Pressure can make even accomplished leaders default to certainty, speed and control, shutting down the perspectives they most need. Karlee Fain reasons that mature leadership depends on awareness, curiosity and the capacity to tolerate discomfort, creating the conditions for wiser decisions, stronger trust and more sustainable organisational performance over time.
We were already running behind when a fork went flying across the tour bus and shattered a television. Which, in case you’re wondering, is not typically how leadership decisions are meant to be made.
At the time, I was working as a live-in coach for high-profile leaders, often in the public eye, supporting them through intense seasons of work where output, visibility and pressure were all heightened at once. My role was to help them sustain the level of performance they were known for, without it costing them everything else.
Which is how I ended up on a tour bus.
It was late. We were on a multi-month, cross-country tour. Everyone was tired in that specific way where your body is present, but your patience left the building hours ago. Dinner was supposed to be quick. Get on the bus. Get to the next city. Do it all again tomorrow.
No one else was doing their job
Instead, mid-bite, my client launched his fork across the room. No warning. Just airborne cutlery. And then came the explanation. How hard he was working (he was). How no one else was doing their job (they were doing their jobs). How unsupported he felt (while he was supported, something was clearly not working). If you’ve spent any time in leadership, you’ve likely been in a version of this room. Not the flying fork, hopefully. But the moment where pressure tips into a reaction that doesn’t actually serve the work. Where the person in charge starts talking louder, faster, and more certain, while everyone else is just trying to find their footing.
Confidence… or…?
This often looks like a meeting. A decision point. A new idea on the table. Someone speaks first. Quickly. Confidently:
“We don’t have time to overthink this, let’s just go with X.”
“I hear you, but what we really need to do is…”
“Let’s not complicate this.” (which, ironically, understanding complexity is often exactly what the situation requires).
The room shifts. A few people stop talking. A few ideas don’t get said. The conversation narrows just enough to move forward. And the meeting continues. This dynamic is more predictable than we like to admit, and we’ve known it for decades.
Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger famously found that people with lower expertise are more likely to overestimate their competence, whereas those with greater expertise tend to express more uncertainty. Which means the most confident voice in the room isn’t always the most informed.
Some might call this efficiency. Decisiveness. High performance. But what we’re watching isn’t great leadership. It’s immature leadership, and it’s everywhere. We’ve confused speed with clarity, and persuasion with accuracy. They are not the same. We tend to think of maturity as something people either have or don’t. Something tied to age, experience, or personality. It isn’t, and we all know this, because we can each think of at least one person whose age and wisdom are… not correlated.
Maturity is awareness. The ability to see what is actually happening, in yourself, in others, and in the system, without immediately reacting to it. From that awareness grows the capacity to stay with what you’re seeing long enough to respond well, instead of reacting quickly.
Maturity is awareness in action
This is where it becomes counterintuitive: The leaders who struggle most with this are not only the showboats, but they are also far too often the most capable folks in the room. Capability opens doors. It earns trust. It creates momentum. But if that capability isn’t matched with awareness over time, it becomes a liability.
The same instincts that helped someone succeed early on, such as moving fast, getting things done, having answers, or taking charge, can become the very thing that limits them. In this way, the traits that make leaders successful early on are often the ones that limit them later. If we don’t learn new skills for new levels, we plateau.
What mature leadership really looks like
Mature leaders still feel the reaction, but don’t let their reaction make the decision for them. One CEO I work with faced a moment that would have been easy to resolve quickly. A key member of her C-suite needed to relocate across the country for family reasons. At the time, the company had a clear, in-person policy. If you’re not here, you’re not in the role.
Her first reaction made sense. Disappointment. Frustration. A sense of loss. And an immediate decision was obvious. “This won’t work; we require in-person work.”
Instead, she ‘paused long enough to get wise’, a phrase I borrow from my colleague and corporate psychology advisor Dr. Maria Sirois. Instead of collapsing into a binary choice, the employee was either in or out, this CEO got curious:
- What are we actually solving for?
- What would it take to make this work well?
- What are we assuming that might not be true?
Through a series of honest conversations, clear expectations, and some trial and error, they redesigned how the role functioned. The result wasn’t compromise; it was expansion. The CEO retained a key leader, promoting her to president eventually. She also strengthened the company’s ability to serve major global clients. This is what mature leadership looks like in the day-to-day. Not perfect decisions or the fastest answers, but better questions.
Why immature leadership gets rewarded
The challenge we face is that most organisations don’t recognise immature leadership when they see it. Because it doesn’t always look like a fork across a room. Sometimes it looks like “expertise”. I sit on a board with a chair who is exceptionally capable in many areas. And limited in others, as we all are, just that this one was more public. One pattern I’ve watched is how quickly concerns or emotional responses get moved past if they don’t mirror his own. He doesn’t bypass them aggressively; he bypasses them efficiently. But what gets lost in that efficiency are perspectives that could strengthen the organisation. Options that never fully form and conversations that don’t get to finish.
Too often, the real meeting happens in private chats after the official meeting. This is how immature leadership shapes outcomes. Not always through chaos. More often, through narrowing. What feels like decisiveness is often just discomfort moving quickly. Over time, organisations begin to reward the person who moves things along. The one with fast answers. The one who sounds certain and speaks with conviction.
We start confusing quick reactions with good thinking. This isn’t just anecdotal. Work on “voice climate” by organisational scholar Elizabeth Morrison shows that when people hold back concerns or alternative perspectives, decision quality drops, even when those individuals are highly capable. In other words, it’s not that the room lacks insight, it’s that the room isn’t structured to hear it.
Practical application of mature leadership
If maturity is awareness, the real question becomes: Is wisdom actually in the room? It’s a question we need more often than most organisations would like to admit.
When a decision is being made, look for three things:
- Is there space for reality?
Are multiple perspectives being voiced, especially the inconvenient ones? - Is discomfort being tolerated?
Are people willing to sit in not knowing? Are we being curious enough? - Is the leader aware of their own reaction?
Are they responding thoughtfully? If the answer is no, wisdom isn’t in the room yet. So pause. Name what’s happening. “Let’s hold on a second. It sounds like we’re leaning towards this decision.
That might be right, but is there anything we might be missing?” Then ask: “What might be shaping how we’re seeing this right now?” Because the real question underneath is: Are we responding to the situation, or to the pressure we feel about it?
Neuroscientists like Starcke and Brand have shown that under pressure, our thinking quite literally narrows. Stress reduces cognitive flexibility and pushes us toward faster, more habitual responses, often at the expense of better decisions. This is why urgency feels productive, even when it’s not. This type of brave pause in the form of a question can create just enough space for enhanced thinking to enter the conversation.
I saw this play-out during a PR crisis with an educational organisation. The instinct was immediate: respond to every inaccurate post, defend the organisation in real time. But when we slowed the moment down, something became clear: Those quick responses meant to defend themselves weren’t strategy, they were pressure rooted in fear that they would lose public trust for something that was not at all their fault. Instead, they chose a more deliberate path. They brought in a PR firm and focused on long-term reputation rather than reactive defense. Over time, the noise lost momentum and the organisation protected its credibility.
Mature leadership creates something most organisations are starving for
Organisations need space for better thinking, honest conversation and for solutions that don’t need reworking later. It reduces the avoidable costs of immature leadership, tension, reactivity, having to re-do work, walking on eggshells, that quietly erode performance over time.
This space replaces them with something more sustainable. Clarity. Trust. Decisions that hold. And to be clear, this isn’t about being slower, it’s about being wiser. In this way, pausing doesn’t compromise momentum; it refines and accelerates it.
In a time where we all need great problem-solving skills, effective leadership can no longer be measured by how quickly you can move a room or how much conviction you bring to an idea.
Mature leadership is measured by what becomes possible when the leader is not the loudest voice, but the one who makes space for the best ones.
Karlee Fain is the Founder, CEO & Coach at Karlee Fain, Founder of The Boundary Academy, and host of the Messy & Magnificent Podcast
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