Leadership Insights to Perform Under Pressure Using Navy Submarine Decision-Making Tactics

January 30, 2026

Have you ever found yourself frozen, waiting for absolute certainty before making a critical decision? That moment when you know you need to act, but something holds you back, convincing you that just a little more information will make the path clear? I’ve learned something powerful from leadership keynote speaker Marc Koehler: that hesitation is exactly what costs teams their competitive edge.

Marc brings a rare combination of high-stakes experience to the conversation about leadership under pressure. As a former U.S. Navy Nuclear Submarine Officer, turnaround CEO, and bestselling author of “Leading With Purpose,” he’s navigated life-or-death situations beneath the ocean’s surface and guided struggling companies back to profitability. Through his firm Lead With Purpose, he’s trained over 51,000 leaders using principles distilled from more than $1 million in Navy leadership training. What makes his perspective invaluable is that he’s not theorizing from a boardroom. He’s lived through scenarios where the wrong decision could end lives, and he’s translated those lessons into systems that work in any organization.

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Leadership Under Pressure Starts With the 40-70 Decision Rule

The Navy taught Marc something that contradicts how most of us operate in business. We wait for certainty. We gather more data. We scheduled another meeting. Meanwhile, the window of opportunity closes, competitors move ahead, and our teams lose confidence in our ability to lead. The submarine force operates differently, and its approach to business leadership decisions is both counterintuitive and brilliantly effective.

Here’s the rule that changed how I think about decision-making: if you’re 40% confident in your decision, you’re encouraged to make it. Wait until you’re 70% certain, and you’ve already waited too long. This isn’t recklessness. It’s recognition of a fundamental truth about human psychology. We systematically underestimate our own judgment by roughly 30%. That feeling of being “only 40% sure” is actually closer to 70% certainty once you account for our built-in self-doubt.

Think about the last major decision you delayed. What were you waiting for? More data rarely provides the clarity we imagine it will. Instead, we burn time, create anxiety in our teams, and send the unintended message that we lack conviction. The 40-70 rule acknowledges that leadership isn’t about having perfect information before acting.

What makes this approach powerful is understanding that your next decision isn’t final. You’re not locked into a single course. Make the call at 40% confidence, evaluate the results, make corrections, and keep moving forward. This creates momentum where hesitation creates stagnation. Your team watches how you handle uncertainty, and they model their own behavior on what they observe. When you demonstrate decisive action paired with course correction, you’re teaching them how to operate in ambiguous situations.

I’ve seen this play out in organizations where leaders wait for consensus or perfect data before moving. The cost isn’t just lost time. It’s the erosion of trust within teams who need direction, not endless analysis. Marc’s experience with thought leadership in high-pressure environments proves that velocity matters as much as accuracy when you’re building a culture of responsive decision-making.

Preparation Creates Automatic Confidence During Crisis

Marc shared something his wife noticed about him that reveals the real secret behind leadership under pressure. During crisis moments, he enters what she describes as a meditative state. Not panicked, not visibly stressed, just deeply focused. He’s not naturally calm in the way we might imagine. That composure isn’t a personality trait. It’s the result of preparation so thorough that response becomes automatic.

The submarine force doesn’t send officers out after a quick orientation. They invest 18 months in training before deployment. That might sound excessive until you understand what it creates. When something goes catastrophically wrong thousands of feet below the surface, there’s no time to think through your response. Your training takes over. The same leadership principle applies to elite performance in business environments.

Most organizations approach preparation incorrectly. They rush people through 30-day onboarding programs, throw them into roles, and expect them to perform under pressure. Then we’re surprised when they freeze or make poor decisions during critical moments. The Navy’s approach recognizes that individual readiness must come first, followed by collective readiness. You can’t build a high-performing team with individuals who aren’t deeply prepared for their roles.

Building individual readiness means creating leadership systems for deep preparation, not superficial training. It’s the difference between checking boxes on a compliance form and genuinely equipping someone to handle unexpected challenges. When I think about the leaders I’ve seen excel under pressure, they share this quality. They’ve done the work ahead of time. They’ve run scenarios, studied failures, and built mental models that activate automatically when stress hits.

After individual readiness comes collective readiness, which focuses on how your team handles change together. This is where you test whether your preparation translates into coordinated action. Can your team adapt when the initial plan falls apart? Do they know how to communicate under stress? Have they practiced enough that they trust each other’s judgment without hesitation?

Marc’s experience with teamwork in submarine operations demonstrates why this sequence matters. Individual competence without team cohesion creates chaos. Team cohesion without individual competence creates confident failure. You need both, in that order, to build the kind of organization that performs when pressure is highest.

The practical application means rethinking how you onboard and develop people. Are you giving them time to build genuine competence, or are you rushing them into situations they’re not prepared for? Are you creating opportunities for your team to practice responding to challenges together, or assuming they’ll figure it out when it matters? The quality of your preparation directly determines the quality of your performance under pressure.

Your Emotional State Becomes Your Team’s Emotional State

Here’s something most leadership development programs miss entirely. Your team doesn’t just hear your words or follow your directives. They absorb your emotional state and mirror it back in their own behavior. This isn’t metaphorical or theoretical. It’s neurological reality that shapes every interaction within your organization.

Marc puts it simply: the emotion of confidence will spread to your team, and the emotion of fear will spread to your team, too. You are not hiding your stress as well as you think you are. Your body language, your tone, the micro-expressions that flash across your face during difficult conversations—your team reads all of it. They’re constantly scanning you for signals about how worried they should be.

This creates a multiplication effect in both directions. When you project genuine confidence and leadership traits rooted in preparation, it cascades through your organization. People take more initiative. They make bolder decisions. They recover faster from setbacks because they believe recovery is possible. Conversely, when you broadcast fear or uncertainty, even unintentionally, it spreads just as quickly. Teams become cautious, second-guess themselves, and wait for permission before acting.

The challenge is that you can’t fake confidence. Your team will detect the incongruence between what you’re saying and what you’re feeling. This is where preparation becomes essential again. Marc’s “meditative state” during crisis isn’t performance. It’s the natural result of knowing he’s done the work to handle whatever comes next. That assurance is authentic, and authenticity is what your team responds to.

Understanding this emotional contagion changes how you think about personal development as a leader. Managing your own emotional state isn’t self-care or a nice-to-have skill. It’s a core leadership competency that directly impacts organizational performance. The work you do on yourself—building preparation systems, developing emotional regulation, creating margin in your schedule—isn’t selfish. It’s strategic leadership at its core.

I’ve watched performers who understand this leadership principle transform their organizations simply by changing how they show up during difficult periods. They don’t pretend everything is fine when it’s not. They acknowledge challenges while simultaneously projecting confidence in the team’s ability to navigate them. This combination of honesty and assurance creates psychological safety paired with high standards, which is the foundation of exceptional corporate culture.

The practical question becomes: what emotion are you choosing to amplify? Because you are choosing, whether you realize it or not. Your team is picking up on something. They’re either gaining confidence from your presence or absorbing anxiety from your uncertainty. Marc’s work in employee engagement demonstrates that this choice is one of the most powerful levers you have for influencing organizational performance.

Making Multiple Course Corrections Is the Strategy

One of the most damaging myths in leadership is the idea that great leaders make perfect decisions. We tell stories about visionary CEOs who saw the future and made bold bets that paid off. What we don’t talk about enough is how many course corrections happened between the initial decision and the eventual success. This omission creates unrealistic expectations and paralyzes leaders who think their first move needs to be their final move.

Marc’s approach to leadership under pressure explicitly includes course correction as part of the strategy. You make a decision at 40% confidence, you evaluate what happens, you adjust based on new information, and you keep moving. This isn’t admitting failure. It’s recognizing that conditions change and new data emerges. The ability to adjust quickly becomes more valuable than the ability to predict perfectly.

This shifts how you communicate decisions to your team. Instead of presenting a five-year plan as if it’s set in stone, you frame it as your best current thinking based on available information. You explicitly tell your team that you’ll be making adjustments as you learn more. This transparency does something counterintuitive: it actually increases confidence rather than decreasing it. Teams trust leaders who acknowledge uncertainty and demonstrate adaptability more than leaders who pretend to have all the answers.

The military background Marc brings to this conversation is particularly relevant here. Military planning includes contingencies and adjustment protocols because they know the first contact with reality will reveal gaps in the initial plan. Business leaders often lack this same pragmatism. We treat pivots as embarrassing admissions of error rather than normal responses to changing conditions.

Building a culture that embraces course correction requires changing how you respond when adjustments become necessary. Do you frame them as failures, or as evidence that you’re learning faster than your competitors? Do you punish people for needing to change direction, or do you celebrate their responsiveness? The answers to these questions determine whether your organization can move quickly or gets stuck defending outdated decisions.

I’ve seen this play out in organizations that succeed with creativity and innovation versus those that struggle. The successful ones treat their initial decisions as hypotheses to be tested rather than commitments to be defended. They build feedback loops that surface problems early. They reward people who identify necessary changes instead of hiding issues to protect their reputations. This creates an environment where the 40-70 rule works because course correction is normalized rather than stigmatized.

The practical application means building leadership systems that capture feedback, creating forums where people can challenge current direction without fear, and modeling the behavior yourself. When you make a course correction, explain why clearly. Show your team that new information changed your thinking and that changing your thinking is a strength, not a weakness. This is how you build an organization that moves fast without being reckless.

Building Crisis-Ready Teams Requires Systems, Not Hope

The difference between organizations that perform under pressure and those that collapse isn’t talent. It’s not passion or commitment or any of the usual suspects we cite when trying to explain high performance. The difference is systems. Marc’s work with Lead With Purpose demonstrates that elite leadership is achievable when you stop relying on hope and start building repeatable processes that create consistent results.

Most organizations approach crisis preparation the way people approach fire drills. They know they should do it, they check the box occasionally, but they don’t genuinely expect to need it. Then when crisis actually arrives, they discover that superficial preparation doesn’t translate into effective response. The gap between their imagined capability and their actual capability becomes painful and expensive.

The Navy’s 18-month training cycle isn’t about teaching people what to do during normal operations. Normal operations are relatively straightforward. The training is about creating automatic responses during abnormal situations when stress compromises your ability to think clearly. This is what separates adequate preparation from preparation that actually works when it matters.

Building this kind of readiness in a business context means identifying your highest-risk scenarios and drilling them repeatedly. Not once during onboarding, but regularly throughout someone’s tenure. You’re building muscle memory for crisis response. You’re creating patterns that activate automatically when conscious thought becomes difficult. This is how you develop attitude and capability that persists under pressure.

The system approach also addresses something Marc emphasized about leadership during crisis. His meditative state isn’t mystical or innate. It’s the predictable result of preparation. When you know you’ve trained for this scenario, when you’ve seen your team execute under simulated pressure, when you’ve built protocols that work, your stress response changes. You still feel the pressure, but you trust your preparation more than you fear the unknown.

Creating these systems requires investment that many organizations resist. Training takes time away from productive work. Drilling scenarios feels like overhead when you’re not currently in crisis. Building redundancy and backup plans seems inefficient when everything is running smoothly. These objections miss the point entirely. The time to build crisis capability is before the crisis, not during it. Once you’re in the middle of a high-pressure situation, you’re either prepared or you’re not.

I’ve worked with organizations that made this investment and seen the return. They don’t just perform better during obvious crises. They handle everyday pressure more effectively because their people have confidence in their own capabilities. They attract talent that wants to work in high-performing environments. They retain people who appreciate working in organizations that invest in their development. The benefits extend far beyond crisis response into every aspect of organizational performance.

Marc’s approach to developing leaders at every level recognizes that crisis-ready capability can’t be concentrated only at the top. When pressure hits, decisions happen at every level of your organization. The question is whether you’ve equipped people throughout your hierarchy to make good decisions quickly, or whether they’re waiting for permission while opportunities slip away. Building systems that create this distributed capability is what separates organizations that scale successfully from those that remain dependent on a small number of heroic leaders.

The Practical Path Forward for Your Leadership Development

Everything Marc shares about leadership under pressure sounds compelling in theory. The real question is how you actually implement these leadership principles in your specific context. You can’t replicate Navy submarine training protocols in a mid-sized software company or a manufacturing operation. But you can adapt the underlying principles to build crisis-ready capability in your organization.

Start with individual readiness. Audit your current onboarding and development processes honestly. Are you giving people genuine preparation, or are you checking boxes and hoping for the best? Individual readiness means someone has the knowledge, skills, and practice to handle their core responsibilities plus predictable variations. If someone joins your team and encounters their first real challenge three weeks later, feeling unprepared, your leadership system failed them.

Building individual readiness takes longer than most organizations want to invest. That’s precisely why most organizations struggle with performance under pressure. You’re making a choice between short-term productivity and long-term capability. The Navy chose long-term capability because the cost of failure is measured in lives. Your cost of failure might be measured differently, but it’s still real. Lost revenue, damaged reputation, missed opportunities, talented people leaving—these accumulate when your organization can’t perform when it matters.

After individual readiness comes collective readiness through teamwork development. This means creating opportunities for your team to practice responding to challenges together. Not theoretical exercises, but realistic scenarios that reveal how well your people coordinate under stress. Do they communicate effectively? Do they trust each other’s judgment? Can they adapt when the initial plan falls apart? You only discover these answers through practice.

Implement the 40-70 decision rule explicitly in your organization. Make it part of your culture that decisions at 40% confidence are encouraged, waiting until 70% is waiting too long, and course correction is expected rather than shameful. This requires changing how you respond when people make decisions that don’t work out perfectly. If you punish decisive action that requires adjustment, you’ll get analysis paralysis instead. If you celebrate responsive course correction, you’ll get organizational velocity.

Pay attention to your own emotional state and how it’s spreading through your organization. This isn’t about suppressing authentic emotion or pretending everything is fine when it’s not. It’s about recognizing that your team takes cues from you and being intentional about what you’re broadcasting. Build your own preparation systems so your confidence is genuine. Create margin in your schedule so you’re not operating from a place of constant stress. Invest in your own development so you have the capacity to remain steady when your team needs it most.

Leadership Beyond Buzzwords

The work Marc does through his inspirational & motivational speaking and consulting demonstrates that these principles scale across industries and organizational types. The specifics of implementation vary, but the underlying framework remains consistent. Preparation creates automatic confidence. Decisive action beats perfect planning. Emotional states spread through organizations. Course correction is a strategy, not failure. Leadership systems beat hope every time.

Your next step doesn’t require transforming your entire organization overnight. Pick one leadership principle from this conversation and implement it thoroughly. Maybe you start with the 40-70 rule and explicitly encourage faster decision-making paired with course correction. Maybe you overhaul your onboarding to prioritize genuine preparation over quick ramp-up. Maybe you build one realistic crisis scenario and drill your team’s response. Whatever you choose, commit to it fully and measure the results.

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