Intelligence is not the same as judgement.
Some of the poorest decisions I have seen were not made by careless people. They were made by intelligent, experienced, capable leaders whose judgement had changed under pressure.
That matters because many high achievers assume, often without saying it out loud, that intelligence will protect them. If they are academically strong, commercially successful, clinically trained, legally sharp, or used to being the person others rely on, they can start to believe their thinking is more robust than it really is.
It is a dangerous assumption. Pressure does not remove intelligence. It changes access to it. It narrows perspective, reduces patience, makes challenge feel irritating, turns emotional load into urgency, and makes the familiar response feel like the right response. Smart leaders still make poor decisions under pressure, not because they lack ability, but because the conditions around their judgement have changed.
From what remains afterwards to the decision point
Last week, I wrote about leadership being about what remains afterwards.
That article explored what high achievers still have left after they have performed well in the room. This one moves the same question into the decision itself, because the cost of pressure does not always show up in the meeting. Sometimes it shows up later, when the decision lands on someone else.
For a doctor, that decision may affect a patient. For a lawyer, it may alter the direction of someone’s life. For a founder, it may risk the business, cashflow, team and reputation. For a leader, the decision may look like a commercial call in the room, but land later in someone’s kitchen, marriage, sleep, confidence, family life or future.
That is the part many leaders do not calculate clearly enough. They assess the decision from the chair they are sitting in. They do not always see where the consequence travels.
The redline problem
The pressure that most distorts judgement, in my experience, is fatigue mixed with overload: tiredness, emotional load, noise load, responsibility, expectation and the feeling that everything has to keep moving.
As a petrolhead, I often picture the rev counter. The engine has not failed. It has not blown. But it is being pushed into the red, and if it stays there too long, something eventually pays the price.
Many of the high achievers I work with are not broken. They are not burnt out. They are still functioning, still performing and still looking impressive from the outside. But they are redlining. Their patience is thinner, their perspective is narrower, their tolerance for challenge is lower and their ability to separate signal from noise is weaker than it was.
That is the dangerous middle ground. Not collapse. Erosion. A leader does not need to be broken to make a poor decision. They only need to be making that decision in conditions that were never designed for good judgement.
Intelligence is not self-awareness
This is where very smart professionals need to be honest with themselves. Academic intelligence is powerful. Technical expertise matters. Experience matters. Being able to analyse complexity quickly is valuable, especially in medicine, law, business ownership and senior leadership. But intelligence is not the same as self-awareness.
You can read a room and still miss the impact you are having inside it. You can understand other people and still not understand yourself. You can be highly trained, highly successful and highly respected, and still fail to notice that pressure has made you shorter, narrower, more defensive, less curious and less open to challenge.
Before I worked with my own coach, I had strong emotional intelligence in many ways. But my self-awareness was not where it needed to be. Some leaders are used to being the smartest person in the room, and when ego gets involved, challenge starts to feel like disrespect. Pushback starts to feel like obstruction. Disagreement is heard as a threat instead of a contribution. Under pressure, the leader does not usually need faster agreement. They need better challenge.
Urgency makes the wrong thing feel important
This follows directly from the article on why high achievers treat everything as urgent.
When everything feels urgent, the leader stops asking the better question. They stop asking, “What actually matters here?” and start asking, “What needs answering now?” Those are not the same question.
Urgency rewards speed, certainty and visible action. Sometimes that is useful. In genuine crisis, leaders do need to act. But false urgency pulls attention towards the loudest issue rather than the most important one. It turns pressure into priority, and pressure is not proof of importance.
Doctors know this in a clinical sense. Lawyers know it when a client’s anxiety tries to become the legal strategy. Founders know it when cash, product, people and reputation all seem to be shouting at once. Fast decisions are sometimes necessary. But fast thinking is not automatically good judgement.
Mistakes can build judgement, but only if leaders learn
I have made plenty of poor decisions in my life. Some under pressure. Some not. I also believe mistakes are often the tuition fee for progress. If you are pushing hard, building something, leading people, taking risk and moving beyond the obvious, you will not get everything right.
The important question is whether you have enough humility, reflection and challenge to learn from those mistakes. Over 30 years in business, leadership and consultancy, I know experience can sharpen instinct. There are times when pressure rises and past failure becomes useful, because you have seen the pattern before.
But experienced leaders can also begin to trust instinct when the situation has changed. They can confuse familiarity with clarity, confidence with accuracy, and speed with competence. Pressure can turn experience into a shortcut. Sometimes it is valuable. Sometimes it takes the leader straight past the thing they needed to see.
Decision fatigue thins judgement
This also follows naturally from the recent article on decision fatigue at senior level.
Senior leaders do not just make big strategic decisions. They carry hundreds of smaller decisions, emotional judgements, trade-offs, people calls, risks, expectations and interruptions. Over time, that load changes them.
They become less patient with nuance, less tolerant of challenge and more likely to look for the fastest acceptable answer. They may still sound rational and look composed. The room may still move on. But something important may have been missed.
This is why decision fatigue is so dangerous in high-performing professionals. It does not always look like weakness. It can look like decisiveness, efficiency or confidence. Underneath, the leader may simply have less clean thinking available than the decision deserves.
The protected thinking chamber
This is where executive coaching becomes valuable for high achievers. Not because a coach gives the leader the answer, and not because the leader is broken. The value is in creating a protected thinking chamber: a place to unload pressure, step back from the noise, identify the real problem and be challenged before the decision becomes expensive.
When clients are in the thick of it, they are often in the waves. They cannot see the coastline. They cannot see the lighthouse. They cannot reconnect with direction, strategy and what actually needs doing. That is not because they lack intelligence. It is because pressure has narrowed the view.
Through The Elevation Model™, the work becomes structured. Vision reconnects the leader with the horizon. Alignment tests whether the decision fits the direction they say matters. Awareness exposes the pressure, fatigue, ego and emotional load that may be distorting judgement. Breakthrough challenges the assumption that intelligence alone is enough. Pathways creates better options before the leader defaults to the obvious one. Commitment locks in the right course of action, and Embodiment turns better judgement into a leadership standard.
That is the practical answer. Not simply “slow down”. Not avoid pressure. Not stop making bold decisions. Build enough space, challenge and reflection into the system that judgement is protected when pressure rises.
Closing thought
Smart leaders do not usually make poor decisions because they lack ability. They make them because pressure changes the quality of their thinking.
Urgency narrows perspective. Decision fatigue reduces patience. Ego resists challenge. Emotional load quietly distorts judgement. And when the stakes are high, the cost rarely stays contained inside the meeting room.
So the question is not whether you are smart enough. The better question is whether your judgement is protected when pressure rises.
References and further reading
Financial Times. “Leaders’ judgment matters more than ever in the age of AI.”
https://www.ft.com/content/dc1ad108-dc2e-4635-8e5d-75bfd9840a50
Harvard Business Review. “Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions.”
https://hbr.org/2009/02/why-good-leaders-make-bad-decisions
Zhu, M., Yang, Y. and Hsee, C. K. “The Mere Urgency Effect.” Journal of Consumer Research.
https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/45/3/673/4847790
Hodkinson, A. et al. “Associations of physician burnout with career engagement and quality of patient care.” BMJ.
https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj-2022-070442
West, C. P. et al. “Interventions to prevent and reduce physician burnout: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” The Lancet.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)31279-X/abstract
Entrepreneur. “How I Stopped Letting Emotion Sabotage My Leadership.”
https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/how-i-stopped-letting-emotion-sabotage-my-leadership/492547
I’m Laurence Loxam and I’ve pushed limits in business, on mountains, and at the finish line.
Now I help elite professionals do the same, pushing past the point most people stop.
I coach doctors, lawyers, CEOs and founders who’ve hit success, but still feel there’s more.
Together, we unlock clarity, sharpen confidence, and lead with conviction.
Ready for your next leadership breakthrough? Let’s connect.
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