You're Not Controlling. You're Defending

Why control is a symptom, how to spot it and how to break free from it

Photo by Sivani Bandaru on Unsplash

Most leaders who struggle with control don’t think of themselves as controlling. They think of themselves as thorough. Responsible. High-standard.

They don’t feel controlling. They feel necessary and what is required in an unpredictable, chaotic, and high-risk world.

That’s the thing about control. It doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly takes over, right when the pressure is strongest, and the stakes are highest. And in the current climate, where more critical things are on the line, the pressure to control is stronger than ever. The toll of that — on others and on us — is escalating and cascading in a kind of perverse feedback loop.

So how do we understand it and break free from it?

Defence: Control Is a Symptom

Photo by Dan Burton on Unsplash

Simon P. Walker’s work in The Undefended Leader unpacks the nature of control and explains why it is a symptom.¹ That control isn’t fundamentally a behaviour problem. It’s a defence mechanism. It develops when something deeper in the leader feels at risk and when the self needs protection, and controlling behaviour becomes protective armour.

That’s such an important insight. It shifts the question from What are you doing? to what is happening inside you?

But I want to go a level further in with this. This is hard to hear if control has worked for you. And it probably has up to a point. And it is hard to hear if you cannot conceive of control as something other than a character and competence issue.

But explore with me and see what you think.

Because when I map Walker’s insight alongside the Affective Leadership framework I’ve been building across this series, something becomes very clear:

Control is not simply a defence. It is what happens when the core capacities of leadership begin to fragment under pressure.

Those capacities are four:

• Identity — who you are when the situation challenges you

• Attention — what you perceive when the noise increases

• Regulation — how your nervous system responds to threat

• Presence — the quality of relational space you create around you

When these are integrated, a leader can stay grounded, open, and clear in the middle of complexity.

When they fragment, control takes over. Here’s how each one breaks down.

1. Identity → Control as Self-Protection

The pressure arrives!

Maybe it’s a difficult email. A meeting that went sideways. A plan that starts to unravel. Deadlines are being missed due to a lack of ownership. A colleague who pushes back harder than expected with vague accusations.

For many leaders, something beneath our surface tightens up. It’s not just the situation that feels threatening.

Our self feels threatened.

Walker is precise here: control protects the leader from exposure—especially the exposure of inadequacy, failure, or loss of status. When identity becomes contingent on being right, being respected, and being seen as competent, then any disruption to those things becomes a crisis of self.

So the leader moves quickly and often subconsciously to:

- Set the record and narrative straight

- Reassert their position

- Regain lost ground

What appears to be decisiveness is actually an identity defence, and it's here that the self begins to crack. And once identity is ungrounded, everything else follows in a knock-on effect.

2. Attention → Control as Narrowing

A controlled identity cannot afford to stay open. Openness is too risky. It might encounter something that confirms the fears around it.

So attention narrows.

Instead of noticing, remaining curious, and staying perceptive, the leader begins to fixate. Interprets too quickly. Moves toward resolution. Their field of awareness is now contracting.

We stop listening, and we start managing.

Walker frames it this way: control reduces complexity. It takes what is nuanced and makes it manageable. That feels helpful, but it comes at a major cost.

When our attention narrows, we stop seeing people clearly. We stop reading the room. We miss what matters most, not because we’re unintelligent, but because our attention has already closed around a conclusion.

Control is what happens when attention can no longer remain open under pressure.

3. Regulation → Control as Nervous System Strategy

Here’s where the neuroscience becomes impossible to ignore.

The amygdala fires. The nervous system moves to high alert. The body—your body and mine—starts scanning even more for safety.

Control becomes the strategy it lands on:

- Create predictability

- Reduce uncertainty

- Limit exposure

- Manage the variables

And it works. Briefly.

The internal noise quiets down. The system we are in stabilises. The leader feels calmer because they feel in charge and in control.

But the cost is high, because there is now:

- Reduced flexibility

- Reduced empathy

- Reduced discernment

The important thing to understand here is that this is not a choice. Control is not chosen at this level. I’ll say that again. Control is not chosen at this level.

It is enacted by a dysregulated system trying to feel safe. Which means the solution is not willpower.

It never was.

4. Presence → Control as Relational Diminishment

This is the one most leaders miss. And it is perhaps the most damaging.

By the time identity has become defensive, attention has narrowed, the body has been regulated through control, and the relational world around the leader has already shifted.

Their presence is now compromised.

Instead of creating space, holding tension, and allowing others to be, the leader begins to direct more and more. To constrain. And this subtly dominates the emotional field around them.

Others often feel it before they can name it.

There is less freedom around them: less openness and more pressure.

Walker puts it plainly: control distances the leader from others. Not intentionally. Not cruelly. But inevitably. The leader is still physically present. But presence—the kind that makes people feel seen, held, safe and free—has been replaced by controlling management.

The Formation Question

Let’s recap the four key things that happen when control takes over.

Identity becomes threatened → Attention narrows to protect it → The body regulates through control → Presence is diminished.

Each one triggers the next. Each one makes the others worse.

And so we can say this:

Control is what leadership becomes when the self can no longer remain present to reality.

This is where I want to take Walker’s insight further. He names the nature of control as defence. You cannot change what you cannot name and see.

But how do we get beyond naming the problem? This question is one of formation.

And the answer is not:

> Try harder to control less.

That adds a performance pressure to an already dysregulated system.

The actual path we need to take begins with:

• Grounding identity beyond performance — Stop tying your sense of self to how well you’re doing. If your identity depends on succeeding, then any challenge seems like a personal attack. This is about knowing who you are, regardless of outcomes.

• Training our attention to remain open — Under pressure, most people narrow their focus and get defensive or rigid. This is about practising the ability to stay genuinely curious rather than reactive when things get hard.

• Developing regulation under pressure — This isn’t about controlling your environment or managing how things look. It’s about building real capacity in your body and nervous system to handle stress — so you’re not just coping, you’re actually stable.

• Cultivate presence that can hold complexity — When situations are messy or contradictory, most people do one of three things: simplify the problem, avoid it, or try to dominate it. This is about being able to sit with complexity without needing to resolve it prematurely.

You can't just read about control, attend a workshop, or understand it intellectually and then have it down pat. Forming a capacity means it has to be lived, practised, and embodied over time.

A Summary

So control is what happens when identity is threatened, attention collapses, the body seeks safety, and presence is lost. Four fractures with one symptom. And I have been prone to all of them as a leader, as have all leaders.

Leading with accountability, responsibility, goals, and ownership is essential. All too easily, people unwilling to carry these see any review of them as controlling, which it is not. But when an organisation is under pressure — and so is the leader — control creeps in, and these vital things easily become tools of control.

So how can our attention remain open under pressure?

Next: what it actually looks like to train attention under pressure—and why most leadership development misses this entirely.

1. Chapter 5, Strategies of Defence III: Control.