Why Leaders Tighten Control the Moment They Need Trust the Most

by Tess Brigham, Certified Coach & Licensed Therapist

A leader doesn't decide to micromanage. It happens as an anxiety response, and understanding that response is the difference between fixing it and just feeling bad about it. As a therapist, I want to walk through what's actually happening in a leader's nervous system when they feel their old authority slipping, because it explains why "just trust your team more" never works as advice on its own.

This article expands on a recent episode of The Gen Mess with Tess, where I explore generational differences, communication, and psychological safety in modern workplaces.

What Happens in Your Brain When You Lose Control?

Organizational psychologists Barry Staw, Lance Sandelands, and Jane Dutton studied this at the individual, group, and organizational level and found something consistent: under perceived threat, people and organizations respond with the same pattern.¹ Attention narrows. Information processing shrinks. Control gets pulled inward, toward fewer hands, tighter oversight, more centralized decision-making.

This is called threat-rigidity theory, and it wasn't built to describe management style. It describes a survival response. When something feels threatening, the system doesn't get more flexible to adapt. It gets more rigid to defend.

Apply that to a leader who's just lost the thing that used to make people defer to them automatically. Their brain doesn't register "I need a new leadership strategy." It registers a threat. And the threat response isn't curiosity or openness. It's constriction. More check-ins. More approval steps. More eyes on the work. Not because the work changed. Because the leader's sense of control did.

Why Does Losing Control Make You See Problems That Aren't There?

Here's where it gets more specific to what leaders are actually experiencing right now. Researchers Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky ran six experiments testing what happens when people feel a lack of control, and they found something worth sitting with: people who feel less in control are significantly more likely to perceive patterns that don't exist.² Seeing images in random noise. Finding correlations in stock market data that aren't there. Believing in conspiracies. Developing superstitions.

Their brains are manufacturing structure because the loss of real structure is intolerable.

Now think about a leader who's lost their informational edge. A direct report asks "why are we doing it this way," a normal, reasonable question. But a leader whose brain is already running a control deficit doesn't process that as a question. It gets processed as a pattern: this person is testing me, this person doesn't respect me, this is the start of a bigger problem. None of that may be true. But the brain under a control deficit isn't optimizing for accuracy. It's optimizing for a sense of coherence, any coherence, even a false one.

That's the mechanism behind something I hear constantly from manager clients: they describe a single pushback, one question, one moment of friction, and within a week they've built an entire narrative about an employee's attitude. The narrative isn't coming from the employee's behavior. It's coming from the leader's brain trying to restore a sense of order it lost somewhere else.

Why Does Tightening the Leash Feel Safer, Even When It Backfires?

Control is self-soothing before it's strategic. Adding a check-in, requiring an extra approval step, asking for more documentation, none of that is really about the work getting done better. It's about the leader's own anxiety getting quieter for a moment. It works immediately and it costs nothing up front, which is exactly why it's so hard to stop doing even when it damages the relationship over time.

This is the part that doesn't show up in leadership training. Nobody sits a manager down and says, your last three decisions were driven by your own nervous system trying to calm itself down, not by what your team actually needed. But that's usually what's happening. The leader isn't being strategic. They're regulating.

I saw this with a manager who kept adding oversight to a direct report's projects after losing what she described as her "natural authority." Every added check-in made her feel better for about a day. It made her direct report trust her less every single time. The strategy was working exactly as designed, just not for the goal she thought she had.

What Do You Do With This Instead?

You can't skip the anxiety and go straight to trust-building, because the anxiety is what's driving the control in the first place. The move is to catch it before you act on it.

Before adding oversight, a check-in, or a new approval step, ask yourself three questions. Is this actually about the work, or about how I'm feeling right now? What specifically am I afraid will happen if I don't add this? Would I be doing this if I felt fully confident in my position right now?

If the honest answer to that third question is no, the fix isn't a new process. It's naming the anxiety to yourself before it turns into a policy that outlives the moment that created it.

Control that comes from anxiety and control that comes from actual necessity look identical from the outside. The only way to tell them apart is to check in with yourself before you act, not after your team has already started pulling away.

If you're catching yourself in this pattern right now, my free Gen Z Retention Playbook has more on building the kind of trust that doesn't rely on control to hold it together.