Wartime vs Peacetime Leaders: Is it coachable?

You’ve probably at least once in your career seen a director or executive, who was celebrated as a spectacular leader at their last role, hired into your organization, only to completely fail as a leader– hesitate to make the right (or any) decisions, unable to gain the trust of their reports, and unwilling to negotiate with their stakeholders.

How does this happen? How can a great leader take on a leadership position and completely miss the mark?

The answer may lie in the idea of a “wartime vs peacetime” leader, and what it has to teach us about leadership.

What “wartime” and “peacetime” actually mean

The terms are shorthand for two operating conditions:

• Peacetime: the business is stable or growing; the task is to expand opportunity, professionalize processes, and develop people. Distributed decision-making and experimentation work well here.

• Wartime: the business faces real threat (runway, competition, disruption, regulatory shock). You tighten priorities, centralize decisions, and move with speed. Clarity and focus beat consensus.

Neither mode is “better.” Each rewards different behaviors. A leader who excels in one can struggle in the other.

Why strong leaders fail in new roles

Mismatch explains a lot. A leader hired for scale and process may stall when the job requires decisive cuts and a fast pivot. A leader hired for crisis response may choke growth by holding too much power and pushing urgency after the fire is out. When the mode and the behaviors don’t match, teams lose confidence and output drops.

Ask a simple question: What would actually cause us to fail in the next 90 days?
If the answer is “slow, misaligned execution,” you need wartime behaviors. If the answer is “burnout, brittleness, and missed innovation,” you need peacetime behaviors.

Quick self-diagnosis

Run this short check. Answer each item without hedging.

1. If we miss by 10%, will we be fine or in trouble?

2. Do we need more ideas and options, or fewer priorities and faster decisions?

3. Should decision rights move down to domain owners, or up to a smaller group with full context?

4. Do we need broader psychological safety for exploration, or tighter accountability for delivery?

More answers in the first column point to peacetime. More in the second point to wartime. Many orgs sit in a hybrid; leaders still need to choose which mode governs this quarter.

Switching modes: specific moves

If you are in wartime but behaving like peacetime, do the following now.

• Publish three outcomes for the next 30 days. Assign one single accountable owner for each. This will remove ambiguity and accelerate progress.

• Centralize a short list of high-impact decisions to a small, informed forum. This will raise decision quality and speed.

• Freeze optional projects and reassign talent to the critical path. This will increase throughput and reduce context switching.

• Move to a tight communication cadence (brief weekly all-hands + written updates). This will keep priorities visible and prevent rumor cycles.

If you are in peacetime but behaving like wartime, reverse the pattern.

• Push decisions back to domain owners with clear guardrails. This will build capacity and resilience.

• Invest in systems that raise baseline quality: onboarding, QA loops, incident reviews, and analytics. This will compound performance over time.

• Reintroduce exploration: run time-boxed pilots and option bets alongside the core roadmap. This will surface new growth paths.

• Expand feedback channels and recognition rituals. This will deepen trust and unlock discretionary effort.

Can one leader do both?

Yes. It requires conscious practice because the cues, reflexes, and pacing differ. Leaders who switch cleanly do not rely on personality; they use a playbook, signal the change explicitly, and align decision rights and metrics to the chosen mode.

Where coaching helps—and where it doesn’t

Coaching can help you grow as a leader, a lot.

But coaching won’t change market conditions or fix a broken business model. Coaching will expand a leader’s usable range and speed up the switch, and can work with you on a variety of exercises:

• Assessment: a coach will map your default tendencies against the mode you’re in. This reveals the two or three behaviors that, if changed, will move results fastest.

• Deliberate practice: you will rehearse the opposite mode. Example: if you default to consensus, you will run decision sprints with a deadline and a forcing function. If you default to command, you will run delegation reviews and accept local decisions without rework. Reps make the new behaviors automatic.

• Feedback loops: lightweight, recurring 360s around clarity, speed, and psychological safety will show whether your intent matches team experience. You will adjust on a two-week cadence.

• Communication drills: write and deliver a two-minute wartime update (status, risks, next decision) and a five-minute peacetime narrative (vision, strategy, learning plan). These drills will remove ambiguity and reduce rework.

Result: the leader adapts faster, the team experiences less whiplash, and execution quality improves.

When to adapt the leader vs. change the leader

• Adapt when the leader shows self-awareness, takes practice seriously, and holds enough trust to carry the team through the shift. A clear 60-day plan plus coaching will produce visible behavior change.

• Change when misfit persists, trust is depleted, or the cost of learning exceeds the risk of a switch. Role fit determines effectiveness; fit is not a character judgment.

A simple 30/60/90 to execute the switch

• Days 0–30: name the mode, publish three outcomes, reset decision rights, and start a weekly operating cadence.

• Days 31–60: remove one structural blocker per outcome, complete two coach-led practice cycles, and ship one visible win.

• Days 61–90: reassess mode, adjust decision rights, and set the next three outcomes with updated owners.

So, what should I do if I’m in the wrong mode?

As a leader, you were hired to get outcomes. There is a small subset of scenarios where the right call for the business is to step down, and to allow the organization to find someone else who is better suited for the role.

But assuming you want to rise to the challenge (otherwise, you wouldn’t be here), you should probably get a coach (preferably, a professional coach outside the organization). 

You can also try AI Coaching. We’ve built out an AI coaching assistant that we think does a really good job as a coach. Give us a try, and let us know what you think.