The key to leading under pressure: lessons learnt from CIPD 2025

“Depending on how you lead and the strategies you adopt, you can use the same equipment and the same basic people training but receive different outcomes.” 

This powerful message was delivered by Dr Fong in his keynote speech at CIPD ACE Manchester, and it’s something we try to embed in the leaders we work with. To put this into context, he shared eye-opening stats that compared the average number of air ambulance crashes in the United States (once every 40 to 80 days), which have led to dozens of fatalities, to our air ambulance service in the UK, which hasn’t seen a crew fatality for more than 25 years. What’s ‘the difference that makes the difference’? 

While most leaders don’t deal with life and death scenarios, it’s a critical lesson that can be applied to all leadership roles. If you don’t lead in a manner that aligns with the business values and strategy, you won’t deliver your desired outcome.  

So, how can you make sure your leadership, especially when under intense pressure or dealing with change, steers your business in the right direction? In this blog, we explore other learnings from Dr Fong’s keynote that resonates deeply with the advice we share throughout our consulting work.  

 

Contextualise your data with lived experiences  

Information isn’t insightful until you contextualise it. Often, what your data tells you can be completely different to what people on the shop floor are experiencing. Again, Dr Fong shared a real-life example from his role during COVID-19 as ‘National Clinical Adviser in Emergency Preparedness Resilience and Response (EPRR)’. He told the audience how his spreadsheets would show Intensive Care Units at 85% bed capacity, yet the reality when he spoke to colleagues on the phone or paid a visit in person would be that they had surpassed their capacity limit two weeks ago. 

As a leader, it’s crucial to take the time to go down to the front line to understand the gap between lived experience and the data in your reporting. Not only will this help improve decision making, but it will also send a significant symbol to your workforce – that you want to understand their experience, and to make decisions in their best interests. In turn this will improve engagement, connection and resilience across the company.  

 

Switch from leadership to followership 

We often say the difference between a good leader, and an exceptional leader is the recognition that you’re not always the best person to lead the team to success – instead, leadership should be seen as a baton that’s passed around a team during a project, to ensure the most qualified person leads every task, at the right time. 

Dr Fong had a similar analogy, and again, he put this into context of how, as the most senior crew member attending an incident, he only leads when dealing with the patient – in other moments, he passes the leadership baton to the paramedics, pilots and hospital staff.  

To do this well, you must understand the goals of a mission and identify:  

• When you are likely to be the best person to lead 

• When you should step back and enable others to step up 

• What you must do to support each leader at each moment 

By taking this approach, your teams will feel a sense of empowerment, ownership and equality to leadership. Diversity of opinion will be come in more easily, and employees will feel like they’re part of the solution. All of this will help you reach your desired outcomes more effectively. 

Empowering the younger workforce  

Especially with the rise of AI and the rapid advancements of other technologies, it’s important to acknowledge that the expertise for certain tasks or projects may lie with more junior, younger employees who may have been closer to leading edge technology more recently, in their education. Drawing on conversations that he’s had with leaders at NASA, Kevin made the case that when you empower junior members to own projects with an understanding that there are leaders around to ask for support, more often than not, they deliver.  

There’s been lots of noise around ‘reverse mentoring’ on LinkedIn with businesses getting junior team members to coach senior leaders on digital skills and new perspectives, however this point takes it a step further and actually requires leaders to take a step back and defer to younger expertise to generate greater outcomes.  

We believe that by taking this approach, businesses can unlock performance by breaking down hierarchy and building trust and connections across levels and boundaries. When embedded with a solid practice of two-way accountability, trust builds across the business and engagement rises across all layers of an organisation.  

Is your leadership team behaving in a way that aligns with your strategy?  

We have just released our 2025 Culture Strategy Alignment report, in which ‘Leadership’ was a common problem area, with 41% of respondents stating that it needed improvement – and we saw a similar pattern emerge when we spoke to HR professionals on our stand at CIPD ACE.  

Discover other culture alignment trends and our advice for improving leadership effectiveness in our latest report.  

Download report