Illustration by: iStock.com/Mongkol Akarasirithada
Leadership advice is everywhere: Be confident. Be decisive. Inspire others. Yet when leaders struggle, it’s rarely because they lack ambition or intent. More often, it’s because their behavior — especially under pressure — undermines what they’re trying to achieve.
Behavioral science offers a different way to think about leadership. It shifts the focus away from personality and toward practice. In other words, it’s less about who leaders are and more about what they do — consistently, visibly, and often unconsciously.
So what does the evidence tell us? What do great leaders actually do differently?
A Behavioral Lens on Leadership
Behavioral science starts from a simple premise: leaders are human. They face the same cognitive biases, emotional reactions, and social pressures as everyone else, only with higher stakes and broader consequences.
Studies across organizational behavior, psychology, and decision science show that leaders, like all people, rely on mental shortcuts, respond emotionally to stress, and are influenced by social context — often without realizing it.
For decades, faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business have challenged the idea that leadership effectiveness is driven primarily by individual brilliance or force of personality.
Instead, evidence points to a more nuanced reality: context shapes behavior, and behavior shapes outcomes.
- Research by Baba Shiv has shown how emotions influence how people process information, evaluate risk, and commit to decisions. Because failures loom larger than successes, experience can make leaders increasingly conservative over time, which is why diverse perspectives are essential to counterbalance that tendency.
- Likewise, Jeffrey Pfeffer has long emphasized that power is an unavoidable feature of leadership and organizational life, and that leadership advice fails when it ignores how power actually operates. He argues that execution depends less on merit or competence alone than on influence.
- Brian Lowery turns attention to how people themselves are shaped within those systems. Lowery argues that identity is not fixed or purely internal, but continuously created through social interaction and context. This means leaders influence outcomes through how they shape the environments and relationships that define how others see themselves and act, directly impacting psychological safety.
This is why leadership is best understood not as a fixed set of traits, but as a pattern of behaviors over time. Behavioral science reframes leadership as something observable and learnable. Leaders can experiment, adjust, and improve by paying closer attention to how their actions affect the performance of others.
As Stanford GSB faculty often note in research and forums like the If/Then podcast, it’s impossible to eliminate bias or emotion in leadership. It is, however, important to recognize these forces and design environments where better decisions are more likely to emerge.
From this perspective, leadership becomes less mysterious and more practical. It is shaped not by charisma alone, but by deliberate choices each leader makes:
- how they respond under pressure
- how they structure incentives
- how they model the behaviors their organizations need
What Great Leaders Do Differently
They don’t confuse confidence with effectiveness
Confidence is easy to spot, and it’s often rewarded. But research from Stanford Graduate School of Business suggests that confidence alone is a weak signal of leadership effectiveness.
A 2024 study by Shilaan Alzahawi, PhD ’25, Em Reit, PhD ’22, and Stanford GSB professor of organizational behavior Francis Flynn, examined executives enrolled in a Stanford leadership development program. Participants rated their own leadership abilities, while managers, peers, and direct reports evaluated them on the same competencies. The findings revealed a consistent perception gap:
- Highly ambitious leaders rated themselves as more effective than others did.
- External evaluations did not show higher performance for these leaders.
- Ambition predicted who sought leadership roles, not who excelled in them.
Across competencies ranging from motivating others to managing collaboration, ambitious leaders were no more effective than their less self-promoting peers.
Confidence may open the door to leadership, but effectiveness is earned through behavior: how leaders listen, calibrate decisions, and respond to input over time.
Great leaders recognize this gap. They test assumptions rather than rely on self-belief alone, and they use feedback to align how they see themselves with how others experience them.
They respond to feedback, but not performatively
Teams want leaders to take feedback seriously, but they also look for signals of sincerity. When leaders change their behavior too abruptly — especially in response to difficult feedback — those changes can raise doubts about authenticity.
In a recent study, Flynn found that leaders who change too quickly in response to criticism can appear reactive or inauthentic. Still, leaders who ignore feedback signal defensiveness. Effective leaders do something more nuanced: They absorb feedback thoughtfully, communicate their reasoning, and make changes deliberately. This approach signals respect for the feedback itself and for the effort required to change ingrained behavior.
Handled well, feedback becomes a reinforcing loop rather than a one-time exchange. People are more likely to speak up again when they believe their input leads to meaningful, considered action. In this way, responsiveness is not measured by speed alone, but by credibility and follow-through.
They design the environment, not just the message
Culture is shaped by what organizations reward, reinforce, and make easy to do. While communication matters, shared behavior is ultimately driven less by what leaders say than by the conditions they create: how incentives align, how norms are upheld, and which actions are encouraged or constrained.
Rather than relying on motivation or alignment alone, effective leaders design conditions that guide behavior in predictable ways. As Hayagreeva Rao demonstrates in his research on culture and social dynamics, culture is not an abstract set of beliefs; it is a pattern of repeated behaviors shaped by everyday choices. Leaders influence culture most powerfully not through slogans, but through the systems and signals they sustain over time.
They create an environment of psychological safety
Emotion plays a central role in decision-making, and leaders play a central role in creating psychological safety within their organization.
Sarah A. Soule, the Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean of Stanford GSB and Morgridge Professor of Organizational Behavior, describes psychological safety as an environment where people feel able to speak up and contribute candidly, confident that doing so will not harm how leaders view them.
When leaders manage their emotional responses, they create conditions where others can focus, contribute, and engage more fully. Teams are more willing to surface concerns when they believe their input will be received thoughtfully rather than dismissed or punished.
As Soule emphasizes, this kind of environment is shaped by leader behavior more than by encouragement alone, including:
- Pausing before responding
- Acknowledging uncertainty
- Inviting other points of view
- Listening actively
- Modeling openness, especially under pressure
Regulating emotion does not mean suppressing it; it means recognizing how emotions are expressed and how they affect others. Teams led by emotionally regulated leaders show greater trust and more consistent participation.
They treat leadership as a practice, not a position
One of the clearest differences between effective leaders and the rest is how they think about leadership itself. Great leaders do not treat leadership as a role they have earned or a capability they have completed. They treat it as a practice — something that requires ongoing attention, refinement, and effort.
This view reflects a core insight from leadership development at the executive level: Experience alone does not produce better leaders. What matters is how leaders engage with experience. Leaders who continue to develop are intentional about how they learn from it:
- They examine their own behavior rather than relying on intent.
- They reflect on their behavior, as well as how their decisions land with others.
- They treat setbacks and unexpected outcomes as information, not as judgments of competence.
From this perspective, leadership improvement is less about acquiring new techniques and more about sharpening awareness. Effective leaders pay attention to patterns in their behavior:
- How they respond under pressure
- When their habits support performance
- When those habits begin to get in the way
This practice-oriented mindset also shapes how leaders handle uncertainty. Rather than defaulting to authority or expertise, they remain open to learning. They adjust their behavior as contexts change.
Leadership, in this sense, is never finished. It is built through repeated choices, honest reflection, and a willingness to keep learning. Leaders who adopt this mindset continue to grow alongside the organizations they lead.
What This Means for Leaders Today
When leaders pay attention to behavior as carefully as they pay attention to strategy, they improve how decisions get made and how people perform.
By looking closely at how incentives, norms, and emotional signals shape behavior, leaders can better understand why their organizations operate the way they do — and where small changes can lead to meaningful improvement. And that is something any leader can learn.
This perspective sits at the core of many Stanford GSB Executive Education programs, including the Stanford Executive Program, Executive Leadership Development, and Stanford LEAD. Across these experiences, faculty draw on decades of behavioral research to help leaders understand how daily behaviors shape organizational outcomes.
Explore our Executive Education programs to see how these insights are applied in practice.
