Leading Under Pressure
Most leadership teams can tell you what they decided. Fewer can tell you whether they actually decided it together, and whether it survives contact with a hard week.
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Leadership behaviour that holds up when it’s tested.
We help senior leaders and leadership teams build practised behaviours, not just agreed intentions, so decisions, execution and team performance stay strong under real pressure.
About Mindshift Performance
We work with executive and senior leadership teams who are already capable but operating under real pressure: tough trading conditions, rapid growth, a new strategy that has to land. The problem is rarely talent. It’s that a team can agree in the room and still leave carrying different versions of the decision.
Our founder, Karen Stone, has spent 20+ years in and alongside leadership teams, from Harrods to running her own businesses to working with senior teams at organisations including Atlassian, Meta, AECOM, Dynatrace and Morgan Sindall. Her edge is seeing the pattern underneath a team quickly, and naming it in a way the people in the room can act on.
She’s also a 5th Dan black belt in Washindo martial arts, twenty-two years in. It shapes how she thinks about pressure: not something to manage away, but the thing that reveals what a team has actually practised.
The result is a leadership team that decides together, executes consistently and holds its shape when the week gets hard.
Leadership Team Alignment
Turning agreement in the room into a team that operates as one.
Most SLTs can point to a decision everyone signed off on. Fewer can show that everyone left carrying the same version of it. We work with leadership teams to build alignment that survives Monday, not just the meeting, closing the gap between what a team agreed to and what it actually does once pressure arrives.
Executive Identity Under Pressure
Coaching for leaders whose role has changed faster than their leadership has.
The behaviours that got someone promoted aren't always the ones the new role needs. We work one-to-one with senior leaders navigating that gap, the moment a role outgrows the identity someone's been running on, helping them build judgement that holds under genuine pressure rather than borrowed confidence that only works when things are calm.
Practised, Not Trained
Behaviour change that survives contact with a hard week.
Training changes what people know. It takes something else to change what they reach for once the deadline's slipping. Our work happens inside your real operating rhythm, not a training room, built around repetition and real conditions rather than a single workshop. So new behaviour is still there under pressure, not just in the room where it was taught.
Change that holds.
Not that's announced.
We help leadership teams build behaviour that survives pressure, not just agreement that survives the meeting.
The Performance Gap Playbook is a practical guide for senior teams who want to close the gap between what they agree and what they actually do. It’s built around the three conditions that decide whether new behaviour holds: Clarity, Environment and Practice.
Growth Challenges We Solve
Decisions that bottleneck at the top
→ Leaders need decisions they've actually practised making, not more information to decide with.
A leadership team that's drifting apart
→ Alignment doesn't erode all at once. It shows up first in the small things a team quietly starts treating as normal.
Strategy that stalls below the exec team
→ Teams adopt change when they watch their leaders practice the behaviour first, not when they're told to.
Leadership meetings that don't change anything
→ A conversation only changes what happens next if the behaviour underneath has actually been practiced, not discussed.
Leaders promoted into roles they haven't grown into yet
→ Most leaders are promoted for what they were good at in their last role, not for the judgement the new one requires. That's exactly where inconsistent decisions and uneven performance start.
“Karen helped our senior leadership team become even more effective, and the change has lasted. The playbook we built with Karen is now part of business as usual.”
Guy Hannell, Area Director, Morgan Sindall Construction & Infrastructure
“Karen’s facilitation and coaching didn’t just improve our leadership. It changed how we work.”
Alison Leonard, Senior Finance Director, Dynatrace