A Performance System You Can Trust: Your Nervous System

A Question for Middle and Senior Leaders

Does your leadership reduce fear, or quietly amplify it?

Most leaders are asked the same question in different forms:

“Is your team performing?”

We look to engagement surveys, delivery metrics, revenue, targets and output. These matter. But they don’t tell us one critical thing:

Are your people in a physiological state that actually allows high performance?

Because performance does not begin with pressure.

It begins with safety, dignity and connection.

Neuroscience now helps us understand something wise leaders have always sensed: when people don’t feel safe, they cannot give their best – not because they lack skill or motivation, but because their nervous system is busy trying to protect them.

What Can We Learn from the Nervous System?

Polyvagal Theory, developed by Dr Stephen Porges, explains how our autonomic nervous system constantly scans for cues of safety or threat — a process called neuroception. This happens outside conscious awareness and directly shapes how we think, relate and work.

In simple terms, we move through three broad states:

1. Safe and Connected (Ventral Vagal)

Biologically, this is when the prefrontal cortex — responsible for complex thinking, emotional regulation and decision-making — is most available. This is the foundation of psychological safety and high performance.

This is where collaboration, creativity and leadership capacity live. In this state, people:

• Think more clearly and long-term
• Speak up with ideas and concerns
  
• Listen and communicate with nuance
  
• Collaborate more effectively
  
• Recover more quickly from setbacks

2. Survival Mode: Sympathetic (Fight / Flight / Fawn)

When the nervous system senses threat, it mobilises:

• Attention narrows towards self-protection
  
• Thinking shifts to short-term solutions
  
• Trust drops, vigilance rises, and we scan for risk or exclusion
  
• Non-essential body processes (like digestion) may be deprioritised as the body prepares for action

This state can help in short bursts. But when teams live here chronically, creativity, strategic thinking, health and relational trust decline. People are working hard, but from survival, not inspiration.

3. Survival Mode: Dorsal Vagal (Shutdown)

When stress feels overwhelming or inescapable, the system can shift into collapse:

• Low energy and reduced initiative
  
• Slower thinking and responses
  
• Withdrawal from conversations and decisions
  
• A sense of “I can’t” or “what’s the point?”

This is not disengagement by choice. It is a protective biological response.

What This Looks Like in Organisations

When people are busy protecting their reputation, defending their team or avoiding embarrassment, enormous energy is lost to survival.

When people feel safe enough to ask for help, admit mistakes, offer new ideas and disagree respectfully, that energy becomes available for innovation, learning and meaningful contribution.

But we don’t see “nervous system states.” We see behaviour.

Chronic fight / flight / fawn in teams may look like:

• Defensive conversations and blame cycles
  
• Reluctance to admit mistakes
  
• Over-analysis and difficulty making decisions
  
• Competition that erodes trust
  
• Tension in meetings, people jumping between topics or speaking carefully rather than honestly

Shutdown in teams may look like:

• Silence or disengagement in meetings
  
• Low ownership and reduced initiative
  
• Overwhelm at tasks that were previously manageable
  
• Teams or departments withdrawing from one another

Over time, both states also affect health — increasing burnout, stress-related illness, absenteeism and presenteeism.

No performance framework can override a nervous system that does not feel safe.

Wisdom, Now Backed by Science

Long before we had neuroscience, deeply wise leaders understood a simple truth:

You cannot demand greatness from people who are busy trying to protect themselves.

Nelson Mandela, for example, led through dignity, presence and deep listening — even in the aftermath of profound harm. He understood that humiliation shrinks people, while respect helps them rise.

Today science shows us that when people feel respected and safe, their nervous systems shift into a state where connection, courage and creativity become biologically possible.

Safety is not a soft extra.

It is a performance condition.

Leadership as a Regulating Multiplier

Science also shows us something crucial:

Nervous systems regulate each other.

Through tone of voice, pace, facial expression and presence, leaders continuously send cues of safety or threat. This process — known as co-regulation — means a leader’s internal state does not stay personal. It becomes contagious.

Under pressure, a leader who is grounded, clear without aggression, steady in uncertainty and honest when dysregulated helps the organisation regulate. This is where the multiplier effect lives.

A leader’s regulation increases the cognitive capacity, relational trust and creative energy available across the system. When nervous systems settle at scale, performance shifts.

This is not about being endlessly calm or “nice”. It is about reducing unnecessary threat and increasing relational safety — so more of the organisation’s intelligence becomes usable, especially when the work is demanding.

Call to Action: Lead for Safety, Lead for Results

If you want teams that are resilient, innovative and able to handle complexity, look beyond metrics and ask:

Do our people feel safe enough — in their bodies and in their relationships — to bring their full intelligence to work?

Because where people feel safe, they think better.

Where they feel respected, they contribute more.

And where leadership creates the conditions for regulation, performance is no longer forced — it is freed.