For Organizations: A 12-WEEK Leadership Development Cohort
LEADERSHIP UNDER PRESSURE™ LAB
for Organizations
Pressure doesn't create a different leader.
It reveals the patterns they've learned to rely on
and the conditions that shaped them.
12 Weeks to Shift from Survival to Steady
Leader patterns and organizational conditions shape decisions, relationships, and the way teams experience leaders.
Most leaders never see their patterns clearly, because the moments that reveal them are the moments they have the least capacity to observe.
The conditions are harder still to see, because from the inside they've become the normal way work gets done.
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The Lab is a 12-week cohort program
Leaders will learn why their nervous system pulls them into survival mode under sustained pressure, what their patterns under pressure are, practice a different way of meeting pressure in real time, and build the internal, team, and organizational capacity that makes steady leadership sustainable.
Leaders work through live sessions with a small group of leaders carrying responsibility similar to theirs, applying everything to the situations they're actually navigating that week.
Up to 30 leaders per cohort, calibrated to leadership level. Multiple cohorts can run at the same time when you're developing a larger leadership population.
Taught by Christina Pate, PhD, psychologist, leadership strategist, and executive coach, drawing on two decades studying how people function under pressure in complex, fast-moving organizations.
NOTE:
This page is for organizations enrolling a group of leaders. If you're an individual leader who wants to join a cohort on your own, the Leadership Under Pressure™ Lab for Individual Leaders is the right page.
THE PROBLEM
"Our leaders are capable. They're also running on empty."
From the outside, your organization looks like it has it together. Work is still getting delivered, calls are still getting made, your leaders are still holding things together for everyone around them. Underneath that, they're running on urgency and old patterns that used to work and no longer fit the pace or complexity of what they're carrying now.
The gap between how capable your leaders actually are and how steady they feel keeps getting wider. Most of them have stopped saying that out loud to anyone.
If this sounds familiar, you're not alone:
✓ Your leaders are working harder than they ever have and somehow still feel like they are falling further behind.
✓ Your strongest managers are the ones closest to burning out.
✓ Change initiatives stall because there's no room left to absorb more.
✓ Decisions that used to feel straightforward now feel overwhelming, taking longer than they should.
✓ Turnover keeps hitting the roles you can least afford to lose.
✓ Leaders feel pressure to have clarity while everything around them is changing.
✓ Leaders are asked to operate in ways that sit at odds with who they actually are, and holding that gap takes more out of them than anyone sees.
✓ Leaders are tired of proving themselves and wonder if they've lost touch with what actually matters.
You already know the way your leaders are operating right now is unsustainable.
Where to start is the part that's unclear.
Here's why nothing has worked (yet)
You've already tried the obvious things. Maybe you brought in a leadership development program. Maybe you funded coaching for your senior team. Maybe you ran the engagement survey, built the action plan, rolled out the framework, sent people to the offsite, bought the platform.
Here's what tends to happen. It helps. And it isn't enough. A year later your strongest manager is still the one you worry about most (or they’ve left), and the survey is naming the same things it named last year.
Effort has never been your problem. Every one of those approaches worked on the top of the system while leaving the foundation underneath it untouched.
#1: You’ve been trying to solve a state problem with thinking and performance. You've been trying to solve a capacity problem with capability. When a leader's nervous system is in survival mode, neither their best intentions nor the frameworks get any traction.
Clarity becomes inaccessible, judgment narrows, self-trust goes offline, and direction feels lost or forced instead of grounded.
When the nervous system is running on alarm, the best tools in the world have nowhere stable to land. That's how human beings are built, and it's why willpower keeps coming up short here.
#2: Leaders shape conditions and conditions shape leaders.
You can build real capacity in someone and then return them to the structures, systems, and incentives that reinforce the old behavior, and the conditions will win.
The Lab teaches your leaders a different starting point.
This Changed How Mike Saw Everything...
"The impact of baseline physiological responses on my behavior was pretty powerful. Seeing how it affected the other aspects of my interactions at nearly every level was very eye-opening for me.
The circles of control were probably my favorite light bulb moment. The realization that most of the rocks I was pushing were not mine.
I've noticed that I am able to stay much more grounded, even when the situation is stressful. This will change how you see everything. It's not hyperbole."
Michael Myers | Lead Engineer, Leitwolf
The Shift
The shift that changes everything
Steadiness under pressure doesn't come from adding more capability. It comes from building the capacity underneath it.
Capability is what your organization is able to do. Capacity is whether it can deliver on that in the time and conditions it actually has.
The same is true of the people doing the leading.
The old belief:
"Our leaders need more development. We build the skills, and the performance follows."
The new truth:
"We've been adding capability to people who have no capacity left to hold it. Once we build the capacity underneath, everything they already know how to do finally has somewhere to stand."
Clarity is state-dependent. When a leader's system is braced, activated, or shut down, their best thinking is out of reach in exactly the moments it matters most. Their state is also shaped all day by the conditions around them: the pace, the workload, and the way decisions get made. This program works on both.
And yet, insight alone runs into the same wall.
Understanding what's happening underneath your leadership is the necessary first move, and plenty of leaders get that far. Then Monday arrives. The week is hard in the ordinary way. The thing your leaders were going to work on gets pushed to next week, and then to the week after, and by the end of the month nothing has changed.
Application under real conditions is where this falls apart, because the conditions don't pause while your leaders integrate.
This is What The Lab Is Built For
✓ You want a structure that turns understanding into how your leaders actually operate.
✓ You need this to work inside the jobs they already have, at the pace they're already moving.
✓ You've funded programs before and watched the impact evaporate within a month.
✓ You want your leaders in the room together, because carrying this alone is part of what makes it heavy.
✓ You want practices they can reach for in the moment rather than concepts they understand in theory.
✓ You're ready to stop spending organizational energy and leader's remaining capacity on the parts of this that were never going to move.
Ready to build capacity that holds?
Why This One Holds
Most leadership development starts at the top of the system, with mindset, strategy, and skills. Those approaches work on the layer that goes offline first when your leaders are under sustained strain.
The Leadership Under Pressure™ System starts layers underneath, at the level of the nervous system, and works upward from there. That sequence is the reason change holds. When one's internal state stabilizes, everything leaders' already know how to do finally has somewhere stable to stand.
Twelve weeks matters for the same reason. Their patterns were built over years of repetition under real conditions, and they update the same way. Leaders need enough weeks to try something, try it out, bring it back to the room, and try it again. That cycle is where the change actually happens. In experimentation, reflection, and improvement.
Mark now has real specific tools for managing himself...
What We Do Together
The Lab moves through three levels of your leadership ecosystem, in the order that makes each one work.
We begin with the individual.
The Leader.
Change is inside job.
The first stretch of the Lab is about how leaders operate under sustained pressure. They'll identify their own patterns and the early warning signs that precede them, build a reliable way to shift their state in real time, and surface the narratives running underneath their reactivity. This is the highest-leverage work in the program, because when leaders change, everything downstream of them changes with them.
Then we look outward.
The Team.
Regulated leaders create regulated teams.
From steadier ground, we turn to the relational infrastructure your leaders are responsible for building: communication, collaboration, trust, and psychological safety. Those four decide whether a team can do hard work together, and all four are shaped by how the leader shows up.
Your leaders will get clear on what's creating trust and what's generating the strain their teams are absorbing, and they'll leave with specific changes to how they communicate, where their boundaries sit, how conflict gets handled and repaired, and what rhythms their teams run on.
Then we zoom out further.
The System.
Regulated leaders build systems that sustain performance at scale.
The final stretch addresses the conditions most leaders didn't initially create. Your leaders will learn to read how organizational structures are shaping behavior around them, sort what sits in their control from what sits in their influence from what sits outside both, and decide where their effort actually moves something.
If you're outside of the cohort, you get something out of this stretch too. Your leaders surface, in structured form, what's getting in the way of the work.
Underneath all three levels sits the Leadership Under Pressure™ System, built on the ALCHEMI™ and Ecosystem frameworks, drawing on psychology, neuroscience, systems science, adaptive leadership, and organizational development.
By the end of twelve weeks they'll be operating differently inside the same conditions, with practices they reach for automatically and a clear read on where their leverage is.
By the end of this program, leaders will be able to:
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Recognize their own pressure patterns as they're happening, early enough to do something about them, and shift their state in real time using practices they've tested under actual conditions
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Name the narratives driving their reactive behavior, and work with them instead of being run by them
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Build the relational infrastructure their teams run on: communication, collaboration, trust, and psychological safety, including how conflict gets handled and repaired
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Walk into hard conversations prepared rather than braced, and set boundaries that hold in a way that strengthens the relationships and the performance they're protecting
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Read what their teams are absorbing from them, and adjust their communication, their expectations, and their rhythms so people get clarity instead of strain
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Sort what's theirs to control, what's theirs to influence, and what sits outside both, and read how the structures around them are shaping behavior, so their effort lands where it actually moves something
What this looks like in their actual week...
✓ They handle a high-stakes situation without it blowing up or shutting down, and they can feel themselves doing it differently in the moment.
✓ They make a difficult call and feel confident in it, without replaying it that night.
✓ Someone raises a problem early, while it's still small.
✓ Someone on their team tells them, unprompted, that something has shifted in how they're showing up.
✓ They leave work tired, but not depleted, and the day ends when they close the laptop
Across the cohort, you'll see decisions that get made and stay made, teams that communicate with less strain, and a shared language for what happens to people under pressure. Over twelve weeks, patterns also surface that surveys tend to miss: where the friction actually sits, and where your attention would move something.
"My only worry going in was that it would just be about mindset and less about strategies. I already knew there was an issue and was bought into changing it. I just needed help making those changes. What surprised me most was how practical and immediately applicable the strategies were. They were things I was able to implement right away.
Since then I have been more successful delegating work to create more space to focus on leadership, have been a good role model for my team about creating boundaries, and have been more thoughtful about my yeses to ensure I am putting my time and energy into the right things."
Ashley | Senior Director, Research & Development
What's Included
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The Full Leadership Under Pressure™ System, Delivered Live
Twelve weeks of live facilitated sessions, calibrated to your leaders' level, with dedicated space for application, reflection, and shared accountability alongside colleagues carrying similar responsibility. Christina teaches every session herself.
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Private Program Site for Your Organization
Your cohort's own space, with every session recorded and posted within twenty-four hours, along with that week's materials. Access runs twelve months, so a hard week at work won't cost anyone the program.
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12 Months of Cohort Access
Ongoing connection, support, and integration with the leaders who were in the room together.
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Leadership Under Pressure™ Assessment
Every participant identifies their own pattern under pressure before the cohort begins, so the work starts where they actually are.
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The Well - Resource Hub
People fall off because when they're overwhelmed, their brain goes offline. Language disappears. Decision-making narrows. Old patterns take over. Leadership gets tested in the real moments, and the real moments are exactly when your leaders have the least access to what they learned.
The Well is built so they can find what they need without having to think clearly first. It's organized by state, so when someone is activated, shut down, or running on fumes, they open it and find support for where they actually are. It's also organized by level, so when the question is about them, their team, or the organization around them, the tools are already sorted.
ready to do this?
Your Investment
$42,000 per cohort
Includes one private 12-week cohort for up to 30 leaders, with weekly live sessions, access to the program site, session recordings, and the complete resource library.
Organizations running multiple cohorts receive reduced per-cohort rates.
Add-ons are priced separately and come at a reduced rate when bundled with a cohort.
Book a call and we'll scope it together.
Book a Call"I am more intentionally leading with the end in mind. I am finding opportunities to share agreements with the team as a natural progression of our work together. I would say that you are worth the investment in yourself. The right investment at the right time can be game changing if you put the work in."
Rosemary Reilly-Chammat | Director, State Agency
This Is for You If:
- Your leaders carry real responsibility for people, performance, and outcomes, and the stakes of getting it wrong are high
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You have capable people running on constant urgency, stretched and reactive, and you can see the cost accumulating
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You're in a season of growth, restructuring, or sustained change, and your leadership layer is absorbing the impact
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You've already funded training, coaching, and engagement work, and the effect faded within a few months
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You know the cost of staying here is too high, for performance, for your people, and for the leaders you can least afford to lose
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You want steadiness and sustainable performance that doesn't depend on a few people holding the whole load together
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You're developing a group rather than one person, because the work compounds when leaders learn it at the same time
This is for organizations whose leaders are already delivering and who want to sustain the work, the teams, and the people without the cost of burnout or breakdown.
This Is Not for You If:
- You're looking for a one-day workshop or a keynote
- You want development delivered to your people with no look at the conditions around them
- You need a standardized curriculum with no adaptation to your context
- Self-awareness and internal capacity sit outside what your culture accepts as part of leadership
A Rare & Valuable Intersection...
"Christina operates at a rare and valuable intersection of clinical psychology, business strategy, and adult learning. Her unique expertise, grounded in her Psychology PhD, allows her to develop training and facilitation content that is not only rigorous and data-driven but also truly user-centered, informed by her deep understanding of human behavior. I highly recommend Christina to any organization seeking to enhance both the productivity and wellbeing of its people."
Kristin Maczko | Global Lead, Organizational Effectiveness, Technology
Meet Your Guide
Dr. Christina Pate
Christina is a psychologist, strategist, and executive coach, and the creator of ALCHEMI™ and the Ecosystem model, the two frameworks behind the Leadership Under Pressure System™, a science-backed, integrative approach to lasting transformation.
For more than two decades she has worked across psychology, neuroscience, leadership, and organizational development, studying how people function under pressure and why capable, high-performing people so often struggle in ways that don't match how competent they actually are. She's designed and led transformational initiatives for thousands of people, including senior leaders in high-pressure environments across public and private sectors including technology, education, financial services, and healthcare.
She teaches this from the inside. After two decades of watching this pattern in other people, she lived her own version of it, and what she built on the other side is the system she teaches now.
Her approach is body-first, nervous-system-informed, and built for people who have already tried thinking their way through it.
let's do this!
you might be thinking...
"Our leaders don't have time for another thing."
Participants commit about three hours per month. Sessions alternate, ninety minutes one week and sixty the next. Between sessions the work happens inside the day they're already having, applied to the situations they're already navigating. The reason the program is built this way is that the leaders it serves don't have spare hours to add.
"Can this be tailored to different levels of leadership?"
Yes. The Lab is calibrated to three levels: managers, directors and senior directors, and executives. The framework stays the same across all three. The examples, the practice scenarios, and the depth of the systems work shift to match what that level actually carries. Organizations developing several layers often run one cohort at each level.
"We've invested in leadership programs before."
Most leadership development and most coaching starts at the top of the system, with mindset, strategy, and skills. This starts one layer underneath that, at the nervous system level, which is the piece that determines whether any of the rest of it holds under real pressure. One CTO described this work as "reaching a depth no previous executive coach, mentor, or therapist had gotten to.
"How do we measure it?"
We define your success measures before the cohort begins, because they vary by organization. Common ones include team-level feedback and engagement indicators, retention in critical roles, time to decision on things that had been stalling, and direct feedback from participants' teams. Participants also self-assess at the start and the end, and I share aggregate patterns with you.
"What about confidentiality?"
What individual participants share stays in the room. They have to be able to speak honestly for this to work. What I bring back to you is aggregate and thematic: patterns, conditions, and where leadership attention would help. We agree on those boundaries before we start, and participants know them on day one.
"What if someone has to miss a session?"
Every session is recorded and posted within twenty-four hours along with that week's materials, and access runs twelve months. The cohort space stays open the entire year, so people can bring questions there and stay connected to the group.
"Our work environment is the problem, not our leaders."
You may be exactly right, and this program doesn't pretend otherwise. Performance issues, turnover, conflict, and chronic stress are usually symptoms of systems that haven't evolved to match the complexity of what they now demand from people. What your leaders learn here is where their actual leverage sits inside conditions that stay hard, and why the environment being difficult makes this work matter more rather than less.
"Christina was able to immediately get to a depth of my leadership foundation that no previous executive coach, mentor, or even therapist has ever done. She helped me recognize patterns that have supported me over my career and, better yet, how to become more available for broader impact more consistently, and under more conditions from where I typically retreat.
She heard everything I said during our time together and reflected back more nuances than I could have imagined. I am more centered and can see the arc of my work more clearly now."
Jenny Moshea | Former CTO & VP of Enterprise AI
Structure
How The Lab Is Structured
Every session is live and facilitated by Christina Pate, PhD. Your leaders work through the material in live teaching and structured group discussion, applying it to their own context alongside colleagues. Nobody is handed off to someone else, and nobody works through prerecorded content alone.
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Length |
12 weeks |
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Live sessions |
Alternating weekly, 90 minutes one week and 60 minutes the next |
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Cohort size |
Up to 30 leaders |
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Calibration |
Manager/Sr. Manager, Director/Sr. director, or Executive |
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Delivery |
Live, facilitated by Christina Pate, PhD |
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Program site |
Private to your organization |
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Access |
12 months |
For Groups
Enrolling More Than One Cohort?
Cohorts hold up to 30 leaders. If you're developing more than that, cohorts can run in parallel or in sequence. Running them in parallel tends to be the stronger choice, because your leadership population gets the same language at the same moment, which is where culture starts to move.
Organizations running multiple cohorts receive reduced per-cohort rates.
Want to Enhance?
Some organizations also build more around the Lab. Each of these comes at a reduced rate when bundled with a cohort:
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Add-on |
What it's for |
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1:1 Coaching |
Individual work for leaders carrying the highest stakes or navigating a specific challenge or transition |
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Executive Advising |
Ongoing thought partnership for senior leaders and sponsors |
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Leader Enablement Advising |
Consulting on the conditions and practices that determine whether the learning holds |
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Program Design |
Custom work when the Lab connects to an existing leadership architecture |
Please send us message! We're happy to work with you.
YOUR NEXT STEP
Start with a conversation.
Your leaders have been managing this by working harder, and working harder has taken them as far as it takes anyone.
Twelve weeks from now they can be inside the same conditions with a different experience of them. Making decisions they trust. Walking into hard conversations prepared. Giving their teams clarity to work with.
The conditions may stay hard. What changes is who your leaders are inside them, and what everyone around them gets as a result.
Thirty minutes. We talk through what's happening in your organization, which leaders you're thinking about and at what level, and whether the Lab is the right fit. If it isn't, I'll tell you and point you toward what is.
If it's a fit, we'll cover cohort composition and calibration, timing, add-ons, and what the investment looks like at your scope. No preparation needed.
Not ready for a conversation yet? Join the Alchemi Community for free insights, resources, and news.
Or, take either the Leadership Under Pressure™ Archetype Assessment or the Leadership Under Pressure™ Organizational Pattern Assessment. They're free, take a few minutes, and show you the patterns shaping your personal leadership or shaping the leadership in your organization right now.
Book a CallIf a fellow leader were on the fence about this program, what would you say?
"You don't understand your operating system as well as Christina does. The program will make you more effective as a leader and more productive as a person."
Mark Mydland | Engineering Executive, Medical Technology
"Do it, 100%. It's cathartic in some ways to have a safe place to talk through all this stuff, but it also feels very productive because the lens is - how do we make this better? How do we strategize? And then there are actual strategies."
Ashley | Sr. Director, Research & Development
"As I navigated a major career transition into a challenging new leadership role, Dr. Christina Pate's program gave me exactly what I needed - a structured yet personal process to slow down and reconnect with what was happening beneath the surface. Christina's calm, deliberate approach created the space to explore the fears and anxieties that naturally emerge during significant change. If you're looking for someone who understands that lasting change starts from the inside out and can guide both you and your organization through complexity with wisdom and care, trust Christina's process"
