Executives invest heavily in leadership development, from coaching and assessments to competency models and strategic planning. But one factor often goes underexamined: day-to-day behavioural patterns.
Research from the 2025 Leadership Growth Profile dataset shows just how strongly those behaviours correlate with team outcomes.
Drawing from over 1,600 leadership evaluations across four large organisations, the data reveals consistent links between specific leader actions and key measures such as performance, engagement, psychological safety, and mental health.
The patterns are clear. Leaders who consistently demonstrate values-aligned behaviours tend to be associated with higher-performing, more resilient teams. Those who fall into reactive habits, especially under pressure, are often linked with lower trust, weaker team dynamics, and reduced effectiveness.
These aren’t abstract qualities. They’re observable behaviours with measurable associations.
For leadership teams and development functions, the implications are significant. If organisations want to strengthen results, they need to look closely at what leaders are actually doing, especially in the moments that matter most.
This article explores the five behaviours most strongly associated with positive outcomes, the five most strongly associated with negative ones, and how behavioural insight can become a core lever in leadership and culture strategy.
The Green Zone Behaviours Most Closely Associated With High Trust and Engagement
In the Leadership Growth Profile framework, behaviours are grouped into two core zones: the Green Zone and the Red Zone.
The Green Zone refers to intentional, values-aligned behaviours that support trust, clarity, and shared ownership. These are the habits teams rely on when navigating pressure, complexity, or change.
The 2025 Leadership Growth Profile dataset identified five Green Zone behaviours most consistently associated with strong team outcomes:
- Is attentive and focused
- Treats others with care and respect
- Actively listens to diverse points of view
- Involves people in decisions that impact their work
- Shows empathy when needed
Crucially, these behaviours were statistically significant predictors across several critical leadership outcomes. The behavioural data gathered through the Leadership Growth Profile explained:
Leaders who demonstrated these behaviours consistently were rated significantly higher across all major metrics. Here’s what the data revealed:
49.64% of the variance in performance
46.61% in leadership effectiveness
41.71% in engagement
46.55% in psychological safety
39.57% in mental health
This means the way leaders show up — in daily conversations, decisions, and moments of tension — reflects a large share of what shapes the team experience.
This insight is especially relevant now. Remote structures, shifting priorities, and sustained pressure make trust and clarity essential. Green Zone behaviours help teams stay aligned, speak up early, and take ownership together.
Consider one leader, faced with an urgent operational issue. Rather than escalating or assigning blame, she paused, gathered the team, asked open questions, and created space to reflect. The process took time. But the result was alignment, momentum, and shared resilience.
These are not soft skills. They are measurable, repeatable behaviours with strong ties to performance, wellbeing, and long-term impact.
The Red Zone Behaviours Most Strongly Linked to Team Friction
The Red Zone describes a set of reactive behaviours that emerge when leaders are under pressure. These patterns are often automatic. They reflect urgency, habit, or emotion rather than intentional leadership. They may appear decisive or efficient on the surface, but they tend to limit performance over time.
The 2025 Leadership Growth Profile dataset identified five Red Zone behaviours most consistently associated with negative team outcomes:
- Responds to feedback with aggression or blame
- Dominates meetings and conversations
- Points out others’ errors or failures
- Demands extreme deadlines
- Shuts down new ideas to manage risk
These behaviours showed the strongest statistical links to lower scores across multiple outcome areas. According to the data, Leadership Growth Profile behavioural patterns accounted for:
44.57% of the variance in performance
36.63% in leadership effectiveness
38.25% in engagement
44.48% in psychological safety
43.18% in mental health
In other words, the presence of these behaviours helps explain a substantial portion of what shapes how teams feel and perform.
These behaviours often go unchallenged. They may be reinforced by pace, urgency, or a narrow focus on results. Over time, they shape how teams think and operate. Communication becomes cautious and initiative fades. People start to protect themselves instead of solving problems together.
When Red Zone behaviours become common, they change the tone of work. Leaders may not intend to create pressure or tension, but the experience for others is consistent. These moments accumulate. They create patterns that limit clarity, reduce trust, and make strong performance harder to sustain.
Why These Patterns Are Hard to See
Most leaders aim to be supportive and effective. They take their roles seriously. They want their teams to succeed. But what leaders intend and what their teams experience are not always the same.
This is the gap between intention and impact. A leader may believe they are encouraging open dialogue. Their team may feel shut down. The leader may think they are providing support. The team may feel micromanaged. These are not signs of carelessness. They are signs of limited visibility.
The more senior a leader becomes, the harder it is to see the full picture. As power dynamics shift, people become more cautious. Leaders face pressure to move quickly, respond confidently, and deliver results. Under that pressure, they often rely on familiar behaviours which eventually become patterns. And because those patterns feel normal, they rarely get questioned.
Most organisations do not make those patterns easy to see. Feedback tends to be vague, infrequent, or overly polite. Many systems focus on outcomes rather than behaviour. This makes it difficult for leaders to connect their habits with the ripple effects they create.
Without structured, specific input from across the system, most leaders are reinforcing patterns they cannot see — and would never choose if they could.
The impact may not be immediate. But these blind spots progressively shape how teams engage, how decisions get made, and how performance holds up under pressure.
Behavioural feedback is about clarity, not judgement. When leaders understand how their behaviour is received, they can adjust with purpose. And when they do, they positively impact the environment people work in every day.
| Turning Insight Into Action With the Leadership Growth Profile
The Leadership Growth Profile was designed to give leaders something most assessments overlook: clear insight into how their behaviour is experienced by others. Its structured approach allows leaders to move beyond general impressions and focus on what is actually happening in their day-to-day leadership. It highlights:
By combining deep insight with ongoing coaching, the Leadership Growth Profile offers a proven, repeatable framework for surfacing and shifting leadership behaviour at scale. Click here to learn more about the Leadership Growth Profile |
The Cultural Impact of Behavioural Shift
Leadership behaviour is contagious. When it’s reactive, teams become cautious. When it’s consistent and values-aligned, teams become clear, resilient, and more willing to take ownership.
Behavioural change at the top sets the tone. It shapes how decisions are made, how feedback is shared, and how safe people feel to speak up. When Green Zone behaviours are practised regularly, they begin to define how the team operates.
Over time, these shifts hardwire into culture. People learn what’s encouraged, what’s allowed, and what’s possible, by example.
The most effective organisations aren’t led by perfect leaders. They’re led by aware ones.
When leaders see their patterns and take action to shift them, the effects ripple outward. They strengthen performance, trust, and the entire organisational culture. All because of daily behaviour.
Leading With What Actually Works
Most leaders operate with good intentions. They want strong teams and clear outcomes. But without feedback, their patterns stay hidden. Over time, those patterns become culture. The signals are always present. The challenge is learning to see them.
Which behaviours are your leaders reinforcing without realising it?
The Leadership Growth Profile brings those patterns into view. It offers behavioural insight across relationships, showing where habits support performance and where they may create drag.
With that visibility, leaders can move forward with clarity. This is where real culture change starts. Through leadership that can be seen, supported, and strengthened.
To explore how the Leadership Growth Profile brings visibility to leadership behaviour, visit the Leadership Growth Profile.
