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Leadership1 distinct publisher3 min readPublished
MIT Sloan Management Review reports on a four-year study of one leadership team whose three-year programme ended in mutual blame, tracing the failure to anxiety the leaders never named or contained.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
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The mechanism worth understanding here is how an emotion becomes an operating model. The researchers hold that anxiety mobilises people at first and paralyses them once leaders neglect it or fail to contain it [9], and that uncontained anxiety then gets organised: work is arranged so that everyone stays busy while the status quo endures, and that covert function undercuts the stated aim [10]. This is why the failure is hard to see in a status report. Workstreams report and the programme formally continues while the finger-pointing does the quieter work [1].
The board-deck version of a failure like this writes itself. The strategy was wrong, the process was weak, the people were not committed, strong leadership was absent [8]. The authors say they grew wary of those explanations precisely because transformations fail where awareness, motivation, leadership, strategy and commitment are all abundant [7]. That matters for how a post-mortem is scoped: send a review team to find the missing input and it will find one, because some workstream is always behind.
The two conditions the study puts underneath defensive organizing are uncomfortable because they are things boards deliberately buy. An executive who identifies with the organisation, and a workforce that trusts that executive's competence and benevolence, together produce leaders who feel responsible and followers who feel reliant [11]. When performance dips, the argument runs, a leader who cares faces more than reputational risk: performance anxiety becomes existential anxiety about not being the leader he aspires to be, and social anxiety about not being the leader others expect him to be [12].
A skeptic will say this is one anonymised professional services firm, given the pseudonym Recco [14], and that a single case cannot carry a general claim about why change programmes fail. Fair. What the design buys is sequence rather than prevalence: the transformation ran three years [4] inside a four-year observation of the same leadership team [5], leaving roughly a year of margin, so most of the programme was watched as it happened rather than reconstructed after the blame had settled [15]. The record does not say how common this pattern is, and no one should price it as typical.
The tradeoff the article implies but does not settle is what naming anxiety costs the person who names it. The authors say leaders can avoid defensive organizing by learning to work with anxiety, and that recognising how easily one is taken down the defensive route comes first [16]. But trust in competence and benevolence is both the precondition for the mechanism and the currency a leader spends when he says out loud that he is frightened [11]. This quarter that is a communications choice inside one programme review. Over a longer horizon it decides whether an executive team can report bad news about itself while the plan is still formally running, and the case studied ended in the organisation's demise [6], which is the upper bound on what deferral costs.
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
The authors say they outline how leaders can avoid defensive organizing by learning to work with anxiety, and that people must first recognize how easy it is, as leaders and followers, to be taken down a defensive route.
When leaders fail to manage both their own and others' emotions and worries, anxiety can trigger "defensive organizing," in which the transformation initiative itself stalls as managers and employees engage in finger-pointing while the status quo persists.
The researchers were present when the CEO of a professional services firm broke a long silence after his presentation by saying, "I feel set up."
The transformation the CEO had envisioned, and that his executive team had championed and worked on for three years, had failed to deliver returns, and the hope his leadership once inspired had soured into blame.
The scene occurred toward the end of a four-year study of the leadership team that strategized and implemented the firmwide transformation.
In the case the authors studied, the sequence of tension, exhaustion, resentment and disengagement ended in the organization's demise.
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1 article · September 1, 2026
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One anonymous firm, watched closely
The fieldwork is genuinely deep — four years alongside the leadership team, present for the moment the CEO said "I feel set up" — and that depth is the strength of the case. Everything else is thin. The firm is a pseudonym, the quoted evidence amounts to two lines of executive dialogue, and there is no count, no coding, no second organization, and no case where leaders contained the anxiety and the programme survived. Claims about transformations in general lean on "this study and beyond," which names nothing.
Nothing outside the study to count
The reporting stays inside Recco. No other organization is described as having tried to name and contain anxiety this way, no programme or curriculum built on the framework is mentioned, and the authors' executive development work appears only as a source of anecdotes, not as evidence of uptake. Uptake of a newly coined idea is not something to estimate from silence.
A theory sized larger than its case
The scale of the argument outruns the scale of the evidence: one anonymous services firm supports a claim about why transformations fail even where leadership, strategy and commitment are strong. Against that, the authors are careful in ways that keep the gap modest — they concede that anxiety often helps change succeed, they avoid single-cause language about the wider world, and they present a mechanism rather than a percentage. The overstatement is in the reach, not the rhetoric.
The researchers own the frame they sell
The authors coined "defensive organizing," diagnosed it, and — in the same piece — mention the executive development and coaching work where leaders come to them to discuss anxiety in private. That is a straight line from finding to service, and MIT Sloan Management Review's practitioner audience is precisely the market for it. To their credit the coaching work is stated openly rather than buried; what is missing is any word on their commercial relationship, if any, with the firm they studied for four years.
Believe the room, not the rule
Two different reliability levels sit in one story. The scene — a CEO saying he feels set up, three years spent, hope turned to blame — comes from researchers who were there and is as solid as first-hand reporting gets. The rule drawn from it, that neglected leadership anxiety is what quietly organizes transformations into failure, has one case behind it, one publisher, and no dissenting reader. Useful as a lens on your own leadership team; not yet something to cite as an established finding.