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Purpose Effective leadership action requires managers to harness power that is intrinsically political. This paper studies and characterises the political nature of a manager's behaviour when taking leadership action. Design / Methodology / Approach The methodological approach is qualitative and examines three organisations over a three year period when these entities experienced a major product failure. The paper analyses the actual managerial behaviour of managers and provides insight into the factors that most strongly influence the effectiveness of managers when taking leadership action. Findings We can conceptualise political behaviour when taking leadership action in terms of rationality and emotionality and, in so doing, clarify how we must modify behaviour to ensure that leadership action is consistently effective. Research Limitations / Implications A case study of three multi-national engineering companies engaged in the design, development and manufacturing of turbomachinery provides the platform for the research. The concepts we present will require validating in other organisations of different demographic profiles. Practical Implications The concepts we present and the implications we discuss provide insight into the political nature of managerial behaviour when taking leadership action. We highlight the practical steps individual managers can embrace to ensure their behaviour is appropriate to context, even under the most traumatic of situations. Thus, we provide managers with a model that facilitates effective leadership action. Originality / Value This paper provides insight into how managers behaved in circumstances that mattered to them. Through immersion in events at the time they took place, we captured situations in which managers were under real pressure and in so doing, avoided the bias inherent when interviewing a manager about past events. As such, we conclude that the political behaviour managers engage in when taking leadership action is rooted in the reality of the adversity that the most capable managers have both experienced and overcome. Paper Relevance The detailed study reports behaviour in a situation where managers' business and future prospects were in jeopardy. This paper identifies why some managers were able to use the experience positively, helping them to adopt politically intrinsic behaviour to facilitate effective leadership action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]