Leading Under Pressure
Most leadership teams can tell you what they decided. Fewer can tell you whether they actually decided it together, and whether it survives contact with a hard week.
Leadership behaviour that holds up when it’s tested.
We help senior leaders and leadership teams build practised behaviours, not just agreed intentions, so decisions, execution and team performance stay strong under real pressure.
About Mindshift Performance
Your leadership team is already capable. You’re operating under real pressure: tough trading conditions, rapid growth, a new strategy that has to land. The problem is rarely talent. It’s that your team can agree in the room and still leave carrying different versions of the decision.
Our founder, Karen Stone, has spent 20+ years in and alongside leadership teams, from Harrods to running her own businesses to working with senior teams at organisations including Atlassian, Meta, AECOM, Dynatrace and Morgan Sindall.
What that means for you: she’ll see the pattern underneath your team quickly, and name it in a way your people can act on.
She’s also a 5th Dan black belt in Washindo martial arts, twenty-two years in. It shapes how she thinks about pressure: not something to manage away, but the thing that reveals what a team has actually practised.
The result is a leadership team that decides together, executes consistently and holds its shape when the week gets hard.
Leadership Team Alignment
Turning agreement in the room into a team that operates as one.
You can probably point to a decision your whole team signed off on. Harder to say is whether everyone left carrying the same version of it. We build alignment that survives Monday, not just the meeting, closing the gap between what your team agreed and what it actually does once pressure arrives.
Executive Identity Under Pressure
Coaching for leaders whose role has changed faster than their leadership has.
The behaviours that got you promoted aren’t always the ones your new role needs. We work one-to-one with you in that gap, the moment the role outgrows the identity you’ve been running on, building judgement that holds under real pressure rather than borrowed confidence that only works when things are calm.
Practised, Not Trained
Behaviour change that survives contact with a hard week.
Training changes what people know. It takes something else to change what they reach for once the deadline's slipping. Our work happens inside your real operating rhythm, not a training room, built around repetition and real conditions rather than a single workshop. So new behaviour is still there under pressure, not just in the room where it was taught.
Change that holds.
Not change that's announced.
We help leadership teams build behaviour that survives pressure, not just agreement that survives the meeting.
The Performance Gap Playbook is a practical guide for senior teams who want to close the gap between what they agree and what they actually do. It’s built around the three conditions that decide whether new behaviour holds: Clarity, Environment and Practice.
Growth Challenges We Solve
It’s Thursday. The decision you all agreed on Monday is back on the table, because two of your team heard something different from what you thought you said. You find yourself making the same case again, and somewhere in the middle of it you realise you’re tired. Not of the work, but of winning the same point twice. Nobody in the room is doing anything wrong. That’s exactly what makes it so hard to fix.
Decisions that bottleneck at the top
→ Leaders need decisions they've actually practised making, not more information to decide with.
A leadership team that's drifting apart
→ Alignment doesn't erode all at once. It shows up first in the small things a team quietly starts treating as normal.
Strategy that stalls below the exec team
→ Teams adopt change when they watch their leaders practise the behaviour first, not when they're told to.
Leadership meetings that don't change anything
→ A conversation only changes what happens next if the behaviour underneath has actually been practised, not discussed.
Leaders promoted into roles they haven't grown into yet
→ Most leaders are promoted for what they were good at in their last role, not for the judgement the new one requires. That's exactly where inconsistent decisions and uneven performance start.
What becomes possible
Your exec team leaves the room with one version of the decision, and it’s still the same version on Friday. Strategy lands two levels down, because the people below see you acting on it, not just announcing it. Hard quarters stop exposing the cracks, because the behaviour you need under pressure is the behaviour you’ve already practised. And the time you used to spend reopening decisions goes back into running the business. Over time, your leadership team stops being something the business has to work around, and becomes the reason it can move faster than its competitors.
“Karen helped our senior leadership team become even more effective, and the change has lasted. The playbook we built with Karen is now part of business as usual.”
Guy Hannell, Area Director, Morgan Sindall Construction & Infrastructure
“Karen’s facilitation and coaching didn’t just improve our leadership. It changed how we work.”
Alison Leonard, Senior Finance Director, Dynatrace