The reason your leadership development is not working has nothing to do with the programme

Harvard Business Review recently published a piece by Amy Elizabeth Fox and Lena Triantogiannis of Egon Zehnder and Mobius Executive Leadership. The title: The Nervous System of Performance.

The argument, in brief: under pressure, leaders do not default to their best thinking. They default to their most primitive survival strategies, shaped by early experiences. More effort, more drive, more speed. Short-term results, long-term narrowing. The harder they push, the less they access.

I have been thinking about it since I read it. Not because it is surprising. Because it names something I see every week in the leaders I work with, and that almost no leadership development programme addresses.

What conventional development misses

Most leadership development works on the surface. Skills, behaviours, frameworks. How to give feedback. How to delegate. How to have a difficult conversation. How to be a more strategic thinker.

These are not bad things to learn. But they sit on top of something that does not get examined.

Fox and Triantogiannis describe it as the internal system. The accumulated responses to early experiences, often small ones, that shape how a leader reacts under pressure. Not abuse or dramatic trauma necessarily. A teacher who embarrassed them in front of the class. A parent who was emotionally unavailable. A peer group that excluded them at a critical moment. Events that, at the time, produced a survival response.

The survival response was appropriate then. It protected something. The problem is that it does not update automatically. Decades later, the same response activates in a board meeting, in a difficult conversation with a co-founder, in the moment when the quarter is not going the way it should.

The leader who over-controls under pressure. The one who withdraws when things get complicated. The one who becomes certain when certainty is least warranted. The one who avoids conflict until it becomes unavoidable. These are not personality traits. They are survival strategies that have outlived their original purpose.

And they are, as the article notes, remarkably resistant to conventional coaching.

Why working harder does not help

The pattern Fox and Triantogiannis describe is one I recognise immediately. Leaders under pressure reach for the same tools that got them here: more effort, more speed, more control. It works until it stops working.

Over time, this increases reactivity, reduces self-awareness, and narrows creativity. Leaders work harder but access less.

This is a precise description of what burnout looks like from the inside before it becomes visible from the outside. The person is working at full capacity. They are producing results. They are exhausted in a way they cannot fully explain, because the exhaustion is not from the volume of work but from the energy consumed by the internal system running in the background.

I know this not only from the leaders I work with. I know it from August 2024, when I stopped being able to work. Not because I lacked motivation or commitment. Because the system that had been running in the background, the one I had never examined, had finally consumed more than I had to give.

What the HBR article describes as the nervous system of performance is the same thing I call what is below the surface. The patterns that are driving behaviour without being visible. The responses that feel like who you are but are actually what you learned to do when things were unsafe.

What actually changes things

Fox and Triantogiannis describe five elements of trauma-informed leadership development. The one that I think matters most is the fourth: suspending judgment.

Every survival response was once a solution. It served a purpose. Trying to eliminate it only reinforces it. The capacity for a leader to acknowledge what is happening inside them, without immediately trying to fix or suppress it, is the beginning of something different.

This is also the hardest thing to create in a conventional development context. It requires an environment where the leader feels genuinely safe, not performatively safe, to be uncertain and vulnerable. Senior executives are not accustomed to that environment. They are rewarded for certainty, for having answers, for appearing in control.

The insight that is hardest to reach in a coaching conversation or a leadership programme is also the one that changes the most: that the thing getting in the way is not a skill gap. It is a response pattern that made sense at some point and has been running on autopilot ever since.

Once a leader can see that pattern clearly, not judge it, not suppress it, just see it, the range of available responses expands. The meeting that used to trigger rigidity produces curiosity instead. The conflict that used to activate avoidance becomes a conversation.

Not because the leader learned a new skill. Because something underneath became visible.

What this means for how I work

The article ends with a note that this work should not be done without a trained practitioner. I agree, with a qualification.

Not every leader needs trauma-informed therapy or an immersive residential programme, though for some people that is exactly the right intervention. But every leader benefits from a space where the patterns that are running below the surface can be named without judgment.

That is what I try to create in the work I do. Not a curriculum. Not a set of skills to learn. A space where what is actually happening in the room can be seen for what it is.

The conversation that does that is sometimes uncomfortable. It is also, in my experience, the one that people remember months later. Not because of what was said, but because of what became visible that they had not been able to see before.

That visibility is where the real work begins.

The Nervous System of Performance by Amy Elizabeth Fox and Lena Triantogiannis was published in Harvard Business Review in June 2026.

Mees Loman is the founder of Loman Leadership, a leadership coaching practice for founders and leadership teams of fast-growing companies in Amsterdam and beyond. lomanleadership.com