fix, not a perspective to understand.
In my work, two moves make the difference:
- Share your perspective with courage. Say what you see, think and feel — clearly, without softening the truth.
- Explore other perspectives with curiosity. Ask before you judge. Listen to understand, not to reply.
Courage without curiosity turns into dominance. Curiosity without courage turns into avoidance. Together, they create the dialogue senior teams need most when the pressure is highest. Martin Buber described this as meeting the other as a “Thou”, not an “It” — I’ve written more about it here.
From knowing to living
Back to my client. The energy in that session didn’t come from a clever intervention. It came from both of us staying connected — present, alive, committed to the work and grounded in our bodies — while the pressure was real.
That’s the point of PACE. It’s not something you learn once. It’s a practice, and it matters most exactly when it’s hardest.
Questions for you and your leadership team:
- When pressure hits, what disconnects first — the conversation, the relationship, or yourself?
- Which of your inner drivers takes over under stress?
- Where does your team retreat into silos instead of leaning in?
- What would change if you stayed connected exactly when it matters most?
Ready to Build a Leadership Team That Stays Connected Under Pressure?
Or book a 30-minute intro call. No commitment, no consulting pitch — just a real conversation: hello@alive.berlin
References:
Bergstein, J., Lassalle, J. & Ritter, F. (2022). Self-Empowered Leadership: Führungslust statt Führungsfrust – Ein Workbook. Vahlen. | Bruch, H. & Vogel, B. (2011). Fully Charged: How Great Leaders Boost Their Organization’s Energy and Ignite High Performance. Harvard Business Review Press. | Hackman, J.R. (2002). Leading Teams. Harvard Business Press. | Stewart, I. & Joines, V. (2012). TA Today: A New Introduction to Transactional Analysis (2nd ed.). Lifespace Publishing. | Kahler, T. & Capers, H. (1974). The Miniscript. Transactional Analysis Journal, 4(1). | Staw, B.M., Sandelands, L.E. & Dutton, J.E. (1981). Threat-Rigidity Effects in Organizational Behavior. Administrative Science Quarterly, 26(4).
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In my coaching studio in Berlin-Charlottenburg, as well as through online/remote coaching, I support my clients in exploring their unique leadership style. Leadership coaching and business coaching are effective, scientifically proven ways to improve performance as a leader. To ensure the quality of my coaching, I am a member of the DBVC, Germany’s largest professional coaching association.