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Pressure has the power to create both. Diamonds and mortal wounds.
Not so much about the intensity of the pressure that dictates the outcome, but the surrounding conditions.
These days, to say leaders are under some pressure…well, I think you know.
Boards, customers, patients – everyone is screaming for more. All while the existential threats of you know the list – AI, the economy, politics, and on and on – continue to loom. Reorgs, resource constraints, I mean...
So yeah. Pressure. And they're doing what people under pressure do. They push it down.
They set bigger targets. They talk about empowerment. They tell their teams that they're talented and creative and that if they just work smarter they can get it done.
And their teams are drowning.
When teams are feeling this heat, we (the royal) assume the antidote is lower expectations - fewer priorities, a lighter load. But in reality expectations aren't the problem. The conditions surrounding them are.
Teams aren't underperforming. They're performing amongst conditions that aren't aligning all the moving parts. And when they raise the flag to say this isn't possible as scoped – they're essentially told to "influence" harder, to "just push back" on the seniormost leaders asking for things not on the priority list.
So they stop raising flags. It's impossible. It's learned helplessness. A concept I learned in college. It's what happens to smart people (or dogs, in the studies I recall) in broken systems.
The system is teaching them that honesty is dangerous. So now they do what trapped people (or dogs) do. They go through the motions but without much energy behind it. And the results the leader is pushing so hard for?
Teams aren't failing because they stopped trying. The team stopped trying because success was already out of reach. The conditions made it impossible. And nobody with the power to change that was willing to hear it.
Leaders are seeing a performance problem. People who've checked out. A culture that needs fixing. What they're not seeing is how those conditions developed. Often invisibly.
Often under the same pressure they're living with right now. Because there's a difference between the pressure you can't control and the pressure you're choosing not to absorb. And right now a lot of leaders are navigating both at once – and the line between them can get hard to see.
The board isn't letting up. The market isn't getting easier. That's real and nobody's pretending otherwise. But that's not the whole story. Because inside all of that there are things that are squarely within a leader's control.
When a team can't move because a critical partner team hasn't prioritized the same work, and their leader's response is "go influence without authority," the path hasn't been cleared. The leader needs to do the work of aligning first with their peer. Then the influence can happen.
When senior stakeholders keep lobbing new priorities over the fence, and the leader "empowers" their team to push back. The reality is, pushing back on a skip-level leader is harder than it seems. The team's leader should begin by offering some air cover.
These are just two examples. There are more. The pattern is the same: discomfort flows down, hard conversations get offloaded, and teams who are already underwater get handed problems that were never theirs to solve.
A team that keeps being handed problems their leader should be solving – or at least helping to ease – will eventually stop solving anything at all. And that's the moment pressure stops making diamonds.
So if your team feels stuck, checked out, resistant - before you diagnose them, diagnose the conditions. Ask yourself honestly: what am I passing through that I should be absorbing? What conversations am I delegating down that belong above me? Where is my team being asked to operate without the cover they actually need?
You can't control everything coming at you. But you control more than you're owning right now. The pressure isn't the problem. It never is. It's what you do with it before it hits your team.
Related: Standing Still Is Breaking More Teams Than Change Ever Will