Busy Season Doesn't Lie: What Pressure Reveals About Your Leadership
How Tax and Accounting Leaders Can Use High-Stress Periods to Understand Their True Leadership Default
It was the second week of March, and Karen could feel herself changing. The warm, collaborative manager her team knew from May through December was gone. In her place was someone shorter, more critical, and far less patient. She knew it was happening. She could see it in how her team responded. But with deadlines stacking up and clients demanding answers, she felt powerless to stop it.
By mid-April, two things were clear. First, her team had delivered everything on time with no major errors. Second, her best senior manager had started quietly updating his resume. When she asked him about it months later, he was honest. Working for her during tax season felt like working for a different person, and he was not sure he wanted to do it again.
Karen cares deeply about her team. But she had never examined what happened to her leadership when the pressure was highest. And in tax and accounting, where intense periods are predictable and recurring, that blindness costs more than most leaders realize.
Stress Does Not Change You. It Reveals You.
The person you become during busy season, year-end close, or audit deadlines is not some aberration caused by external stress. It is your truest leadership default, stripped of the more intentional behaviors you practice when you have bandwidth to be deliberate.
When the nervous system is under sustained pressure, the brain economizes. It stops running effortful, conscious processes and defaults to deeply wired patterns that require no thought. For many tax and accounting leaders, those patterns were formed during years of technical work where skepticism, verification, and control were rewarded as professional virtues. These are the same instincts that, under normal conditions, make leaders exceptionally skilled at technical work but can create blind spots in their leadership.
Under normal conditions, you might consciously choose to delegate or pause before revising someone's work. But when deadlines loom, your system reverts to what it knows best. You take the work back. You tighten oversight. You stop communicating proactively. You become the version of yourself that operates entirely on instinct.
This is not a character flaw. It is how human beings work under load. But it is why leadership development during calm periods matters so much. If new behaviors have not been practiced enough to become accessible under stress, they will disappear precisely when you need them most.
Why This Matters in a Profession Built on Recurring Pressure
In many professions, high-stress periods are occasional. Tax and accounting does not work that way. Busy season, quarter-end close, year-end reporting, and regulatory filing deadlines create predictable cycles of intensity. Leaders often normalize their stress response because everyone around them is under the same load.
The problem is that your team is making decisions about their future during these exact moments. A senior professional watching you take their work back in March is deciding whether they want to be here next March. A manager experiencing your silent treatment during close is wondering if this job is sustainable. The patterns you exhibit under pressure are shaping whether your best people stay.
What Leadership Under Pressure Actually Looks Like
In public accounting: A partner who is approachable most of the year becomes different during Q1. She stops having one-on-ones. She communicates almost exclusively about what is wrong. She bypasses her managers to work directly with staff, quietly undermining their authority every year. When busy season ends, she returns to being the leader everyone respects. But the damage compounds annually.
In corporate tax: A director who handles routine pressure well becomes paralyzed when regulatory guidance changes mid-quarter. Instead of trusting his experienced team to adapt, he implements three new review layers simultaneously, creating bottlenecks exactly when the team needs speed. They stop bringing him problems because they have learned it will only create more work.
In both environments: A leader who works sixteen-hour days while the team works twelve, not because the work requires it, but because letting go feels riskier than staying in control. The team interprets this as a vote of no confidence. Over time, they stop offering to take on more.
None of these leaders set out to undermine their teams. But the gap between their intentions and their impact under pressure is where leadership effectiveness breaks down.
The Three Things Pressure Teaches You
If you are willing to pay attention, high-pressure periods offer three pieces of data that are difficult to gather any other way.
First, they show you your actual default. Not the leader you aspire to be, but the instincts you revert to when your system is under load. That is the version your team will remember most.
Second, they reveal where your development work has not gone deep enough. If a behavior disappears under pressure, it has not yet become integrated. The goal is to make new choices accessible even when your bandwidth is low.
Third, they show you what your team has learned to expect from you. If your team gets quiet during peak periods or becomes overly cautious, they are responding to patterns you have established. Their behavior is a mirror.
Where to Start: Using Pressure as Data Instead of Failure
The shift begins with reframing how you think about your behavior under stress. Instead of viewing it as something to suppress, treat it as honest feedback about where you actually are as a leader.
Before the next high-pressure period, run a pre-mortem on your leadership. Spend thirty minutes reflecting on the last intense cycle. What did you do well? Where did you revert to control, silence, or criticism? Identify one specific pattern you want to interrupt. Then tell one trusted colleague or direct report what you are working on and ask them to give you a signal if they see it happening.
During the pressure, build one deliberate connection point per week. Not a status meeting about deliverables, but a genuine check-in with each direct report that is not about the work. Five minutes to ask how they are holding up. This signals to your team that they are still people to you, not just resources under pressure.
After the pressure subsides, conduct a brief post-season reflection. Not on technical outcomes, but on leadership behavior. Use three questions: Where did I lead from my best self this cycle? Where did I revert to habit? What is one thing I want to do differently next time? Write it down.
The Most Rigorous Thing You Can Do
In a profession where everything gets audited, the one thing that almost never gets examined is how the leader's own wiring shapes outcomes. Technical errors surface immediately. Leadership patterns take years to reveal their cost.
Karen eventually understood what was happening to her during tax season. It took a hard conversation with the manager who almost left, and it required her to sit with uncomfortable truths about how her team experienced her under pressure. But once she could see the pattern, she had something she did not have before: a choice.
She still feels the pull toward control when deadlines stack up. The instinct does not disappear. But now she recognizes it as information rather than inevitability. She has practiced enough alternatives that she can access them even when her bandwidth is low. And her team has learned that the leader they work for in March is recognizably the same person they work for in July.
Busy season will always be demanding. The work will always have real stakes. But the version of you that shows up under pressure is not fixed. It is just the most practiced. And practice, as it turns out, is something you can change.
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