3 Leadership Habits Even Seasoned Leaders Forget Under Pressure

Mark Vitantonio is a global logistics and strategy executive with over 30 years of international leadership experience in the U.S. Air Force. He brings deep expertise in international negotiation, crisis response, and cross-cultural collaboration, and is passionate about building and strengthening global partnerships. Mark is based in Seattle, Washington.

  Leadership  

In high-growth business environments, startups scale overnight, markets shift without warning, and leaders are expected to project confidence while navigating conditions that nobody fully understands. In that environment, a paradox emerges: The faster things move, the more likely experienced leaders are to abandon the simple habits that normally make them effective.

Three leadership habits disappear quickly when pressure rises: trusting your informed instincts, giving decisions time to mature, and maintaining emotional composure for the team. I learned this lesson early in my career when my unit failed its capstone readiness evaluation. It was a gut punch—and one of the most formative experiences of my life. Under the pressure of the evaluation, I had overanalyzed my instincts, rushed critical decisions to relieve anxiety, and let my stress infect the rest of the organization.

Over the course of my career, I've learned that "leadership" is often overused and overcomplicated. A principle I returned to repeatedly was Occam's razor: among competing explanations, the simplest one is usually correct. Applied to leadership, the same holds true. Commanding in the U.S. Air Force as a major, lieutenant colonel, and colonel allowed me to narrow my leadership habits from 10, to five, and finally to three:

• Trust informed intuition (your gut)
• Let …

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