When Resilient Teams Fail: The Cost of Dysregulated Leadership

When Resilient Teams Fail: The Cost of Dysregulated Leadership

In boardrooms and executive meetings across industries, resilience has become a preferred vocabulary. It signals foresight, adaptability, and modern leadership. Organizations speak fluently about resilient teams, agile cultures, and the capacity to thrive amid disruption. Yet many of these same organizations are confronting a paradox they struggle to articulate.  Despite their significant investment in resilience, performance and adaptability still tends to waiver.  Furthermore, trust still highly depends on the level of authentic leadership.

The prevailing assumption in organizational design is that resilience can be cultivated at the team level through skills, tools, and mindset. I typically get asked to provide these types of services.  While these elements matter, they overlook a more foundational reality. Resilience is not an individual or even collective trait in isolation. It is an emergent property of a system. And in any system, leadership behavior functions as the primary regulating force.

Teams experience leadership through tone, timing, consistency, and emotional presence. When leaders are regulated and capable of maintaining clarity, coherence, and responsiveness under pressure, the system stabilizes. When leaders are dysregulated, the system can fail, regardless of how resilient teams are asked to be.

I have found that dysregulation in leadership is rarely acknowledged because it does not fit comfortably within traditional executive discourse. It is easier to discuss performance gaps, communication breakdowns, or resistance to change, rather than to examine the internal states shaping those outcomes. Yet leadership dysregulation is one of the most reliable predictors of cultural erosion.

It definitely needs to be talked about, and hence I wrote this article to initiate a conversation.

I do want to be clear that addressing this is not about personal development (although personal development is also very important).  In this context, though, we need to look at the entire system.  We need to look at the stability leadership brings when there is uncertainty.  We need to look at the safety a leader creates for others to think, challenge, and adapt.

Importantly, and I do want to express, that dysregulation is not synonymous with incompetence or poor intent. Many dysregulated leaders are highly intelligent, deeply committed, and operationally effective. The issue is an accumulation of unintegrated pressure within environments that reward speed, certainty, and control while offering little structural support for reflection, regulation, or recovery.

In this context, dysregulation becomes normalized. Leaders learn to override signals of stress, suppress uncertainty, and push through discomfort. Over time, this state is no longer perceived as strain; it becomes the baseline. From within that baseline, leaders may genuinely believe they are calm, decisive, and rational.

However, when I have worked with teams in this situation, they have shared an entirely different experience with me. Employees can be quite sensitive to emotional signals, particularly when they are coming from authority figures. Teams read leadership regulation through micro-behaviors more than words.  When there are, for example, abrupt shifts in priority, intolerance for dissent, performative listening, emotional withdrawal, or excessive control disguised as rigor, it can be felt. None of these behaviors are necessarily dramatic, but their consistency creates a system of operation that isn’t necessarily healthy or pleasant. 

Under dysregulated leadership, teams can become vigilant, monitoring mood, managing their communication carefully, and avoiding risk that could trigger reactivity. Work continues, often at a high level. From a distance, it seems to be an operation running smoothly, which can make these issues invisible in a busy workplace.  What is mistaken for resilience is often compliance and relational compensation.  The cost of this compensation is disengagement, reduced innovation, and eventual attrition.

And unfortunately, without stability, there is no true resilience. 

There are a lot of measurements of organizational wellness initiatives failing to take hold.  Cultures can feel performative, and engagement efforts plateau. The answer is rarely found in the design of the initiative itself. It is found in the relational field in which the initiative is introduced. Dysregulated leadership constrains that field.

I have found that to really handle this issue, we have to examine how leadership success is measured within the organization itself.  It is often that organizations tend to reward outcomes without accounting for the human cost incurred to achieve them. Leaders who drive results through pressure are often promoted, even as trust diminishes and turnover rises.

Correcting this requires a fundamental reframing of leadership capability. Regulation needs to be an essential leadership skill and as I mentioned above, it is a part of the system as a whole. We now really understand that a leader’s internal coherence directly influences organizational coherence. Whether acknowledged or not, leaders set the emotional parameters within which strategy is executed.

This does not require leaders to suppress emotion or maintain artificial calm. On the contrary, regulated leadership allows for full emotional range. It involves awareness, integration, and choice. Leaders who can recognize their internal states without acting them out unconsciously provide stability even in high-stakes conditions.

Regulated leadership expands capacity throughout the system. When leaders remain present during uncertainty, tolerate dissent without defensiveness, and respond rather than react, they create conditions where teams can think clearly under pressure. This is a strategic advantage.

In regulated environments, conflict becomes generative rather than threatening. Errors are addressed without panic. Decisions are made with appropriate speed rather than reflexive urgency. Over time, teams internalize this stability.

I have worked with many teams to create resilience.  However, I will only be offering resilience initiatives when we can compensate for leadership dysregulation. Asking teams to be resilient in unstable emotional environments is a displacement of responsibility and it simply will not matter in the long run.

So, let me ask this:  What is your organization doing to promote leadership emotional regulation?