Under Stress, Our Patterns Lead the Way

Breaking outdated leadership models

Most leaders are running a model they never consciously chose — formed in earlier conditions, by leading under pressures that may no longer apply

Nobody sits down and designs their leadership style. It compounds over time.

It forms from the managers you worked under early, the ones you admired and the ones you swore you'd never become. From what got rewarded in the first environment where you had real responsibility. From what worked the first time the stakes were high and you had to do something. By the time you're senior, you have a working model of what leadership is — what a leader owes people, what they hold onto, when they intervene, what they can afford to show — and most of it was set before you had the standing to question it.

That model was probably well-adapted to where it formed.

Plenty of directive leadership is excellent, and plenty of collaborative leadership is theater. The question is simpler and more practical: does the model I'm actually running still fit the conditions I'm actually in?

Why you can't answer that by reflecting on your beliefs

Chris Argyris and Donald Schön drew a distinction that anyone examining their own leadership has to reckon with: the difference between your espoused theory — the values and reasoning you believe your behavior is based on — and your theory-in-use, the values actually implied by what you do (Argyris & Schön, 1974). Their central finding is that these two frequently diverge, and that people are typically unaware of their own theory-in-use. You can state your leadership philosophy sincerely and accurately and still be describing something other than the model that governs you.

Which means self-examination through stated beliefs doesn't get you there. Ask a leader what they believe about collaboration and you'll learn their espoused theory. Watch what they do when a decision is urgent, a project is exposed, and someone junior disagrees with them — that's the theory-in-use.

Argyris was clear that most people genuinely hold the values they claim. What he found is that they are unaware of the theory actually governing them — which is another way of saying that the behavior is being driven by patterns formed outside of conscious awareness. Under pressure, those patterns run first. Your stated values get a vote afterward, if at all.

Not something hidden and dramatic, but a way of responding driven by earlier experience, rehearsed enough to become automatic, and executing before you've decided anything.

What actually holds the old model in place

The next step is to surface the assumption driving the behavior — and that's the right move. What people often find is that naming it once doesn't hold. The insight is real, and the behavior comes back under stress. That's usually a signal that there's another layer underneath that hasn't been surfaced yet.

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey's work on what they call immunity to change describes that layer: a sincere commitment to a goal, sitting on top of a protective pattern — what they term a competing commitment — organized around keeping you safe from something, with both held in place by "big assumptions" that feel like plain facts rather than beliefs (Kegan & Lahey, 2009). A leader who genuinely wants to delegate more may hold an equally genuine, unexamined commitment to never being caught unprepared.

This reframes what's happening when a leader "reverts" to an older style in a hard moment. It's a protective structure doing what it was built to do — and it holds precisely because the assumption underneath it has never been examined as an assumption.

The corollary matters for anyone trying to do this work alone: the pattern is hidden from the same person trying to surface it. Reflection can genuinely help, but it can also reinforce the very beliefs you're trying to see, because you're using the model to examine the model. This is why the leaders who make real progress here almost always do it with someone who watches them work — a trusted colleague, a board, a practitioner — rather than through introspection alone.

The tell is what you do under stress

If beliefs won't show you the model, behavior will. And the moments that reveal it most reliably are the ones with pressure in them.

Watch yourself in the vulnerable moments: when a decision is urgent and information is incomplete, when someone questions you in front of others, when a project you own is going sideways, when you're tired and something needs handling now. What you do there — take control, go quiet, over-explain, decide alone, escalate, absorb it yourself — is the model showing its underlying pattern.

Then work backward. If that's what I did, what would I have to believe for that to be the right move? That question produces something more honest than "what do I believe about leadership," because it starts from evidence. And it tends to surface the assumption in a form you can finally look at: If I don't hold this myself, it won't get done right. If I show uncertainty, I'll lose the room. If I let that go unchallenged, I'll lose authority.

None of those are irrational beliefs. Every one of them was probably true somewhere. The question is whether it's true here, with these people, at this scale, under these conditions.

Updating the model

What changes a leadership model isn't just insight; it's also evidence. Kegan and Lahey's practical move is to treat the big assumption as a hypothesis and test it — deliberately, in a low-cost setting, and observe what actually happens rather than what you predicted would.

If the assumption is the team can't handle ambiguity, hand them a genuinely ambiguous problem and watch. If it's showing uncertainty costs me authority, say "I don't know yet, here's how I'll find out" in a room where the stakes are manageable, and notice what it actually does to the room. The point isn't to prove yourself wrong. It's to test and update a belief you inherited with information you gathered.

That's slower than a mindset reset, and it's also the thing that sticks. A model built from years of experience doesn't just yield to an insight. It updates with new experience.

The reframe

The work is to find the two or three places where the old model and the current conditions have become less effective, and to update those deliberately — with evidence, not exhortation. Most of what you built still serves you. The value is in knowing which parts don't.

References

Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness. Jossey-Bass.

Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming organizational defenses: Facilitating organizational learning. Allyn & Bacon.

Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organization. Harvard Business Press.