What stress is actually telling you

In conversation with Cristina Taboada, the Director of Executive Coaching at Harvard Business School (HBS) Executive Education

Stress in leaders, according to Cristina Taboada, is often about misalignment. And as the top coach in one of the world’s top business schools, we think Cristina knows what she’s talking about.

She gave us a typical coaching scenario: a senior leader knows that they need to delegate more – everyone tells them, and they agree. But it doesn’t happen. In fact, under pressure, when it matters most, they hold the work even tighter.

On the surface this looks like a skills or habits problem, and a typical coaching intervention would be around better systems, clearer frameworks, accountability structures. But according to Cristina, that misses what's actually happening.

Underneath the behaviour is a belief: if I delegate this and it goes wrong, that reflects on me. Under pressure, it's faster and safer to do it myself. This belief doesn't announce itself – it operates quietly, making delegation feel too risky. So there’s a misalignment between beliefs and behaviours.

But, according to Cristina, it doesn’t end there: ask them if they want to be the kind of leader that grows their people, and most will say yes. They want to see themselves as a steady leader, calm under pressure, empowering their team. So there’s also a fundamental misalignment with identity.

So stress in leaders is rarely only about workload. It's about this misalignment – between how you're behaving, what you actually believe, and your sense of who you are as a leader. When those three things are out of sync, the friction registers as chronic, nagging, hard-to-explain stress.

Stress as a signal

This kind of insight is central to stress intelligence: instead of responding to stress only as a problem to be minimised, we can treat is as a signal. In Cristina’s work, she might treat be curious about what misalignments there are beneath the stress. The fix isn't behavioural coaching in isolation – it's rewiring at the level of belief first, and letting new behaviours follow naturally. She uses the analogy of a chiropractor — it's not surgery, it's realignment.

Cristina’s fascinating observations about misalignment in leaders reminds us of a concept with a 70 year clinical pedigree. In 1957, social psychologist Leon Festinger introduced what he called cognitive dissonance: the psychological discomfort that arises when our behaviors, beliefs, and sense of self fall out of alignment. In other words, we are wired to feel these gaps, to experience them as inner discomfort.

This cognitive dissonance intensifies the stress of high-pressure moments: any kind of crisis will heighten our sense of gaps between our beliefs, our behaviours and our identity. And at the same time, this dissonance is a tax on our cognitive function, reducing our ability to deal with the situation at hand and further increasing stress.

So if you’re struggling with stress – especially if it feels somehow disproportionate to your circumstances – then you could look at this as a signal rather than a symptom. It could be pointing towards some inner misalignments, some cognitive dissonance. The right response isn't to manage down your stress. It's to learn to read it.