Almost two decades in banking taught one lesson above all: the industry measures risk with extraordinary discipline. Portfolios face rigorous stress tests, credit decisions are second-guessed, liquidity shocks are modelled, and exposures are tracked against clear limits.
What is too often overlooked is the condition of the person interpreting that data and acting on it.
"The problem is not a lack of intelligence. The problem is restricted access to that intelligence," says Patricia Ordody, founder of the Zurich-based coaching firm Health is Wealth.
Every analyst understands the principle: models are built from variables and constants. The decision-maker is treated as a constant — rational, stable, reliable. Performance, outcomes, and technical skill are measured. Clarity, emotional self-regulation, and the ability to recover under pressure remain invisible until they fail.
When the brain registers a threat, the amygdala can react before the prefrontal cortex — the region governing complex decision-making — has fully processed the situation. Attention narrows, urgency rises, and the impulse to defend, attack, avoid, or switch off intensifies. Expertise has not disappeared; access to it has become harder.
Pressure itself is not the enemy. The Yerkes-Dodson curve captures what many high performers know intuitively: too little pressure reduces attention, the right amount sharpens concentration, and too much impairs performance. Closely related is the concept of the "window of tolerance" — the zone in which people can still think clearly, weigh risks, and hear dissent without reacting defensively. Sustained pressure shrinks that window: feedback is perceived as criticism, urgency crowds out judgment, and a sharp response can derail a negotiation.
Under pressure, cognition itself shifts. The negativity bias causes potential losses to carry more weight than comparable gains. Chris Argyris, the Yale professor and pioneer of organisational learning, described this through the "ladder of inference": people observe data, select certain information, assign meaning, form assumptions, draw conclusions, and then act — yet thoughts are not facts.
The critical question, Ordody notes, is not only "What do I think?" but "What did I actually observe, what was merely assumed, and what else could it mean?"
Seniority offers no shield. A Gallup report found global employee engagement has fallen to 20 per cent, down from 23 per cent in 2022, with productivity losses estimated at roughly $10 trillion — nearly 9 per cent of global GDP. Most of the decline sits in middle management. Executive engagement dropped five percentage points in a single year, from 27 per cent in 2024 to 22 per cent in 2025 — the steepest annual fall on record.
A leader under sustained pressure influences the entire team; hierarchies amplify the effect the higher the position. At the top, leaders report higher engagement but also far more frequent episodes of stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness.
Emotional intelligence is eroding alongside it. A 2025 study published in Frontiers in Psychology covering 28,000 adults across 166 countries found a decline in emotional intelligence between 2019 and 2024.
The consequences extend beyond the individual. Poor decisions on the executive floor hit the P&L, raise team stress, and drive attrition. Decisions go unchallenged, errors go unacknowledged until clients spot them, and willingness to flag risks fades. Yet these costs rarely appear under their true name — there is no line item for "low emotional intelligence" or a "dysregulated nervous system." What is measured, Ordody argues, is the outcome, not the underlying variable.
Unlike many risks, this one can be influenced. Health is Wealth trains emotional self-regulation, resilience, and mental performance capacity systematically, before they become weaknesses. No financial institution would allow an untested model to value a position, yet institutions rely daily on human judgment without assessing the state of the decision-maker behind it.
Ordody, a certified executive coach who spent nearly twenty years in banking, frames the case bluntly: the quality and capacity of the decision-maker should command the same seriousness as the quality of the decision itself.
"We assume we act rationally. That assumption is barely tested, priced in, or even named. It is time to change that."
