Pushing Harder, Getting Less

Pressure produces a short burst

I was sitting in a leadership offsite not long ago with a team that was, by almost any measure, doing the right things, and getting steadily worse results. The quarter had come in under target, and the response in the room was the one I have watched play out more times than I can count, which was to reach for more targets and tighter reporting and a new dashboard that nobody had actually asked for. Someone floated the idea of a performance conversation with the two managers whose numbers had slipped, and there were nods all round, and I sat there thinking that not one person in that room was lazy or careless, and yet every instinct they had was pointing them in the wrong direction. And I will be honest with you, because I have sat exactly where they were sitting, more than once, so none of this is me looking down on anyone from somewhere clever.

The instinct, when the results fall short, is to push, and I understand it completely, because it feels like leadership. We add the pressure and the oversight and the urgency, and sitting underneath all of it is an assumption we almost never stop to examine, which is that performance is a thing you extract from people if you only lean on them hard enough. The genuinely cruel part is that it works for a little while. Pressure produces a short burst, and the burst gets read as proof that the pushing was the right call, so the next time the numbers dip we push again, a fraction harder, and the people inside it get a little more tired, and the truth gets a little harder to come by, and round it goes.

What I have come to believe, after watching this cycle for years, is that performance was never really a pushing problem at all, it is a conditions problem. And the thing I find reassuring is that there is solid research telling us the same, if we are willing to sit still long enough to hear it.

Richard Hackman spent close to forty years studying what actually makes groups perform, in places as unalike as airline cockpits and hospital teams and intelligence units, and late in his career he put a figure on it that I have honestly never been able to shake. He estimated that something like sixty per cent of the difference in how well a team ends up performing is settled before the work even begins, in the conditions the leader puts in place, with around thirty per cent resting on how the work is launched, and only the last ten per cent or so down to anything the leader does once the team is already underway (Hackman, 2012). I would gently ask you to sit with that for a second, because it turns the whole picture inside out. All the chasing and correcting and pressing that most of us pour ourselves into, the stuff that feels most like the job, all of it lives inside that final ten per cent. The real leverage was always upstream, in the environment we built or failed to build, and most of us are spending our best energy in the one place it counts for least.

When I share that number with senior leaders, the room usually goes still, and then someone pushes back, which is fair enough, because it asks them to let go of the very thing that has felt most like leading for their entire career, the feeling of driving the result personally. A leader who believes the job is to drive performance wakes up asking what am I going to do today to make performance happen. A leader who believes the job is to build conditions wakes up asking something different and far more useful, which is what is the environment I have created, and is it actually producing what I need. The first works harder and harder and grows more tired. The second builds something that keeps producing even when they are not in the room.

I have seen, more times than I would like, what it looks like when the conditions are never built. The information goes first, because people learn that telling the truth early is unsafe, so the problems that are obvious to the people doing the work stay invisible to the people making the decisions until they have grown expensive and sometimes impossible to undo. Then the best people start to drift away, rarely with any drama, usually slowly and then all at once, because the place will not let them do work they are proud of. And what gets left behind is a kind of performance that leans entirely on a few good people carrying far more than they should, which holds right up until those people burn out, and then it falls over, because there was never any real momentum underneath it, only effort wearing momentum's clothes.

There is something sitting beneath all of this that the research keeps returning to, and I want to be clear that it is not soft. Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety found that the teams that learn and perform best are not the comfortable ones, they are the ones where people feel safe enough to say the difficult thing while it is still small and cheap to fix (Edmondson, 1999). That safety is a condition you build, and you mostly build it in the half second after someone tells you something you did not want to hear, by how you respond. It is not a poster in the kitchen. And it rests on something more basic again, which is whether the people around you are treated as capable adults with genuine say over their work, or as resources to be managed and moved. When people are seen the first way, they bring everything they have. When they are managed by pressure, they bring compliance, and the capacity is still in them, it simply never comes out to play.

None of this work can be done while you are reacting, which is exactly why I keep circling back to the practice of pause. You cannot see the environment you have built while you are sprinting through the middle of it. Pause is what makes the space to step back and ask the conditions question at all, and it is the one move available to any leader at any level, no matter how broken everything else feels right now. So if you wanted somewhere honest to start this week, I would not reach for a new dashboard. I would find the one place where the truth is not getting to you, the meeting where everyone agrees a little too quickly, and I would go and make it safer for someone to disagree with me, and then I would pay close attention to how I handled it when they did.

Because the question worth carrying is not the one that team kept reaching for at the offsite. It is not how do I get more out of these people. It is harder and far more useful than that, and it is this: what kind of place have I actually built, and is it somewhere the performance I keep asking for could ever really happen?

What this Moment Needs

References

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

Hackman, J. R. (2012). From causes to conditions in group research. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 33(3), 428–444.