Why Do Smart Executives Make Bad Calls Under Pressure? | AI for Executives

Sahar Andrade, MB.BCh, breaks down new Harvard Business Review research on why executive stress now exceeds pandemic-era peaks and how it narrows the brain’s decision-making center. The neuroscience of bad calls under pressure, and the ten-second reset that fixes it 

New HBR research on why executive stress now exceeds pandemic-era peaks, and the ten-second reset that widens judgment back out. 

In this episode, Sahar unpacks the difference between sharp stress that sharpens performance and corrosive stress that erodes it, why the prefrontal cortex is the first system to lose bandwidth under sustained pressure, and why current executive stress levels are exceeding even the pandemic-era peak. 

She closes with the Pushback Beat every stretched executive is thinking and the ten-second protocol that widens judgment back out before a high-stakes call. 

Comment RESET for the Executive Pressure Reset, three tools built for your next high-stakes decision.

Why do smart executives make bad decisions under pressure? What happens to the brain under sustained executive stress? Why is executive stress higher now than during the pandemic? What is the difference between sharp stress and corrosive stress? How do regulated leaders make better calls under pressure? Does more grit or motivation fix decision-making under stress?

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SPEAKER_00 0:12

People don't just quit buses. Sometimes buses get pushed out by their own organization. After trusting an AI-generated recommendation that turned out wrong. They followed the confident, fluid answer the tool gave them, made the call, and when it backfired, the organization blamed the human. Not the process that put an unverified AI answer in front of a decision maker in the first place. The reason this cuts so deep is not political, it's neurological. Betrayal by your own organization activates the same brain regions as physical pain. And once that circuit fires, an apology does not reverse it. This episode is for two audiences at once. If you are the manager living this right now, you will get language for what happened to you and a real starting point. And if you are the one deciding how your organization treats leaders who trusted a tool the organization itself rolled out, you will get a clearer picture of what the decision actually costs you long term. So why the old saying needs an AI era update? You have heard it a hundred times. People quit buses, not jobs. It's usually told from underneath. The employee who finally had enough of a manager who never listened, never protected them, never had their back. Before I go further, my name is Sahar Andradi. I am a neuroleadership coach with a medical background. This is AI Cafe Conversations Season 5. We are the only podcast where we integrate AI, neuroleadership, or neuroscience, and leadership. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your support, and thank you for making us one of the top 2% global podcasts. I appreciate you. So, again, going back to the old saying that needs an AI era update, there is a version of this happening right now that the old saying doesn't cover at all. A manager using an AI tool, the company itself told him to use, gets a confident, very well-written recommendation. He trusts this, he acts on it. It's wrong. And when it comes out, he is not just wrong, he is scapegoated, treated as if he personally failed, when the actual failure was a process that handed him a fluent, confident answer, and never taught him or anyone else to question it. This is the conversation almost nobody has outlined. Because admitting you trusted a tool that turned out wrong feels like admitting you were not careful enough. But the neuroscience here matters more than the shame does. So let's get into it. There is a well-known finding worth knowing here. Research on AI-assisted decision making has found that people accept incorrect AI-generated answers more than 80% of the time. 80% of the time. I see it every day, by the way. And rate themselves as more confident when they did not less. That's not a character flow in the people it happens to. That's what fluent, fast, confident sounding output does to the part of your brain that's supposed to stay skeptical. It goes quiet because fluency reads as truth to a brain that's tired, busy, or under pressure to move fast. Remember, I always say this AI suggests human design. No matter how much I like my AIs, no matter what I use Claude or Chat or whatever, I never take the first answer. I never take it for granted. I keep pushing dig at least five levels down to get the proper answer. It's not about just accepting what is different. So why trust ruptures hit the brain like an injury? Here is what most leadership advice skips entirely. Trust isn't a relationship concept, it's a nervous system event. When you are betrayed by people or systems you counted on, including a tool your own company rolled out and told you to rely on, the brain processes that experience through the same circuitry involved in physical pain. This is not a metaphor. Social pain and physical pain share overlapping neural pathways. That's why betrayal doesn't just feel bad emotionally, it registers in the body as an actual injury. The same way a sprained ankle registers as an injury. Complete with the instant to protect the injured part and avoid putting weight on it again too soon. This matters because it explains something leaders get drunk constantly. They expect trust to reset the way a disagreement resets with an apology, a meeting, maybe a policy update about how to use the tool going forward. But an injury doesn't heal because someone said sorry. It heals through repeated, consistent evidence that the environment is safe again. That takes time, your organization usually isn't willing to give a manager who's already been quietly labeled as the person who trusted the tool and got it wrong. There is a reason this specific kind of wound is so hard to talk about openly too. Admitting you were betrayed by a process, your own organization built and endorsed means admitting you trust a system that lets you down. And for a lot of leaders, that admission feels more exposing than admitting a straightforward mistake would. A mistake is something you can fix next time, but a betrayal is something that changes how safe the entire environment feels going forward, tool included, and that's much harder thing to sit with in a performance review. Let's discuss the manager who gets scapegoated because they pay the same price. This is where the quid bosses, not jobs, conversation needs to widen for right now. Managers are being told constantly to use AI tools to move faster and decide faster. When a decision made with that tool's help goes wrong, the organization needs somewhere to put the discomfort. Often, that somewhere is the manager who trusted the tool, not the leadership team that rolled it out without ever teaching anyone how to question it. Trust with leadership erodes, goes away. Reputation takes a hit that outlasts the actual incidents by a long distance. And here is the detail that matters most. This is not a one-time cost, it's the kind of thing that costs someone four years. That's not an exaggeration. That's the nervous system doing exactly what it's built to do. Once a threat has been logged in a specific context, in this case, this organization, this tool, this leadership team, the brain stays on alert in that context far longer than the original event would seem to justify. This is not weakness, it's protection. The circuitry that's supposed to keep you safe doesn't know the difference between vigilance that helps you and vigilance that's now costing you your effectiveness. Quitely making you slower to trust the next AI recommendation, slower to make a confident call at all, slower to do the exact kind of decisive work that made you a good manager in the first place. And here is what makes this particular betrayer so corrosive compared to other workplace confidence. It doesn't come from a peer or a competitor, it comes from the very structure that told you to trust the tool in the first place and then blamed you for doing exactly that, what you were asked to do. When the threat comes from inside the system you were relying on for safety, the nervous system doesn't have a clean outside enemy to organize around. It has to hold the unsettling reality that the instruction and the punishment came from the same place, a place that we stopped, that we trusted. So, how to tell if this is happening to you right now? If you are not sure this is your situation, here are the signals worth paying attention to. You notice you're being left out of meetings, you used to be automatically included in. Colleagues who used to loop you in decisions start looping you in after the fact instead or not at all. Your instance start telling you to document everything, every AI output, every email, every conversation, in a way that feels less like diligence and more like self-protection. And underneath all of it, you notice a specific kind of exhaustion that doesn't come from workload, it comes from constantly, quietly scanning the room to see who's still actually on your side. None of these signals alone proves anything. Organizations are messy and not every exclusion is a message. But when several of these show up together following a specific incident where you made a defensible call using a tool your organization endorsed, that pattern is worth naming honestly rather than explaining away. So what actually protects against this? The deeper problem underneath all of this isn't one bad AI assisted call. It's an organization that rolls out AI tools without building a real process for verifying output. And without a real process for fairness when a decision made with that tool goes wrong. Without that, every manager is trusting the tool alone, under pressure, with the full weight of the consequences landing on them personally if it goes sideways. This is exactly the terrain my brain, B-R-E-I-N framework was built to address, giving leaders a way to make these calls from regulation instead of blind trust. And now you know what the R is regulation instead of blind trust in a confident sounding output and giving organizations language for accountability that doesn't default to finding one person to blame for a systematic gap. If you are the manager who got burned this way, here is the practical starting point. Name what happened plainly to yourself first. Not I was careless, if that's not actually true, but I used a tool exactly the way I was told to. Then rebuild trust deliberately rather than waiting for it to happen on its own because it won't. Pick one or two people whose trust actually matters to you professionally and create small repeated moments of consistency with them. Trust rebuilds through pattern, not through explanation. A single well-worded conversation will not undo a month of quiet suspicion. Ten small, reliable moments over 10 weeks will do more than any single meeting ever could do. Because the nervous system trusts repetition far more than it trusts a good speech. And give yourself permission to grieve the version of the relationship you had with that organization before this happened. That sounds dramatic, I know, for a workplace issue, but it isn't. You trusted a structure to hold you if you used its own tool the way you were told to, and it didn't. Naming that loss honestly instead of pretending it didn't matter is often what actually allows the vigilance to soften over time. If you are the one further up the chain, watching a manager go through this, there is a direct role for you too. A single private conversation acknowledging that the call was defensible given the tool and the instructions provided, even if the outcome was bad, does more to interrupt this pattern than any policy document ever will. Managers who feel unfairly blamed rarely say so out loud. They simply become more cautious, less willing to trust the next rule, and eventually less willing to stay. If you want managers who make good judgment calls under pressure, including judgment about the question and AI recommendation, you have to be willing to defend those calls publicly when they don't go perfectly, not just when they succeed. So the pushback beat, now some of you are thinking, isn't this just accountability? If a manager trusts a tool without verifying it, shouldn't there be consequences? Yes, there should be consequences when a decision is generally negligent. When someone had a clear, easy way to check the output and simply didn't bother. But that's not what most of these stories describe. Most describe a manager doing exactly what the organization told them to do. Using a tool the organization rolled out and endorsed with no training on when to double-check it and no process for catching a wrong answer before it caused damage. The distinction matter because organizations that can tell the difference between negligence and a defensible call made with company indoors tools end up training every manager in the building to stop trusting any AI assisted process at all. Or worse, to stop making confident calls at all. That's not accountability, that's a slow erosion of the exact judgment leaders need to exercise under pressure. And it teaches an entire layer of management that the safest move is never to advocate for a decision, which is precisely the opposite of what most organizations say they want from their leaders in an AI adoption moment. There is a version of this pushback aimed at the manager too, not just the organization. If this is you, you might be telling yourself that you should have known better, that you should have double-checked the AI output, that a more experienced leader wouldn't have made that call. Be careful with that story. Hindsight makes every defensible decision look obvious in retrospect. The information you had in the moment, including the organization's own instruction to use and trust the tool, is the only fair measure of the decision. Not the information that became available after everything unfolded. If you have been the manager who got burned for trusting AI recommendation the organization itself endorsed, or the one still carrying the afterstate or the aftertaste of a trust structure that never got properly repaired, you are not imagining the cause. It's real, it's neurological, it's fixable with the right approach even years after the original incident. This is also worth saying plainly for anyone building or running a leadership team right now. The old saying tells you that people quit buses, not jobs. The AI era version is that trust breaks in both directions. And an organization that throlls out AI tools without a real process, both verification and fairness, is quietly training its best manager to stop trusting anything, including their own judgment. Not sure where you stand. Have a leadership clarity call with me. It's free, 30 minutes, no pitch, just clarity. I will leave the link in the notes of description of this episode. And as I always say, before we leave, show me some love, comment, share, subscribe, rate our podcast. Appreciate your support. Thank you so much for always supporting me and being here and listening to this. If you have any ideas, email me at sohar at soharconsulting.com. Till I see you on our regular long podcast on Wednesday next week. Peace out.