Why Crisis Brings Out the Tyrant in Otherwise Good Leaders

The "collaborative" CEO who becomes unrecognisably controlling during the acquisition has not, despite what everyone around them is beginning to whisper, suddenly become someone else.

The controlling material was always present. The integration that had been keeping it at bay under normal load has simply given out. What the crisis has done is not create a new person. It has removed the leader’s capacity to remain the one they had been performing.

The persistent myth of crisis leadership

The leadership literature contains a persistent and expensive myth: that crisis forges character. The bad version of the leader who appears under pressure is treated as an aberration — something the situation produced that was not there before, which will disappear when the situation resolves.

My experience, across two decades of close work with senior leaders, is the opposite. Crisis does not forge character. It reveals what character had been doing, quietly, beneath the daily composure. The controlling material, the manipulative material, the grandiose material, the avoidant material — all of it was present before the crisis. What the crisis did was consume the cognitive and somatic resources the leader had been using to keep it managed.

This matters significantly for how organisations respond. If the tyrant is genuinely an aberration — an unfortunate overflow produced by exceptional circumstances — then the appropriate response is to wait it out. Once the crisis resolves, the familiar leader returns.

If the tyrant is instead a pre-existing pattern that has surfaced because containment has given way, then waiting produces a different outcome. The containment rebuilds, imperfectly, in the aftermath. The pattern remains. It will surface again in the next crisis, with the same signature. And the people around the leader will, collectively and silently, have begun the long process of losing trust in the integration that had held before.

What actually happens physiologically

Under acute sustained pressure, three things happen simultaneously to the neural and somatic architecture that ordinarily keeps shadow material managed.

First, the prefrontal cortex — which is the structure that does the slow integrative work of holding multiple perspectives, moderating impulse, and producing considered response — begins to cede influence to faster subcortical systems. This is evolutionarily appropriate under physical threat. It is developmentally catastrophic under chronic strategic threat, because the integrative work itself is what had been keeping the shadow material contained.

Second, the body’s regulatory capacity — its ability to return the nervous system to a baseline state after activation — becomes increasingly compromised the longer the pressure persists. Activation becomes structural. The leader is permanently operating at a level of arousal that was previously reserved for specific high-intensity moments. The shadow material that is held in check by normal regulation begins to leak through the gaps that sustained activation has produced.

Third, the leader’s social and relational support systems — the trusted advisors, the space to reflect, the feedback loops that had been reliably surfacing concerning behaviour — often degrade precisely when they are most needed. Calendars compress. Time for reflection disappears. Those who might have said “I think you’re handling this badly” are either not available or not being listened to.

The combination is predictable. The leader under crisis has less integrative capacity, more baseline activation, and fewer external correctives than at any point in normal operation. The shadow material, which had been managed by the sum of all three, now has unusually clear access to the driver’s seat.

What the tyrant looks like in practice

It is usually not dramatic. The leader does not start shouting in meetings or making obviously irrational decisions. The tyrant version is more often a quiet compression of the leader’s ordinary tendencies in exactly the direction they have been working hardest to moderate.

The collaborative leader becomes subtly autocratic. Decisions that would previously have been discussed are announced. The consultation that used to precede commitment is now performed after the decision is already made.

The thoughtful leader becomes impatient with thought. Reflection reads as delay. Questions read as resistance. The leadership style that had been the leader’s strength is now experienced by the people around them as their opposite.

The trusting leader becomes suspicious. The relationships that had been built on genuine faith begin to be audited for signs of disloyalty. Minor slights land as betrayals.

The warm leader becomes cold. The personal interest in the people around them recedes. They are “in work mode”, and the distinction between work mode and everyone they had been before feels, to those around them, like a personality transplant they were not warned about.

What actually prevents this

The prevention is not crisis management training. It is the work of making the shadow material conscious, integrating it, and building the nervous-system capacity to hold pressure without the capacity collapsing.

This is the point at which the conventional leadership development conversation becomes uncomfortable, because this work cannot be reliably delivered in short form. It requires sustained engagement with the material that the leader has been spending their career not engaging with — which is, by definition, the material the leader has the most practice avoiding.

Shadow work during crisis is effectively impossible. The material comes up faster than it can be metabolised, and the leader either collapses into it or dissociates from it further. First-time integration during acute pressure produces casualties, not development.

The integration has to happen before. Which is why the leaders I have watched handle genuine crisis well were, almost without exception, leaders who had done substantial depth work in periods when the stakes were lower. They had met their own controlling material, their own grandiosity, their own avoidance, in conditions that allowed them to develop a relationship with it. When the crisis arrived, the material surfaced as expected — and they had, by then, the capacity to hold it rather than be taken over by it.

The honest question for organisations

When your organisation next goes into crisis, which version of your senior leaders will be running the response?

This is a developmental question that most organisations only ask retrospectively, after a version of someone has shown up who they did not want in the room. The timing of that question matters. Asked before crisis, it is a strategic question with a developmental answer. Asked during, there is nothing useful that can be done. Asked after, the cost has already been paid.

The leaders who are going to be tested by the next major pressure event already exist. So does the work that would prevent their tyrant from being the one to meet it. Whether that work gets done before the test is, in my experience, one of the most consequential decisions a senior organisation makes — and, because it is rarely framed as a decision, one of the least frequently examined.