Good judgement under pressure is rarely just instinct

Some leaders seem able to think clearly when the pressure is on. They can make a call while other people are still working through the options, without appearing thrown by the situation. From the outside, we often describe that as instinct.

But instinct can be a misleading word. It makes good judgement sound innate, as though some people simply have it and others do not.

A recent Harvard Business Review article offers a more useful explanation. The authors studied eleven elite coaches across football, basketball, baseball and rugby, looking at how they make high-pressure decisions before, during and after the moment itself.

These are people who often have seconds to decide, with incomplete or conflicting information and a large audience ready to judge the outcome. Yet their decisions are rarely as spontaneous as they appear.

“What appears to be instinct,” the authors write, “is usually the product of preparation, emotional control, pattern recognition, social awareness in the moment, and accountability in the aftermath.”

The visible decision is only one part of the process.

The work starts before the decision

The coaches prepare for situations they are likely to face. They think through possible decisions, agree who will make them and decide what information will matter. They are not trying to predict exactly what will happen. They are making sure they will not have to work everything out from the beginning when the pressure is already high.

That has clear relevance for leaders.

A difficult decision can become harder because several questions are being answered for the first time in the moment. What are we actually deciding? Who owns the call? Whose views do we need? What evidence matters? What would cause us to change course?

Thinking about those questions in advance does not remove uncertainty. It means the leader has something more reliable than the loudest voice, the strongest emotion or the most immediate pressure to work from.

Paying attention to people

The part of the article I recognised most was the attention these coaches pay to people.

Alongside the tactics and the data, they notice body language, movement, tone, choice of language and more subtle changes in energy. They are particularly alert to someone behaving differently from usual. They do not assume that one observation tells them everything. They look again and check their impressions.

The purpose is different in coaching, but that quality of attention felt very familiar.

When I work with a client, I listen to the content of what they are saying, but I also pay attention to how they are saying it. I might notice that they have moved from “I want to” to “I should”, that the same metaphor keeps returning, or that their posture or energy changes when they mention one particular option.

I do not take any of those things as an answer or decide what they mean on the client’s behalf. I offer back what I have noticed and allow them to consider whether it is significant.

Sometimes that small observation opens up something the client had not yet said, or perhaps had not quite recognised themselves.

When fear starts shaping the decision

The coaches in the article also pay attention to their own emotional state. They are not trying to remove emotion. They are trying to prevent it from distorting their judgement.

One football coach described the danger of becoming preoccupied with how the media might react: “Fear doesn’t align with good decision-making.”

Business leaders may not have a crowd or the media watching, but the imagined reaction of other people can still become part of the decision. What will my manager think? How will the team respond? What happens if I get this wrong? What will this say about me?

Those concerns may be entirely understandable. The difficulty comes when they begin to carry more weight than the information in front of you.

This is something coaching can help make visible. What do you know, and what are you assuming? What outcome are you afraid of? Whose reaction are you already trying to manage? What evidence are you giving the most weight to?

That does not make the emotion disappear. It makes its influence on the decision easier to see.

What happens afterwards matters too

The article also makes an important point about what happens after a decision.

Elite sports coaches regularly review their choices. They acknowledge when they may have got something wrong, return to relationships damaged by a difficult decision and change the systems that shaped it.

That matters because the quality of a decision and the eventual outcome are not always the same thing. A sensible decision made with limited information can still lead to a poor result. Equally, a weak process can occasionally produce the outcome someone hoped for.

If leaders only judge themselves by what happened, they may miss what there is to learn about how they decided.

Coaching can provide space to look at that more carefully. What did you know at the time? What was influencing you? What did you notice, and what did you miss? What would you do in the same way again? What needs to change before the next decision?

Simply having more experience does not automatically create better judgement. The learning comes from being willing to examine that experience honestly.

Good judgement under pressure is not a fixed trait, and it does not come from preparation alone. It develops through what leaders do before a decision, what they notice in the moment and what they are willing to learn afterwards.

The decision may be made in seconds. The judgement behind it is built over time.

Source: Alan McCall, Adrian Wolfberg, Johann Bilsborough and Ricard Pruna, “How Elite Sports Coaches Make High-Pressure Decisions”, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2026.