What CEOs Need to Learn from Other High-Stakes Professions

If you’re in the military, or emergency medicine, or aviation, stress is not treated as an unfortunate by-product of the job. It is treated as part of the job itself. Not so for business leaders.

“These days it feels like everyday is a crisis,” one business leader told us. To deal with the relentless pace of high-stakes issues they’re dealing with, leaders need to be smarter about stress. Instead, many have no idea how stressed they really are – and what impact that’s having.

In contrast, soldiers train under simulated chaos so that fear and uncertainty become familiar terrain. Trauma surgeons rehearse crisis protocols until critical decisions become instinctive under pressure. Pilots are drilled repeatedly in emergency scenarios precisely because calm judgment deteriorates when the nervous system is overwhelmed.

Yet most CEOs receive almost no training for dealing with pressure – even though they may take decisions that significantly impact people’s lives – and the world around them. And the science shows how too much stress can undermine decision-making, leading to a downward spiral of poor outcomes and heightened anxiety.

CEOs are dealing with relentless uncertainty, public scrutiny and existential decisions – and the resulting cognitive overload – largely through experience and improvisation. They become adept at pushing through fatigue and ignoring stress signals – there just isn’t time for that stuff.

Despite all this, leadership development still focuses heavily on strategy, communication, and execution, while giving remarkably little attention to how leaders actually regulate themselves under sustained stress. In high-stakes moments, CEOs are surrounded by top advisors and data dashboards – but the pressure itself is overlooked as a critical variable.

A dangerous block in business culture

Is this lack of focus on stress just an oversight, or is there something else going on here? We’re reminded of a conversation between research professor Brené Brown and Adam Grant, organisational psychologist at Wharton. Brené asks,

“Why is vulnerability so much more difficult to talk about with ... men in suits, in [business], than it is with trauma surgeons and firefighters and military and professional athletes?”

It seems counter-intuitive at first. You might think that those high-reliability, don’t-f*ck-it-up roles require the toughest personality types – not the kind who want to talk to Brené Brown about vulnerability. But it turns out that these professions treat performance under pressure as a trainable skill rather than a personality trait. And like any trainable skill, it requires starting out with a clear, honest assessment of where you’re at.

It's a terrible bind for leaders in business. Not only are they under intense pressure to make the right decisions in conditions of radical uncertainty, they’re expected to know how to manage that pressure without any support or training. What’s the block here? Adam Grant speculates it might be something to do with precarious manhood: “So if I'm a firefighter, everybody knows I'm a bad-ass,” he says – suggesting that business professionals "have a lot to prove".

We aim to show how the injunction against this kind of inner work in business culture is amplifying risks to business and to broader society. This is where stress intelligence comes in: the ability to understand and even harness your own stress responses in order to improve decision-making – and, ultimately, performance.