Twenty years inside fast-growing companies taught me the same lesson over and over. Under pressure, leaders stop leading the way they intend to and start leading the way they were raised.

That is eventually why I went back to school. Last year I finished a master's in counseling psychology at Santa Clara, and finishing it forced a choice. I could become a therapist and work with people one at a time, or I could bring what I had learned into the HR work I was already doing inside companies.

I chose the companies. I have never regretted it, and I have never found it simple.

A company is not a strategy with people attached to it. It is a system of human beings, each one shaped by how they were raised and what they have lived through, making decisions together under pressure. At Series A to C, that pressure is constant. A board, investors, customers, and a runway that is always shorter than you want it to be. How you handle stress becomes an operating input to running the business.

Scaling Oscar Health from 250 to 1,000 people, leading HR at Hippo through its NYSE listing, and now sitting beside founders in the worst weeks of their companies, I have watched this happen at every stage and in every kind of company. It is not a character flaw. It is how nervous systems work. But it is visible to every person who works for you, and it quietly sets the ceiling on what your company can execute.

So the question worth asking is not whether you are a good leader. It is which operating mode you are in right now.

1. Crisis

I once spent forty-five minutes with a CEO who talked without stopping. I said almost nothing. It was not a conversation; it was a release. That evening the same CEO sent an email with thirty new things to accomplish, none of which we had previously discussed.

That is crisis mode. You are in fight-or-flight, which means you cannot take in new information. Meetings become venting. Decisions get made afterward, alone, late at night. Your team experiences this as constant redirection, and eventually they stop starting things, because they have learned that whatever they start will be replaced by Friday.

If this is you, the way out is not working harder. It is shrinking the field. Name no more than three priorities for the next thirty days and say out loud what you are not doing. Find one person, a coach, an advisor, a fractional people leader, whose job is to be the calm in the room with you. And set a rule for yourself about late-night email. Write it, save it as a draft, and read it again in the morning before you send it. If it is not kind, true, or necessary: delete it.

2. Surviving

Two moments, both from this year.

A CEO sat down with their co-founder in the middle of a fundraise and said, clearly and calmly, that the co-founder's behavior was damaging the team. They did not avoid it. They did not blow it up. They said the true thing at the hardest possible time.

And a leadership team at an offsite, with their new CEO sitting in the room, said out loud what the previous CEO had done to them. That they had not felt safe. That they had learned to stay quiet to get through the week. Then they spent the rest of the day deciding together what values and behaviors they wanted to operate with instead. It was one of the braver things I have watched a group of executives do.

That is surviving, and I do not mean it as an insult. Surviving is when you can still do the hard thing, and doing it costs you most of what you have that day. Your judgment is intact. Your capacity is not.

The risk is that surviving looks like success from the outside, so leaders stay there. It is sustainable for a quarter. It is not sustainable for a year. If this is you, the work is capacity, not courage. What are you carrying that someone else should own? Which decisions are you still making that your leadership team should be making without you? There are almost always two or three sitting on your desk that do not belong there.

The hardest version of surviving is the one you inherit. You walk into a company where the last person in your seat left damage, and you are running the business while a team that has no reason to trust you decides whether to. You inherit the flinch without having earned it. It feels unfair, and it does not matter. This is what systems do. They keep the behavior long after the person who taught it is gone.

Which is why asking and then changing nothing is worse than never asking, and why that offsite ended in behaviors the team chose for themselves. What your predecessor took was their authority to act. Not their competence and not their commitment, their authority. Choosing their own behaviors was the first piece of it they took back. Your job is to keep handing it over long after the offsite is over.

3. Thriving

The clearest picture of thriving I have seen recently was completely undramatic. A CEO sat down with a senior leader on his team after an executive interview and ran a real debrief. He gave them direct feedback on how they had shown up. Nobody got defensive.

That is the tell. Not that everything is going well, but that a CEO can give hard feedback and nobody in the room gets defensive.

If this is you, do not coast. This is the window for the structural work: compensation architecture, the manager layer, the performance system, the org design for the headcount you are about to add. You will not have the bandwidth in six months. The companies that come through their next crisis intact are the ones that built the infrastructure while they were calm.

The part that is harder than any of this

As a young consultant, I was convinced I could change someone's behavior through sheer force of will. Enough one-on-ones, enough coaching, enough carefully worded feedback, and surely they would change.

They do not. Unless a person genuinely wants to change their behavior, they will not, and no amount of skill on my side substitutes for that. I learned to ask early whether I actually have a client, meaning someone who has decided they want to be different, or whether I have someone who is simply going through the motions.

You can ask yourself the same question. Think about the last time someone gave you hard feedback. What did you actually do with it? If the honest answer is that you explained why they were wrong, that is worth sitting with. Your team already knows the answer; ask them.

Why this matters more now, not less

The reflex right now is to solve everything with tools. Tools are useful, and I recommend them. But no system will have the hard conversation with your co-founder, absorb a board's disappointment without passing it down to your team, or notice that your best engineer has gone quiet. That work is yours, and it is the part of the job that compounds.

At Lenhardt Partners, we call this Human Intelligence. Designing organizations where people, leadership, and systems hold together under real pressure. Not in theory. On the worst week of the quarter.

So one question for you. Which of the three operating modes are you in right now, and does your leadership team know? Reply and tell me. I read every one.

Stay human, friends.

~Anna