Traditional approaches to leadership development assume that leaders can be thoughtful and deliberate about how they are behaving. Yet, increasingly, this just isn’t so, because they just don’t have the time.

In our research with leaders from across the globe, they report on average that 72% of their day is spent running on automatic, without little time to think things through and be thoughtful about how they are being as leaders.

Instead, leaders are increasingly having to rely on their instincts. But depending on instincts is a bit like gambling, and so mistakes are increasing, and failure rates rising.

In this new normal, how we support, coach and develop leaders needs to change.

The solution lies in helping leaders understand what happens to them when they are running on automatic. How they may act differently, why they do so, and how they can take more control of the impact they have in these moments.

What tends to come out under pressure are deep-lying instincts and tendencies, built from some of our earliest childhood experiences. That our pasts affect who we are today is not new news, of course. But knowing exactly what the links are, and what to about them has not previously been clear.

Now, though, our long-running research into this has culminated in our new book, Rewriting your Leadership Code: How your childhood made you the leader you are today and what you can do about it. In this, we explain the tendencies that past experiences can leave us with and the hidden ways in which they can affect us. And crucially, we show both how we can improve them to become better leaders, and how through small changes in the way we work with our teams we can transform our and their ability to deliver under pressure.

For more information on our research our research in Rewriting your Leadership Code, click here.

For information on coaching leaders under pressure, click here.

And if you’re a leader interested in developing your ability lead under pressure through coaching, or would just like to now more about how your childhood made you the leader you are today and just what you can do about it, click here.