I was facilitating a leadership session at the Schulich School of Business recently when I asked the group a question I have asked dozens of times over the years. Where do you show up with genuine compassion in your leadership, and where do your blind spots still live? The answers that came back surprised me, not because they were unusual, but because they were so consistent. Across the room, in different words and with different examples, leaders kept landing on the same thing. Patience. Patience with their teams. Patience with themselves. Patience with the pace of change and the relentless pressure to deliver results while managing the full weight of human complexity around them.
That response stayed with me for a long time afterward, because it pointed to something important that rarely gets named directly. Patience is not a personality trait some leaders happen to have and others do not. It is a discipline, and right now, for most of the leaders I work with, it is under serious siege. We’ve all had those moments when we run out patience and start to push too hard; but inevitably the harder you push the more resistance you’re met with.
The reasons are more structural rather than personal. Leaders today are witnessing the collision between executive expectations and the evolving demands of bosses and the needs of teams. As we all have to lead with fewer resources and less recovery time, something’s gotta give. And the first thing to go is usually our patience.
Add to this, fragmented workdays beyond what most people can sustainably manage, endless meetings and interruptions, and patience tends to be the first casualty. Leaders operating in these highly emotional environments often stop giving each other the benefit of the doubt. It’s not that leaders have stopped caring. Patience requires reserves of stamina that quietly drain away when the pressure is on.
The good news is that patience can be rebuilt. It begins with understanding what happens in the moments when it disappears.
Three Practices to Reclaim Your Patience Under Pressure
Tool One: Create the Space: Choose Your Response
Ask yourself: In my most impatient moments, am I reacting or am I choosing?
Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor whose thinking reshaped how we understand human freedom, observed that between stimulus and response there is a space. Leaders need to be much more deliberate in finding that space. The practice of patience begins in that space. In my work with leaders, I have urged leaders to use a practice that I’ve come to call the 3Ps: Pause, Plan, Prepare. This isn’t a passive pause. It’s the deliberate act of creating enough distance between what is happening and how you respond to it, giving yourself enough time to choose the response that best serves the moment. Before your next difficult conversation, give yourself three beats and reflect on these questions: What am I feeling right now? What pressures are causing me to feel that way? What responses should I be considering to come up with a better response?
Tool Two: Slow the Thinking Down
Ask yourself: Am I making a fast judgment when this situation deserves a slower one?
Under pressure, many leaders default to fast, instinctive and emotional responses. Impatience is fast thinking applied to situations that deserve a slower, more deliberate considered way of thinking. Delaying our responses helps us move away from making snap judgments about the context and people we are working with. By slowing the pace, you’re better able to check yourself from making these assumptions. The practice here is to notice when you are moving toward a conclusion faster than the evidence warrants, and to deliberately slow the process down. Ask more question before you respond. Sit with the ambiguity a little longer than feels comfortable. The leaders who develop this habit consistently make fewer decisions they later regret.
Tool Three: Diagnose Before You React
Ask yourself: Is what I’m seeing a performance issue, a learning curve, or a capacity problem?
Self-regulation as one of the core competencies that separates effective leaders from reactive ones, patient leaders from those who jump to conclusions. Leaders who can manage their emotional responses in high-pressure moments consistently create stronger, more trusting team environments. In practice, patience breaks down fastest when leaders treat every gap as a performance problem requiring an immediate response. Sometimes a team member needs clarity. Sometimes they need coaching. Sometimes they are carrying a load the leader cannot fully see. Developing greater patience means creating a quality diagnosis deciding what a situation requires.
What Patience Actually Produces
Leaders who develop patience as a discipline build something that impatient leaders consistently struggle to create: psychologically safe cultures. Research has shown that teams thrive in these environments, take more initiative, make better decisions, and recover from difficulty faster, because they trust that difficulty will be met with inquiry rather than frustration.
Oh, and by the way, patience does not mean waiting politely while things fall apart around you. It’s about developing the ability to stay regulated, curious, and constructive long enough for the people around you to grow into what the work requires of them. That is not a soft skill: it’s one of the most demanding and consequential disciplines in leadership, and worth every ounce of effort that it takes to develop it.
What is one moment this week where patience could change the outcome for someone on your team?