I have sat with two decisions in my career that felt, from the inside, almost exactly the same. Both arrived under pressure. Both kept me awake at three in the morning. Each involved holding a line while sensible voices suggested I let go of it. One cost my business two years of drift. The other gave it the best year it ever had. Working out what separated them took me the better part of a decade, and the answer turned out to be worth more than either decision.
The first was a service line I had built myself. My idea, my design, and for two years longer than the numbers justified, my blind spot. The figures were poor and stayed poor. My team could see it. Clients, in their polite way, could see it. I looked at the same evidence and saw a strategy that just needed more time, since the alternative was admitting that something with my fingerprints all over it had failed. When I finally let it go, the business improved almost immediately. That remains one of the more humbling sentences I have ever had to write about myself.
At the time I called it conviction. It was nothing of the sort. It was ego wearing conviction’s coat, and the disguise was good enough to fool the only person in the building who could have taken it off.
The wobble dresses itself as responsibility
Pressure rarely attacks a strategy directly. It goes for the leader’s confidence in the strategy, which is softer. The quarterly numbers come in below forecast, a competitor does something unexpected, an investor asks a pointed question, and somewhere in the leadership meeting a perfectly reasonable voice says: should we be rethinking our direction?
I have learned to treat that question with respect and suspicion in roughly equal measure. There is a version of it that comes from discipline, a genuine review prompted by genuine evidence. There is another version that comes from discomfort, where nothing material has changed except how the pressure feels. The two are nearly identical from the inside. Only one of them deserves a meeting.
Fear sits underneath most of the wobbles I have watched, though it rarely gets named in the room. The fear that you have committed to the wrong path. The fear that the board will hold you personally accountable for a bet that does not pay off. The fear that a competitor knows something you do not. None of those fears is foolish. Every one of them is dangerous, since each creates a quiet incentive to change course for relief rather than for reasons. Moving feels safer than holding still, right up until the organisation adds up what all the moving cost.
I once worked with a business that changed strategic direction four times in eighteen months. The market was moving, as markets do, though nothing about it demanded reinvention. What drove each pivot was an uncomfortable quarter and a leadership team that could not sit still through one. Every new plan was announced with total confidence. By the third, the organisation had stopped listening and started placing quiet bets on how long this version would last. The best people, the ones with options, left. Nobody could tell them where the company was going, because the honest answer was: wherever the next bad quarter pushes it.
The bill for that kind of instability arrives in instalments. Focus goes first: when nothing is settled, everything is urgent, and the organisation becomes busy without becoming productive. Commitment follows, withdrawn quietly rather than dramatically, a slow ebbing of the discretionary effort that makes strategies actually work. Then the talented leave, since people with choices want a direction they can build a few years of their career on. Credibility is the last thing to go and the costliest, because once your people start asking whether you actually mean it this time, no announcement can answer them. Only behaviour can, and behaviour compounds slowly.
The cruelty of it was that the chief executive believed he was being responsive. Agile, even. What he was actually teaching his organisation, pivot by pivot, was that strategy is a temporary statement of intent, valid until the next awkward board meeting. People learn that lesson quickly, and no amount of sincerity in the latest announcement unteaches it.
What you are protecting is the whole difference
There is another kind of holding on, and I want to describe the year I learned the difference in my own bones.
When the pandemic arrived in 2020 it caught my business in an odd position. We had been built remote from the start, on the simple logic that you get the best people doing their best work wherever they happen to live, so lockdown cost us almost nothing operationally. Our clients were another matter entirely. They were not remotely ready, and for the best part of six months the work simply stopped. We could deliver. Nobody was in a fit state to be delivered to.
The pressure arrived early, and it arrived dressed as common sense. The government’s furlough scheme sat there like a lifeboat: stand the staff down, collect the support, wait it out. On paper it was the responsible choice, and it would have bought me a financial certainty I badly wanted at the time. It also cut against everything the business was, and everything I believed about how our people deserved to be treated. I turned it down. Everyone stayed on full hours and full pay while almost no revenue came in. I can confirm that principle is a cold companion at three in the morning.
What I refused to do was pay people to wait. We ran a range of in-person training courses, full-day sessions that lockdown had killed overnight, and I set part of the team to rebuilding them for online delivery. Pulled apart, a full-day course turned out to be a full day mostly because we had put everyone in one room and needed to justify the travel. Broken into two or three shorter online modules, it was actually better. That was the real gamble: paying staff to build something nobody had yet offered to buy.
When our clients finally emerged into their new way of working, the online courses took off. Course revenue rose by 250 per cent at a far healthier margin, since nobody was paying for trainers’ hotels any more. I had backed a read on where the world was heading with real money, before anyone could prove me right.
Here is what still strikes me. The furlough decision and the service-line decision felt almost identical while I was inside them. Same sleeplessness, same chorus of sensible objections, same refusal to move. What separated them was not how hard I was holding on, but what I was holding on to. The service line was protecting my self-image. The furlough decision was protecting the enterprise. Conviction and stubbornness use the same grip. You tell them apart by what is in the hand.
The test I now offer leadership teams is short. When your strategy is challenged, ask whether you are holding the line for the evidence or for your identity. Then watch what the leader in question does with a hard question. The ones whose conviction is sound lean in. They say things like “that is fair, let me think about it”, or better, “what would we need to see to know we are wrong?” The ones who treat every challenge as disloyalty are usually defending a position the evidence stopped defending some time ago. In my experience the organisation can always tell the difference, even when the leader cannot.
Evidence gets a vote. Discomfort does not.
None of this makes a strategy sacred. Markets shift, technology moves, customers change their behaviour, and a conviction that ignores all of that is just rigidity with better posture. The discipline lies in what you allow to reopen the question.
Three questions have served me well. First, what evidence supports the current direction? Actual evidence: customer data, market signals, operational performance. Warm feelings left over from the strategy away-day do not count. Second, what evidence contradicts it? This one takes honesty, since it means going looking for the signals you would rather not find. Third, and most important, are the challenges temporary or structural? A bad quarter is temporary. A fundamental shift in customer behaviour is structural. A delayed launch is temporary. A technology that makes your platform obsolete is structural. Patience is the right answer to one and precisely the wrong answer to the other, and most of the strategic errors I have witnessed at close range come from muddling the two.
An experienced gardener does not dig up the seeds every time there is a cold morning. Telling a passing frost from a season that has genuinely turned is most of the craft, and the gardener earns that judgement by consulting the garden rather than their own nerves. Leadership under pressure works the same way. Some wobbles in the numbers are just wobbles. The discipline is waiting long enough to find out, while resisting the temptation on either side: the pivot that relieves your anxiety, and the denial that protects your pride.
People sometimes ask whether the service-line lesson and the furlough lesson ever came to sit together comfortably. The honest answer is that they were the same lesson delivered twice, once as tuition fees and once as dividend. Two years of holding on for the wrong reason taught me exactly what holding on for the right reason would feel like: identical. That is precisely why the distinction cannot be left to feeling. It has to be anchored to something outside yourself, the purpose of the enterprise and the evidence in front of it, because everything inside yourself will lie to you under pressure with complete sincerity.
There is a payoff, and it is larger than any single strategy. People commit to things they believe will last. Hold a considered line through two rough quarters and something changes in how your organisation carries itself. Priorities stay priorities long enough to be delivered, discretionary effort comes back, and the quiet bets on how long this version will last stop being placed. Steadiness of that kind reads to your people as safety, and people who feel safe do their best work.
Anchored Conviction, the discipline this essay has been circling, sits at the centre of the RESOLVE framework, the framework at the heart of my forthcoming book, The Leader with Resolve, out on 1 October 2026. In the book it acts as the stabiliser: the discipline that keeps honesty, decisiveness and accountability pointed at the same horizon when pressure wants them scattered.
If you are now wondering which of your own held lines are conviction and which are ego in a good coat, that is exactly the sort of question a diagnostic conversation exists for, and I would enjoy having it with you. You could also start with the free RESOLVE diagnostic: two minutes of your time, it asks nothing in return, and it will show you where your leadership currently holds its anchor.