Why do so many leaders end up in Survival Mode?

Exploring the older leadership paradigm many of us inherited

I’ve noticed something over the years: even thoughtful, capable, well-intentioned leaders often find themselves leading from urgency, pressure, and tension. The jaw tightens, the breath shortens, decisions speed up.
It can feel like leadership has become a constant state of managing risk.

If you recognise this — merci for your honesty. And also: it’s not a personal failing. It’s a pattern many of us inherited.

What survival-mode leadership looks like

In survival-mode, leadership often sounds like:

• “We don’t have time to think, just act.”
• “Let’s push this through.”
• “We’ll reflect later.”

And it feels like:

• adrenaline in the system
• constant urgency
• reacting instead of sensing
• controlling instead of trusting
• being “on” all the time

Survival-mode leadership is busy, fast, and mentally sharp — and at the same time surprisingly narrow.

Where did this way of leading come from?

Survival-mode leadership didn’t arise because leaders lacked depth or care. It arose because, for a long time, it actually made sense.

At a biological level, humans are wired to respond quickly to threat. When something feels at stake, our nervous system mobilises: focus narrows, decisions centralise, action speeds up. In moments of real danger, this kind of leadership saves lives.

The challenge is that this emergency response gradually became normalised.

With industrialisation, organisations began to function more like machines than living systems. Efficiency, predictability, and output became the dominant values. Leadership shifted from tending people to managing performance. Speed and control were rewarded; reflection and sensing were not.

Economic systems reinforced this further. Scarcity — of time, resources, certainty — became the background hum of working life. For many leaders, staying alert and pushing forward began to feel synonymous with being responsible.

Education played its part too. Most of us were trained to prioritise thinking over sensing, answers over inquiry, compliance over inner authority. So when pressure arises, leaders often default to mental control rather than embodied presence.

Over time, leadership also became intertwined with identity and self-worth. Success meant safety and belonging; failure felt like threat. Slowing down or pausing didn’t feel wise — it felt risky.

So survival-mode leadership didn’t emerge from bad intentions. It emerged from systems shaped by speed, fear, and extraction. It was an adaptive response to an earlier reality.

The moment of awareness

I’ve seen leaders suddenly notice themselves in survival-mode mid-meeting. Someone asks a question and the body responds before the wisdom does: decide quickly, move on, don’t slow down.

When that moment is noticed — not judged, just noticed — something shifts. Space appears. Breath returns. Choice re-enters the room.

That awareness alone is already a different kind of leadership.

A doorway, not a judgement

This isn’t about rejecting survival-mode leadership or judging it as “wrong”. It’s about recognising that it’s incomplete.

What helped us survive is not what will help us thrive.

The question becomes:
What kind of leadership is needed now — in a world of complexity, interdependence, and constant change?

In the next post, we’ll explore what it looks like to move from survival-mode into a regenerative approach to leadership — one that restores people, culture, and vitality rather than depleting them.

From reacting
to sensing
from control
to stewardship
from survival
to regeneration

Onward 🌿

Leadership for the World We Want