Leadership under pressure separates the leaders who build high-performing teams from the ones who accidentally dismantle them.

I recently published an article in Firehouse Magazine about the strategic leadership required to run a successful technical rescue operation — the kind of incident where someone is trapped in a collapsed trench, or suspended from a high-angle rope, and the margin for error is measured in seconds and inches. If you want to read it, you can find it here (free account required).

But here’s the thing I kept thinking about while writing it: the leadership principles that determine whether a technical rescue succeeds or fails are exactly the same ones that determine whether a business team holds together under pressure — or falls apart.

The environments look nothing alike. The stakes are different. But the invisible infrastructure of leadership? Identical.

Leadership Under Pressure: The Thermostat vs. The Thermometer

In technical rescue, we talk about incident commanders (“IC”) needing to be the thermostat, not the thermometer. A thermometer just reflects the temperature around it. A thermostat sets it.

When a trench collapse gets dispatched, adrenaline spikes across the board. The IC who rolls up and starts barking orders from a place of urgency — without first doing a deliberate 360-degree size-up — doesn’t calm the scene. They amplify the chaos. They become a thermometer.

Now think about the last time your organization faced a genuine crisis. An angry investor on the phone. A product failure going public. A key resignation hitting at the worst possible moment. What did the leader in the room do with their nervous system in that moment? Did they regulate the environment — or did they reflect it back at twice the volume?

This isn’t a soft question. There’s hard neuroscience behind it. When the brain perceives a threat — and a livid stakeholder or a crashing quarter absolutely qualifies — the amygdala fires before the prefrontal cortex even gets a vote. Your rational thinking, your empathy, your strategic judgment: all of it goes offline. Neuroscientists call it amygdala hijack. The fire service calls it going reactive.

Either way, the result is the same: the leader stops leading and starts reacting. And the team around them — wired with mirror neurons that unconsciously read and replicate their leader’s emotional state — follows them right into it.

Calm Isn’t Natural. It’s Trained.

Here’s what most business leaders don’t realize about first responders: we aren’t calm under pressure because we’re wired differently. We’re calm because we’ve trained obsessively for the moment when everything goes wrong.

Technical rescue teams don’t arrive at a trench collapse and figure out zone control on the fly. We’ve drilled it hundreds of times. We’ve run scenarios in the rain, in the dark, with equipment failures, with simulated victim deterioration. By the time the real emergency happens, the structure is automatic. The preparation is what creates the calm — not the personality of the person in command.

When the IC pauses for an extra 60 seconds to do a proper size-up before issuing a single order, it doesn’t feel like delay. It feels like composure. And composure is contagious — in exactly the same way that panic is.

Business leaders almost never train this way. They prepare for strategy. They prepare for presentations. But they rarely practice staying regulated when a board member publicly challenges their data, or when a major client calls to say they’re walking. Those moments require the same thing a technical rescue requires: a nervous system that has been conditioned to pause before it reacts.

The good news is that this is trainable. The 10-second pause. The deliberate breath. The habit of asking “what outcome do I want to create here” before opening your mouth. These aren’t soft skills. They’re high-performance skills — and the best rescue commanders and the best executives share them.

Lead the “What,” Not the “How”

One of the most common failure modes in leadership under pressure is the experienced IC who can’t resist getting into the trench. They know exactly which knot to tie, which shore to set, what pressure to run on the struts. So they start telling their specialists how to do the job they’ve been trained to do — and the system breaks. The rescue team loses autonomy. The IC loses the strategic view. The whole operation narrows.

The right call is to lead by objective: “Your mission is vertical extrication of the victim in the hot zone. Here are your resources. Tell me what you need.” Then step back and let the specialists work.

Sound familiar? It should. This is the exact dynamic that breaks down in organizations every day. The technically brilliant manager who got promoted and can’t let go of the doing. The senior leader who sits in every working meeting because they don’t trust the team to execute without them. The executive who reviews every deck, approves every decision, and wonders why their people feel small and their best performers keep leaving.

Micromanagement isn’t just a culture problem. It’s a neuroscience problem. When people feel their autonomy is being controlled, their brain registers it as a threat — and they shift from creative, engaged contributors to defensive, compliance-mode workers. You don’t get their best thinking. You get just enough to stay out of trouble.

The IC doesn’t need to be the person who ties the best knot. They need to be the leader who ensures the person tying the knot has the space, safety, and support to succeed. That’s not a rescue principle. That’s a leadership principle — and it works in every environment where human beings are counting on someone to lead them well.

Anticipate, Don’t React

Strong command teams in technical rescue don’t just manage what’s in front of them. They anticipate what’s coming in 20 minutes and two hours. If someone is trapped in a trench in 40-degree weather, the IC isn’t waiting to be asked for heaters and extra medical resources — they’re calling for them the moment the collapse is confirmed.

Reactive leadership — in any environment — always costs more than proactive leadership. In a trench rescue, it costs time you don’t have. In business, it costs trust, momentum, and the best people on your team who get tired of operating in permanent crisis mode.

The leaders who build high-performing teams — whether on a rescue scene or in a boardroom — are the ones who are always scanning the horizon while managing the present. They build structures that absorb pressure rather than buckle under it. They prepare their teams before the emergency, not during it.

The Tactical Pause: A Leadership Skill Every Business Leader Needs

One of the hardest calls in technical rescue is the tactical pause — the decision to stop operations, back everyone out, and reassess when the environment becomes too dangerous. The adrenaline of the mission, the presence of a victim, the pressure of the audience watching from the cold zone — all of it pushes hard against stopping. But the command team’s job is to see objectively what the people inside the operation cannot see. Sometimes the most courageous leadership move is “we’re pausing.”

Business leaders need this too. The capacity to pause in the middle of a crisis — rather than accelerate into it — is one of the most undervalued leadership competencies in any organization. It requires a regulated nervous system, clear strategic vision, and enough psychological security to resist the social pressure to “just do something.”

Two or three minutes of deliberate pause can be the difference between a well-run operation and one that compounds the original problem.

Leadership Under Pressure: The Same Principles, Every Environment

What makes a technical rescue succeed isn’t just the gear or the training or the protocols. It’s the invisible infrastructure of leadership under pressure: a commander who regulates the environment rather than amplifying the chaos, who leads by objective rather than by control, who anticipates rather than reacts, and who has the composure to pause when everything in the situation is screaming to push forward.

Those aren’t emergency services skills. They are leadership skills — the same ones that determine whether your team holds together when the quarter goes sideways, when the board gets nervous, when the market shifts faster than your strategy.

The fire service builds this infrastructure through repetition, scenario training, and after-action review. It doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen from one leadership seminar. It’s a practice — developed deliberately, over time.

The question worth sitting with: how are you building that infrastructure in yourself and in the leaders around you?

Ready to build that kind of leadership capacity? Explore Leadership Evolution Coaching at Empower2Evolve — individual executive coaching designed to help you lead from composure, not reaction, when it matters most.

You can also read Ann’s introduction to Scott and the Under Pressure series here.

About the Author

Scott Richardson is a Division Chief of Special Operations with more than 30 years in the fire service, overseeing special operations teams. A FEMA USAR rescue specialist, Colorado-certified Fire Officer II, paramedic, and published author of Technical Rescue: Trench Levels I and II (Cengage Learning), Scott is a contributing writer for Firehouse Magazine and co-founder of Empower2Evolve.