Most leadership conversations about change focus on strategy, structure, or how to bring others with you. What gets less airtime is the quieter, more personal work: leading yourself through change so that your impact is deliberate, not accidental.
In periods of transition, pressure increases, pace accelerates, and ambiguity rises. These are the conditions in which even experienced leaders revert to their default leadership script – the familiar habits and signals that feel safe because they’ve worked before.
The problem is that what worked in one context can unintentionally create friction in another.
In a system under change, your impact lands before your intention. People don’t wait for your carefully chosen words: they read your presence, your tone, your speed, your attention. Whether you mean to or not, you are communicating something about how safe, serious, or hopeful this transition really is.
Leadership through change is not just about what you do. It’s about how you show up—and whether you are conscious of the signals you’re sending.
The pull of autopilot
Under stress, the brain seeks familiarity and efficiency. It narrows attention, speeds up judgement, and pushes you into patterned responses.
Common autopilot moves include:
- Taking control when things feel uncertain, unintentionally signalling distrust.
- Speeding up decision-making, leaving others scrambling to keep up or feeling excluded.
- Withdrawing to focus and “get things done”, which can read as disengagement or avoidance.
- Becoming overly collaborative to keep harmony, blurring accountability and slowing traction.
These behaviours are protective defaults – your leadership nervous system doing what it thinks is necessary.
Reflection prompts:
#1: What are your autopilot relational and leadership patterns? How do they surface when you’re under pressure?
#2: Notice the moment you feel the urge to ‘step in’, speed up, or retreat. Ask yourself: “Is this response serving the situation—or just serving my need to feel in control/valued/efficient?”
Your relational wake
Your presence leaves a wake behind you, and people orient themselves around it—consciously or not.
In calmer times, relationships have slack. There’s room for misunderstanding, repair, slower meaning-making. During change, that slack tightens.
- A short, clipped response in a meeting.
- A rushed decision without context.
- A public display of impatience.
Individually, these are small. But collectively, they become significant. These moments seed interpretation: “Are we under pressure? Are they losing confidence? Should I hold back, speak up, protect myself?”
Reflection prompt:
After key interactions, ask: “What did I transmit beyond the content? What emotional signal might people have picked up?”
Preventing emotional ‘leakage’
Self-awareness in change is not about being endlessly self-analytical. It’s closer to emotional hygiene – the discipline of not letting unprocessed emotion leak into the system.
Leaders often feel responsible for projecting calm certainty. But suppressed anxiety doesn’t disappear; it transmits sideways through tone, micro-behaviours, and decision pace.
Doing your own internal scan before stepping into key conversations is a responsible way of gauging your impact on your team and the wider system.
Try this practical reset before entering the room:
- Name your dominant emotion. (“I’m frustrated / tired / energised / sceptical.”)
- Make a deliberate choice about what signal you want to send.
- Show up ‘clean’, rather than asking the team to unconsciously process your unspoken state.
Breaking the script
Self-awareness becomes most powerful in the moment of choice – when you catch your default script mid-play and decide whether to continue or disrupt it.
Three micro-practices:
| Moment | Default script | Conscious disruption |
| When silence feels uncomfortable and you want to fill it | Step in, summarise, move on | Hold the pause and let others step forward |
| When someone resists or slows the process | Reassert urgency or logic | Get curious about what their resistance might be signalling on behalf of the system |
| When you’re rushing ahead to maintain momentum | Push harder | Ask: “What cadence is actually needed here for this to land well?” |
Reflection prompt:
Where in your leadership do you tend to speed up, take over, or soften? What would it look like to do 10% less of that?
What got us here won’t get us there
Change isn’t just a new plan; it’s a demand for different selves, skills, goals, and often a different culture. If you’re asking the organisation to move, you’re also asking yourself to move—from familiar strengths into new behaviours the future actually needs.
Shift the self (your default leadership script)
Under pressure, we lean on moves that worked before: speed, control, charm, consensus, detail, vision. In a new context, your go-to strength can quietly become the constraint.
Example: Old script → new requirement
- “I drive pace so we don’t stall.” → “I create thinking space so we don’t ship the wrong thing faster.”
- “I protect quality by stepping in.” → “I build capability by stepping back and coaching.”
- “I soothe conflict to keep momentum.” → “I surface productive tension so we make better trade-offs.”
Reflection prompt:
Which strength becomes a risk in this transition? What would 10% less of it look like for you?
Move the culture (how work gets done and what’s valued)
Culture is “how we do things round here” – meeting cadences, who decides, what gets praised, what gets punished. If those don’t shift, the system will drag new strategies back to old norms. For example:
- From heroics and leaders as answer-givers → To experiments, clear ownership, and leaders as context-givers.
- From consensus as safety → To clarity as safety (explicit roles, decisions, and cadences).
- From measuring effort → To measuring learning and adoption.
Reflection prompt:
What behaviour do we currently celebrate that actually anchors the old culture? What will we celebrate instead?
The ROI of leading the self
Self-awareness is not a reflective add-on to “real” leadership. During change, it’s core operational work.
Without it:
- You may drive pace but create anxiety you never intended.
- You may show confidence but accidentally close down productive conflict.
- You may preach collaboration while transmitting urgency that makes real thinking impossible.
With it:
- You buy time and trust, even when direction is still forming.
- Your presence becomes a stabilising force rather than a source of static.
- You create space for others to show up with agency and clarity, not just compliance.
In transformation, people look to leadership – not for perfect answers, but for signals of intentionality. You don’t need to be certain, but you do need to be conscious.
Leading others through change starts with leading the self. And that begins in the quiet moment before you speak, when you catch your autopilot moves rising; and choose, instead, to show up on purpose.
