How a Threatening Situation can turn Leaders into A**holes (and what to do about it)

Rita McGrath
6 min readMay 15, 2023

During times of change, especially when the change is threatening, the right response for leaders is to double-down on flexibility and problem-solving. Unfortunately, as researchers have discovered, CEO’s often fall victim to the “threat rigidity” effect. Under pressure, their utilization of information narrows, they revert to controlling behavior and they generally rely on things that used to work.

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Bad symbolism and worse — what’s up with some of these CEO realities?

As I wrote about last week, a number of stories have surfaced about CEO’s having, let’s just say, less than stellar moments when faced with stress. Here’s another one — David Risher, the newly installed CEO at Lyft, facing pressure from an improved driver experience at Uber and other issues, issued a blank order for everybody to get back in the office, Pronto!

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Rita McGrath
Rita McGrath

Written by Rita McGrath

Columbia Business School Professor. Thinkers50 top 10 & #1 in strategy. Bestselling author of The End of Competitive Advantage & Seeing Around Corners.

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