What Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn Look Like for Leaders
Work doesn't just trigger your stress responses. It trains them, rewards them, and writes them into the investor update.
A client told me recently, with genuine pride, that he’d spent most of a leadership offsite making sure two of his peers (in the C-suite) didn’t blow up at each other.
He tracked their moods all day.
He redirected conversations before they got tense.
He followed up with each of them privately afterward to smooth things over.
Although he was tired and frustrated by his colleagues’ immaturity, he described it as one of his better performances at work this year.
He wasn’t wrong, exactly. It was skilled. It was also a fawn response, running at full speed for nine hours. Nobody in that room was paying him for it.
You’ve probably heard the four ways our nervous systems respond to a threat: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
Most of us learned our default response long before we had a job. It got wired in childhood, in families, in whatever we lived through, and a Substack post by an executive coach is NOT the place to untangle that.
Work doesn’t just trigger these responses. Work FORMS them. Work has its own threats:
Layoffs you survived early in your career
Layoffs you now have to run
A board meeting going sideways
A co-founder conversation you’ve been rehearsing in the shower for a week
Being the only woman, the only Black person, the only queer person, or the only anything, in the room
Missing the quarter when other people’s paychecks depend on you not missing the quarter
Your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a predator and a reorg. It just knows something is coming, and it reaches for whatever has kept you safe before.
Surface-Level Behavior is Not Diagnostic
For the record, I’ve done all four, but the one I most closely identify with is fawn. Nobody who has worked with me would necessarily see it that way. Ask current and former colleagues I’ve worked with and they’ll tell you I’m usually the first and loudest person in the room to challenge a CEO.
After a lot of years and a lot of self work, the fawn only shows up when I’m under-resourced in some way. That’s when the old wiring reaches for the wheel.
That’s why you can’t diagnose these patterns from the outside, in other people, or sometimes even in yourself.
The person who argues constantly is not necessarily a fighter.
The person who agrees easily is not necessarily a fawner.
Surface behavior tells you almost nothing because the healthy version and the hijacked version of each of these can look identical from across the conference table.
None of what follows is a field guide for labeling your coworkers.
Every one of these responses has a healthy version. The behavior isn’t the problem. The driver is.
The question is whether you’re choosing it or obeying it.
Fight
The fight response describes seeking safety by overpowering the threat. It’s becoming the biggest thing in the room so nothing can touch you.
Healthy fight:
Direct conflict, done on purpose
Advocating hard for your team
Making the unpopular call
Saying the thing everyone is thinking
Being able to lose the argument without losing your mind
Hijacked fight:
The email you couldn’t NOT send, even though you knew you shouldn’t
Needing to win the point more than you need the outcome
When every piece of feedback lands as a challenge to your authority and you respond accordingly
When your team starts prefacing things with “don’t take this the wrong way”
Boards and investors reward hijacked fight constantly. They call it conviction and founder mode. The person is not deciding anything; they’re defending.
Flight
Flight is seeking safety by creating distance, getting out of range before the threat can land. It has a healthy version, and it’s underrated.
Healthy flight:
Leaving a genuinely bad situation
Knowing when a role is finished
Knowing when you’ve outgrown a company
Knowing when the situation is not going to change and staying is just slow damage
Some of the best career moves I’ve witnessed were flight.
Hijacked flight looks different:
The pivot that happens every time the current strategy gets hard, right when the compounding was about to start
Escaping into fundraising, conferences, and the next big idea because the unglamorous middle of the company is where the discomfort lives
The exec who leaves every role at the eighteen-month mark, always interviewing, always building the escape hatch
From the outside it reads as vision, building, growing. From the inside it’s a person who has never once stayed long enough to find out what happens next.
Freeze
Freeze is seeking safety by going still, becoming too small and too quiet to be worth attacking.
Healthy freeze:
Deliberate stillness before acting
Refusing to react to manufactured urgency
Sitting with uncertainty until the real shape of the decision shows up
Hijacked freeze:
The decision that has been “marinating” for six months
The executive everyone already knows isn’t working, still on the team, two quarters after you knew it too
Research as a hiding place: one more analysis, one more stakeholder conversation, one more week, because as long as you’re still gathering input, you can’t be wrong yet
The cruel part is that hijacked freeze looks identical to being thoughtful, right up until someone notices that the thinking never ends.
Fawn
Therapist Pete Walker defines fawn as seeking safety by merging with the wishes, needs, and demands of others.
Healthy fawn:
Attunement
Reading the room accurately
Caring about how a decision lands, adjusting your approach to the human in front of you
That’s a real skill, and leadership is worse without it.
Hijacked fawn:
Agreeing in the meeting and resenting it in the car
The pricing you haven’t raised in two years because one customer might get upset
The brilliant asshole you keep on the sales team because he always makes his number
Telling the board what it wants to hear and calling that managing up
The offsite my client described, nine hours of threat management dressed up as collaboration
At its deepest, it’s this: not knowing what you actually think anymore, because your mind learned a long time ago to skip straight to scanning for what’s safe to think.
Work adores this response. The team calls it accessible. Investors call it low drama. This is spiritual scope creep at an organizational scale, care expanded so far past its healthy limits that there’s no one left holding it.
Healthy vs. Hijacked?
So how do you tell the difference between the healthy version and the hijacked one, when they look the same from the outside and often feel the same from the inside?
Could you do the opposite if the situation called for it?
Healthy fight can yield
Healthy flight can stay
Healthy freeze can act before it has all the information
Healthy fawn can disappoint someone and survive it
If you can’t, if the behavior is the only move you have, then it isn’t a strength. It’s a reflex you don’t command.
For a lot of the leaders I work with, the reflex is the job title.
The fight response raised the Series A.
The fawn response is why the board describes you as such a pleasure to work with.
The flight response built the whole resume, three companies, five reinventions.
Untangling the pattern feels like a professional risk. If I stop doing the thing, who am I here? What is this company without it?
But I’ll offer you a few smaller things to consider.
Which response is your defualt under stress? Not the one you’d like it to be, and not the one your reputation suggests. The one that shows up when you’re running on empty at 4pm on a bad Tuesday.
When was the last time someone praised you for it?
What would the chosen version of that same behavior look like, the one where you could just as easily do the opposite?
I am convinced the goal is not to eliminate these responses. They kept you safe, at work and long before work, and they’ll fire again the next time something feels like a threat, because that’s what nervous systems do.
The goal is smaller and harder: a pause between the trigger and the response. A moment where you notice the reflex reaching for the wheel and get to decide, this time, whether to let it drive.
I work one-on-one with founders, senior leaders, and executives in GTM roles to help them get clear on what they actually want and what to do about it.
If that sounds useful, schedule some time to talk and we’ll figure out if we’re a fit.