Leadership Horizons

The Stress/Pressure Dynamic

• Lois Burton • Episode 5

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Resilience in leadership isn't about toughing it out—it's about creating support systems that help you perform at your best. I'm challenging the prevailing narrative that resilient leaders simply endure more pressure. Instead, true resilience means understanding how to maintain peak performance by managing pressure effectively. 

Do you know your optimal pressure zone—that sweet spot where you perform at your best? Much like a tire needs the right amount of air pressure, our performance requires the right amount of pressure—not too much, not too little. When leaders recognize their unique pressure thresholds, they can restructure their environments to maintain that zone consistently, leading to sustainable high performance rather than cycles of adrenaline-fueled sprints and exhausted recovery.

We explore five crucial components of mastering the stress-pressure-performance dynamic: identifying your optimal zone, recognizing early warning signs before stress derails performance, implementing proactive protocols for high-pressure periods, strategically redistributing workload to optimize team performance, and creating active partnerships where team members help each other manage pressure effectively. Each component builds upon the others to create a comprehensive approach to leadership resilience.

The most successful teams don't just endure challenges—they harness them for growth. By understanding these dynamics, you can transform not just your results but your entire experience as a leader. Download our free Leadership Resilience Audit with a bonus section on stress-pressure dynamics at loisburtononline.com and discover how your team can thrive, not just survive, under pressure.

Leadership Horizons - Helping You Lead Beyond Boundaries

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome back to Leadership Horizons, where we explore leadership at its most transformative through unique perspectives. I'm Lois Burton, an executive coach and leadership development specialist with over 25 years of experience working with senior leaders, executives and their teams. I'm passionate about helping leaders be the best they can be and, within this podcast, helping you to look at the demands on leaders today and how you best navigate the new challenges and expectations and the exciting opportunities and new horizons for leaders in 2025 and beyond. Today we're continuing our theme of resilience, which we started last week, and we're going to be diving into something particularly relevant for all leaders the stress, pressure, dynamic and how that impacts performance, which is a critical component of resilience in leadership. There was just one thing I wanted to say which was a little bit more generic about resilience before we dive into this topic, and it comes from a conversation I had with a leadership team just last week.

Speaker 1:

I think sometimes that there's a perception that leadership resilience means toughing things out. Some organizations seem to be pushing the idea that if you just get more resilient ie read tougher then all will be well. For me, resilience definitely does not mean this. Resilience, in my book, means setting in place support strategies for everyone that are positive and proactive, that help you to be calmer, kinder and more effective. We can't go back to pushing the idea of tough leadership as strong leadership, and I wanted to make this really clear as we move on. Resilience helps you make difficult and tough decisions, for sure, and it does help you feel stronger, but it's not just about toughing it out. This perception can really undermine you and your team out. This perception can really undermine you and your team. I'd love to have more debates on this and I'll be posting on LinkedIn hashtag leadership horizons. What does true resilience really mean? And I invite you to the debate, which I think would be really great to have.

Speaker 1:

So, moving back to the stress pressure performance dynamic, let's start with a question I often ask the executive teams I work with Do you know your optimal pressure zone, the sweet spot where you perform at your best? There's often a perception that stress and pressure are overwhelmingly negative things, and they're not. We do need some pressure in order to help us perform at our best, but we need to understand that sweet spot which is not too much, not too little, the bit where we can perform at our peak. And in my many thousand hours of individual and team coaching, I've discovered that understanding this dynamic isn't just helpful, it's essential for sustained leadership excellence. So think about pressure like the air in a tyre Too little and you drag along inefficiently. Too much and you risk a blowout, but just the right amount. That's where performance soars. When I work with leadership teams across sectors, from higher education to finance and to healthcare, leadership teams across sectors from higher education to finance and to healthcare I see the same pattern emerge Teams that understand and manage this dynamic effectively consistently outperform those that don't so. Today, I want to share five key components of the stress pressure performance dynamic and that can transform how teams function, especially during challenging times. And that can transform how teams function, especially during challenging times. So the first component is recognizing your optimal pressure zone, and each of us has a unique pressure threshold where we perform at our peak. It's that zone of sustainable high performance not too little, not too much, but just right.

Speaker 1:

I remember working with a CEO who was puzzled why her performance fluctuated so dramatically. Through our coaching sessions. She discovered that she'd been mistaking adrenaline rushes for productivity, and I think this is a really common mistake, because an adrenaline rush will drive us forward and can often feel really good because we achieved something really amazing in that adrenaline rush, but it's not sustainable productivity and it leads to a dip afterwards. So when we with this particular CEO, when we mapped out her performance curve, she realized that her sweet spot wasn't in that high intensity crunch period that she'd been gravitating towards and which actually can become a bit addictive, but it was rather in the structured pressure with clear boundaries and reflective periods built in. Again, I work with so many people who talk about the difficulty of creating reflective space for themselves. Many people will say that their coaching sessions are their only time when they do do serious reflection, and obviously that's great if you can use your coaching sessions for that. But trying to build in clearer boundaries and more reflective space will really add to your ability to perform at your best. So for my client, once she recognized this pattern, she restructured her calendar to maintain that optimal zone more consistently. I'm not going to say that it was always perfect and that she couldn't avoid some of those high intensity periods. She had to have those, it was the nature of her role. But she really worked at maintaining that optimal zone with reflective periods more consistently than she had before, and six months later she and her team's performance metrics had improved by 32% and, more importantly, she reported that she now felt much more in control rather than constantly jittering on the edge.

Speaker 1:

So the question for you is do you and your team members know your individual optimal pressure zones? Have you mapped them out? This isn't abstract theory. It's a practical leadership tool. The shift from healthy pressure to unhealthy stress is the second component, and that can be subtle and insidious. I'm sure you can recognize this yourself and, as I often tell the leaders I coach, by the time you're obviously stressed, you're already way past the optimal performance zone. So, as in other health conditions, early detection is everything.

Speaker 1:

In my work with executive teams, we explore the unique ways each person shows the early signs of excessive pressure. For some it's linguistic their communication becomes terser or more absolute. For others it's behavioral they withdraw from collaboration or become uncharacteristically impatient, defensive or short-tempered. And for many it's cognitive their decision-making becomes much more rigid, much more reactive and not as effective. So one healthcare executive I work with discovered that her tell the signal was when she started scheduling meetings back to back with no breaks, because her brain was cracking into urgency mode oh, too much to do, too much to back with no breaks because her brain was cracking into urgency mode oh, too much to do, too much to do, no time for a break. She'd previously seen this as being a badge of efficiency, but then realized that actually it was her sign that she was going into an unhealthy stress zone. So when she and her team learned to recognize this, the team developed a simple intervention and they called it the calendar check-in, and this simple awareness tool helped the entire leadership team to pull her back and therefore pull themselves back and maintain their performance curve. So how effectively does your team identify the early warning signs of unhealthy stress and, more importantly, do you have protocols in place to respond when those signs appear? The bonus section in our Leadership Resilience Audit, which is a free download from our website, loisburtononlinecom, gives you a tool to assess this dynamic. So please do feel free to head over and download it, and I would love to know if you find it helpful.

Speaker 1:

The third component is the ability to maintain performance during high pressure periods through proactive protocols and systems. High pressure is inevitable in leadership. The difference between thriving and surviving during these periods often comes down to intentional practices rather than heroic endurance. In my research and work with teams across industries, I found that teams that maintain performance during high pressure periods share specific traits. Firstly, they embrace what some would call pinch point planning. Others would call pressure point planning, but what it means is that they anticipate intensity and they also build recovery periods into their schedules, and they do this proactively, not reactively. The vital part is the recovery period. A lot of teams will plan for those pressure points, but many teams struggle to actually build in a recovery period, but committing to this as part of your planning is a really crucial tool for success. The second thing that these high performance teams do is they practice precision focus, which is clarifying exactly what demands attention during high pressure periods and what can wait. The team that I was with just last week were actually in the process of doing this as a result of the session we ran. They said they were going to look very strictly at their meetings and see which meetings could actually be shelved during a high-pressure period, because those could wait until later. Thirdly, these high-performance teams implement predefined plans and adjustments to their decision-making processes, their communication expectations and their resource allocation that they can activate when the pressure increases.

Speaker 1:

The challenge in all of this is something I hear from many teams I work with. There's no time, between various pressure points, to recover, learn and adjust. I absolutely recognize and respect the environment many of you are working in, which leads you down this path. However, I would gently challenge you to explore whether this is the absolute truth and whether there is more that you can control and influence than you think. I know how difficult this can be. However, I've seen firsthand when teams step back. There is stuff they can do and how the teams that discipline themselves around these pressure points, have preset plans and strategies and hold themselves accountable to actually implement these are the most successful. I want to take you back to the radar model, which we've discussed several times in previous episodes, and encourage you to really implement that during pressured times. So again, the question is when high pressure hits your team, have you got systems in place to maintain the performance or do you rely on individual heroics and just hope for the best? That way can lie some very unsustainable practices and potential for burnout, so I would really encourage you to start looking at this in a very proactive way.

Speaker 1:

The fourth component is about adjusting workload distribution to optimize performance, and this is something that I don't think, that a lot of teams often think about. They don't think about can we actually change the workload distribution? And one of the most powerful leadership interventions I've seen is the strategic redistribution of work based on pressure, capacity and the current state of individual members of the team. So this isn't just about what we would call equality of workload distribution giving everyone the same amount of work. It's about equity Distributing work in a way that keeps each team member in their performance zone. This might be an unfamiliar way of thinking, but again, I would really encourage you to start thinking differently about this.

Speaker 1:

In last week's episode, I talked about Michael, the healthcare director, who implemented a system for optimizing workload and coupled with emotional support in his team during COVID and how well that worked for them. By implementing dynamic workload adjustments, temporarily shifting responsibilities based on where each leader is on their performance curve, they achieve two seemingly contradictory outcomes increased collective output and decreased individual stress. This does absolutely depend on each team member being prepared to be flexible and to be prepared to let certain things go at difficult times, but also take things on to support their colleagues. So it really encourages flexible thinking and it also can take away the risk of single points of failure, but it is a different way of approaching it. So there's two questions here Does your team have the psychological safety and the practical systems to adjust workload distribution based on performance optimization rather than rigid role definitions?

Speaker 1:

The fifth component, which is linked to the last one, is about team members helping each other to manage pressure effectively, and this can be the most transformative component, because it creates a culture where team members take equal responsibility for helping each other and equal responsibility for the pressures that affect the whole team. It goes beyond simple support. It's about creating what we can call collective responsibility, but actually I found it better to think about this as active partnerships, which are intentional relationships where leaders take responsibility not just for their own performance curve but for helping their colleagues to maintain theirs. I found that these partnerships work best with structured practices, regular check-ins that are focused specifically on pressure state, giving permission to intervene when someone shows their stress patterns and to embrace collaborative problem solving around pressure management. Again, as I said, it's a different way of thinking of roles. It's a different way of thinking of roles. It's a different way of thinking of responsibilities within teams, and for many of you, this would be something new, that you would need to start to introduce some new practices.

Speaker 1:

But the question is do you already have some formalized ways for team members to help each other manage pressure, or is pressure management still seen as a purely individual responsibility, and can you start to shift this? So to bring this all together, through my decades of working with leaders and teams, I've seen how mastering the stress pressure performance dynamic transforms not just the results but the entire experience of leadership. Leaders who understand and manage this dynamic don't just perform better, they sustain that performance over time. They don't just endure challenges, they harness them for growth. And they don't just survive in leadership, they thrive. This isn't about eliminating pressure. That would be both impossible and undesirable. Appropriate pressure creates the conditions for peak performance. This is about mastering the dynamic, understanding the optimal zones, recognizing the warning signs and maintaining the performance during intensity through adjusting workloads strategically and supporting each other effectively.

Speaker 1:

As we close today's episode, I invite you to reflect on where your team stands with each of the five components we've discussed, which strengths you can build on, which represent opportunities for growth and, if you're interested in exploring this further, we've added a bonus section on the stress pressure dynamics that to our free leadership resilience audit, which can be accessed at wwwloisburtononlinecom. Please do head over and download it if you think it'll be helpful for your team. Next week, I'm going to be talking about how to manage your meetings for greater effectiveness, and how reducing your meetings by 20% yes, honestly, it's possible will help you to maintain your focus. Until then, this is Lois Burton, reminding you that great leadership isn't just about where you are now. It's about where you're going and how far you can see, because the future of leadership knows no bounds. Thank you for joining me on Leadership Horizons and I look forward to seeing you next week.