Why Inclusive Leadership Is Hardest Exactly When It Matters Most
Most leaders I work with would describe themselves as inclusive. They genuinely believe in being open, in creating space for different voices, in the value of psychological safety, and in wanting their teams to feel heard. In a development session, with time to reflect and no particular urgency, they can articulate all of this thoughtfully.
What I recognise all to often, is that in practice back in the workplace the gaps start to show. It’s in the meeting where someone raises a concern and the leader moves on without really hearing it. In the decision that gets made by the most confident voice in the room because the pressure to move quickly felt too great. In the team member who notices something important but stays quiet, because experience has taught them this isn't the moment. For most of the leaders I work with, this isn't about them lacking knowledge but instead it’s their capacity to deliver under pressure. Inclusive leadership takes deliberate effort, and deliberate effort is precisely what becomes hardest to sustain when the environment gets difficult.
The Pressure Point
The conditions most leaders are navigating right now are genuinely demanding. Middle managers - the people most responsible for translating organisational values into day-to-day reality - are under more sustained pressure than at any point in recent memory. I’ve shared before the stats where 45% of middle managers report burnout, a higher rate than any other employee group. Span of control has doubled in the past 10 years, which in practical terms means most managers today are responsible for significantly more people than their predecessors were, with no additional time or resource to support them. Research consistently shows that most managers spend less than half their working hours actually managing; the rest is absorbed by reporting, administration and the general pull of organisational complexity.
In technical sectors - engineering, pharmaceuticals, energy, healthcare - there's an additional layer that I see regularly: many of the people now in leadership roles got there because they were excellent at the technical job. They're deeply capable. But the skills that made them outstanding engineers, scientists or clinicians aren't always the ones that serve them when leading people, and their comfort zone, understandably, still pulls them back towards doing rather than leading. On top of this, leaders are tackling the complex challenge of adopting AI while managing shrinking teams. Many managers feel their organisations lack the necessary AI expertise, and with widespread plans for headcount reductions by the end of 2026, they're being asked to guide their teams through major disruption while grappling with their own uncertainty. The people being asked to guide teams through this level of disruption are managing their own uncertainty about it at the same time, in environments that are getting smaller.
For leaders whose professional identity has been built on certainty and expertise, that is a genuinely uncomfortable position to hold for any length of time.
What Pressure Does to Leadership
I came across a body of research a few years ago that named something I'd been observing in practice for a long time. Staw, Sandelands and Dutton described it back in 1981 - they called it threat rigidity - and a comprehensive review published recently confirmed the pattern holds as strongly now as it did then. The core finding is that under sustained pressure, people tend to narrow their thinking, centralise decisions, withdraw from communication and revert to what they already know rather than remaining open to new information. The review highlights a critical irony: precisely when organisations need to be at their most flexible and innovative to adapt, they are instead prone to freezing up.
What I find most useful about this research is that it removes the blame. Leaders don't become less inclusive because they've changed their values. They become less inclusive because the cognitive load of a genuinely difficult environment gradually reduces their capacity for the kind of deliberate, considered work that inclusive behaviour requires. The person who prides themselves on being a good listener becomes directive. The leader who made space for challenge becomes, without meaning to, the person who closes it down. Recognising the mechanism doesn't make it inevitable, but it does make it something you can actually work with.
This shift directly compromises the most critical element of high-performing teams: psychological safety. When the pressure to freeze takes over, the space for open communication and risk-taking is the first thing to disappear, leaving teams exposed just when they need to be at their most adaptive.
Why It Matters More Than Most Leaders Realise
Psychological safety is widely talked about, and rightly so. Occasionally dismissed as a nice to have, it’s actually the single biggest predictor of team performance, consistently ranking above skills, experience, and technical ability. This is supported by data from Google's Project Aristotle - one of the most comprehensive pieces of research ever conducted on what makes teams perform well - which found that teams with high psychological safety achieve 19% higher productivity, 31% more innovation, and 27% lower turnover. I think that finding is worth sitting with, especially in technical sectors where the instinct is often to assume that performance is fundamentally about expertise and process. The research is telling us something different.
Psychological safety is built, or eroded, in the small moments of everyday leadership: how someone responds when they're challenged, whether they draw the quieter people into the room or leave them to stay quiet, whether uncertainty is something they share openly or absorb alone. When threat rigidity narrows a leader's behaviour, those moments start to shift in ways that are often subtle but cumulatively significant, and the team adjusts its behaviour accordingly.
Something I've seen consistently, across the organisations and sectors I work in, is the difference it makes when leaders are genuinely practising this. Not articulating it well in workshops, but actually doing it day to day. Teams that feel genuinely included perform differently. They challenge more, they share more, they share problems earlier, and they stay longer. The research bears out what most experienced people leaders already sense: organisations that invest seriously in inclusive leadership see 4.2 times better financial performance, 25% improvement in business outcomes and 59% improvement in retention. Those are the hard metrics that support my experience and build the business case for a boardroom conversation.
A Test, Not a Checklist
Deloitte's Six Cs of Inclusive Leadership: Commitment, Courage, Cognisance of Bias, Curiosity, Cultural Intelligence and Collaboration, were first published in 2016 and remain, nearly a decade on, as useful a framework as anything that's followed them. In my experience, working with leaders across many years and in very different environments, I've noticed that three of these behaviours tend to be the first to disappear when the pressure builds. It's rarely a lack of commitment; rather, these behaviours require the most energy exactly when our capacity is at its lowest.
Courage: Inviting Challenge When You're Already Under Pressure
Of all six, Courage makes the most direct demands on technical and expert leaders. Inclusive courage means inviting challenge when you've already formed a view, creating space for dissent when there's pressure to move quickly, and being willing to say "what am I missing?" in front of people who've spent their careers deferring to your expertise.
For a leader whose professional identity rests on having the right answers, that requires a particular kind of strength - the willingness to share uncertainty in a context that has always rewarded the opposite.
Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety shows that leaders who model fallibility - who acknowledge uncertainty, ask genuine questions and respond to challenge with interest rather than defensiveness - create the conditions in which their teams will speak up. Leaders who signal, even unconsciously, that challenge isn't welcome, don't.
What makes this so difficult under pressure is that the signals often become unconscious precisely when capacity is lowest. The manager who responds to a concern with "we don't have time for this right now" rather than "good point, let's come back to that" usually isn't trying to shut their team down. They're managing their own cognitive load. But the effect on the person who raised the concern is the same regardless of intent, and over time, the quieter voices stop trying.
In sectors where the quieter voice might be the one that catches a safety-critical issue or an emerging risk, that isn't only a team culture problem.
Cognisance of Bias: Knowing What You Default to When Stretched
Cognisance of bias asks leaders to understand their own patterns and actively work to counteract them. Under sustained pressure, this becomes particularly difficult because the cognitive narrowing that comes with threat rigidity reinforces existing defaults. People gravitate towards the familiar: the colleague who thinks like them, the approach that has worked before, the comfort of what they already know over the disruption of a perspective that complicates things.
In technical environments, I see this play out in a predictable way. The most confident, most expert voice in the room gets heard. The more hesitant perspective - which might have caught something important - gets passed over without anyone really intending for that to happen. Left unaddressed, this creates an innovation problem, a risk problem and, in sectors like healthcare and engineering, a potential safety problem.
This is precisely why I use Insights Discovery and Belbin with the technical leaders I work with. Over many years of working in these environments, I've found that people who've built their careers on technical expertise tend to respond well to evidence-based frameworks, as they're genuinely curious about the data on themselves. What Insights Discovery and Belbin offer is a structured way of understanding not just how you show up when things are going well, but what you revert to when you're stretched: which style takes over, what you stop noticing as a result, and where your particular blind spots tend to appear. The shift from "I know how I come across" to "I know what I do under pressure and what I'm likely to miss because of it" is, in my experience, where lasting change in leadership behaviour tends to begin.
Curiosity: The First Thing to Go
Curiosity is usually the first of the Six Cs to disappear when under pressure. When you're in delivery mode, questions feel like delays, and most leaders under sustained pressure are very much in delivery mode. But curiosity is the mechanism through which inclusive leadership actually functions day to day, and it's what signals to people that their perspective genuinely matters, not in principle but in this conversation, right now.
It’s well evidenced that there are three things that employees consistently want from their managers: clarity about what's expected of them, evidence that their manager genuinely cares about them as a person, and a sense that they're growing. Curiosity is what makes all three possible. You can't give someone genuine clarity without understanding what's actually confusing them. You can't demonstrate care without taking a real interest in their experience. And growth, for most people, starts with being asked a question they hadn't thought to ask themselves.
In leadership development programmes, particularly in technical sectors where leaders tend to arrive well-prepared with answers - the switch from knowing to wondering is often the pivotal moment. The point at which a leader moves from providing all the answers to asking what they might be missing is frequently the point at which the whole dynamic of their team begins to change.
What It's Actually Worth
All of this speaks to high performing teams, and what it feels like to work with an inclusive leader. But what about the commercial case? The 4.2 times better financial performance, the 25% improvement in business outcomes, the 59% improvement in retention - these aren't soft benefits. They represent the business case for moving beyond surface level development that produces only happy sheets and very little lasting behaviour change.
What makes the difference, in practice, is not the framework itself. Most leaders already know what good looks like. What makes the difference is building enough self-awareness, and enough practice in the lower-stakes moments, that the inclusive behaviours remain available when the pressure is high and the capacity to be deliberate is low.
Inclusive leadership was never going to be easy. In 2026, with the complexity most organisations are navigating, that is more true than ever. The research is clear about what it produces, and equally clear about the cost of leaving the gap between intention and practice unfilled.
At Green Shed Talent, every project starts with a conversation. If you’re looking to support your leaders through the complexity that is evolving around us, let’s chat.
