Leadership Horizons

Managing Stress-Pressure Dynamic

• Lois Burton • Episode 30

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Finding the sweet spot between challenge and burnout is perhaps the most critical skill for today's leaders. In this deeply insightful exploration of what I call the "stress-pressure performance dynamic," I unpack a transformative leadership concept that emerged from my 25 years coaching executives through their most challenging periods.

Pressure and stress are fundamentally different—a distinction that can revolutionize your leadership approach. Like a perfectly tuned violin string, the right amount of pressure creates beautiful music, while too much causes breakage. 

The most effective leaders understand this delicate balance, helping each team member discover their unique optimal pressure zone rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach. Through real-world examples, I share how one leadership team transformed their performance once they recognized their CFO thrived under tight deadlines, their Operations Director needed recovery time between challenges, and their HR Director required regular check-ins during intense periods.

Learning to spot when healthy pressure tips into harmful stress represents another crucial leadership skill. I provide specific indicators across physical, behavioral, and performance domains that signal when someone is approaching their breaking point. 

Most importantly, I offer practical strategies for maintaining team performance during unavoidable high-pressure periods, including my "pressure mapping" technique that helps distribute workload strategically across teams. The ultimate goal? Creating a culture where team members develop "pressure awareness," naturally supporting each other before anyone drowns. Join me in discovering how mastering this dynamic doesn't just improve results—it creates more resilient, engaged, and ultimately successful teams. 

Download your free Leading with Resilience Team Audit at loisburtononline.com and subscribe for next week's episode on "how not to lose the dressing room."

Leadership Horizons - Helping You Lead Beyond Boundaries

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to Leadership Horizons, where we explore leadership at its most transformative. I'm Lois Burton and I'm delighted you're joining me today. For those of you who are new to the podcast, I'm an executive coach and leadership development specialist. Over the past 25 years, I've had the privilege of working alongside some incredible leaders and I've seen firsthand how the very best leaders navigate one of the most critical challenges facing teams today the delicate balance between pressure and performance. So today we're diving deep into something I call the stress-pressure performance dynamic. This is a concept that emerged from my years of working with senior executives and their teams, particularly during challenging periods and, let's be honest, we've all had plenty of those recently. This is also something I've incorporated into my leading with resilience work and uses the sixth pillar of the leading with resilience team audit. If you'd like a free copy of this for your team, please head over to loisburtononlinecom and you can download it for free. Let me start with a fundamental truth I've observed across thousands of coaching conversations Pressure and stress are not the same thing, and understanding this distinction can be transformational for your leadership. Pressure can be productive. It's that sweet spot where challenge meets capability, where your team feels stretched but not broken. Think of pressure like a violin string the right tension creates beautiful music, but too much pressure and the string snaps. Stress, on the other hand, is what happens when pressure exceeds our perceived ability to cope. It's where performance starts to deteriorate rather than improve. In my work with executive teams across sectors, I've seen leaders who intuitively understand this dynamic and they can create extraordinary results, while others who miss it, watch their talented teams burn out or underperform. So the first element of masterful leadership in this area is helping each team member understand their own optimal pressure zone. This isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. I remember working with a senior leadership team where the CEO assumed everyone responded to pressure the same way he did, by working longer hours and pushing harder. What we discovered through our coaching work was that his team had completely different optimal pressure zones. His CFO performed brilliantly under tight deadlines, but needed clear parameters. His operations director thrived on complex challenges, but needed recovery time between intense periods. His HR director was exceptional at managing multiple competing priorities, but needed regular check-ins to feel supported.

Speaker 1:

As leaders, we need to become students of our people and therefore we can watch for the signs. When does someone produce their best work? When do you see them light up with energy, versus when do you see them start to fray around the edges and do you understand this about yourself? Do you understand what helps you to produce your best work or what really puts you under pressure? Creating regular one-to-ones specifically focused on workload and pressure is really helpful. So in the one-to-ones you can ask questions like when have you felt most energised and productive recently, and what kind of pressure brings out your best work versus what kind of pressure feels overwhelming? What I've seen is that quite often, leaders might have this type of conversation when they first recruit someone, for instance, or when somebody moves into their team, but they don't always have it on a regular basis, and bringing that kind of conversation in on a regular basis can be so powerful.

Speaker 1:

The second critical element is developing your ability to spot when pressure has tipped into unhealthy stress, both in yourself and in your team members. From my experience in coaching senior leaders, I've identified several key warning signs that often get overlooked. The physical signs changes in energy levels, frequent illness, changes in sleep patterns that affect work performance. Behavioural changes can be increased irritability, withdrawal from team interactions or, conversely, manic overactivity. I've seen brilliant executives become overly controlling when stressed or start avoiding important conversations and meetings. Performance indicators this might seem obvious, but it's often subtle. Look for decreased creativity, increased errors in usually reliable team members or difficulty making decisions that would normally be straightforward. One of the most difficult parts of this is that actually you might be replicating some of these changes and indicators and they're happening in your team as well, but because they're happening in you, you're not necessarily spotting them in your team. So taking the time working with your coach or mentor to help spot things in yourself can also help you spot things in others. And the key insight from my coaching work is that sometimes, by the time stress shows up in the performance metrics, you've often missed the earlier opportunities in the physical or behavioral metrics to intervene, and the best leaders I work with are constantly scanning for these early warning signs, both in themselves and in others. So now let's talk about the leaders who help their teams maintain performance when high pressure is unavoidable, because there's always going to be times when high pressure is unavoidable, and quite often, you know, particularly in recent times I'm talking to people who are saying that it's just kind of like one period of high pressure, a slight lull, and then back into another one again or it feels constant. So actually helping your team to maintain their performance when this is true is really, really important. So what are the key things that you can do as a leader? Transparency is really important.

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A senior leader I work with in the financial services sector was really good at this. She was very transparent about the situation. She didn't pretend the pressure wasn't real or try to motivate with false optimism. She was always positive about the fact that there was a way through. But she acknowledged the challenge and communicated clearly about what success looked like and also what support was available, and she increased her support during the high pressure periods. This meant more frequent check-ins and clearer communication and making herself more available. This also went back to some of the things that we've been talking about before, about her own energy management and her own willingness to ask for help. You've always got to look at yourself first before you can help others. Where she could, she also temporarily removed non-essential tasks and meetings. Thirdly, she helped the team to understand that the very high pressure period was temporary. Pressure was still going to exist, but the very high pressure bit was temporary and she gave them the clearest timeline she could and helped them to see the light at the end of the tunnel and, most importantly, as I said before, she monitored her own energy and she monitored their energy, and she made those adjustments before anyone hit the wall. And this was down to her also nurturing her own emotional intelligence, which we've talked about previously and which is crucial for leaders.

Speaker 1:

The fourth element involves becoming sophisticated about workload distribution. This isn't just about dividing tasks equally. It's about distributing pressure in a way that optimizes overall team performance. With some of the teams I've coached, I use what I call pressure mapping, so we map out each team member's current pressure level, their optimal pressure zone and their capacity for adding an additional challenge. Sometimes this means giving your highest performer a bit more stretch, while giving someone who's been under intense pressure some breathing room. Other times it means pairing people strategically so that someone who thrives under pressure can support someone who needs more structure, so that someone who thrives under pressure can support someone who needs more structure.

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The key insight here is that, as leaders, we need to think systematically about pressure across the whole team, not just manage individual workloads in isolation. Next week, I'm going to be talking about how not to lose the dressing room, because I can actually hear some of the questions now about fairness, about equality Should we always be overloading our high performers? And that some people do resist help, and we will be talking about that. I'm very aware of that dynamic as well. But the first thing to do is to map that pressure and then to think about how you can manage it across the whole team. The final element, and perhaps the most powerful, is creating a culture where team members actively help each other manage pressure effectively, and this is when you're taking your team into that real high performance zone, because high performing teams want to do this for each other, and so the best teams I've worked with have developed what I call pressure awareness.

Speaker 1:

Team members notice when a colleague is struggling and they offer the support without being asked. They share workload naturally and they create informal backup systems. But it's a process. It doesn't happen by accident. It requires intentional leadership. You need to model this behavior, acknowledge it when you see it and create systems that support it. Regular team discussions about workload and pressure, not just in crisis moments but as part of your normal rhythm, normalize these conversations and make it easier for people to ask for help before they're drowning.

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So where do you start? Here are three immediate actions you can take. First of all, schedule the individual conversations with each team member, focused specifically on understanding their optimal pressure zones. Make this a regular part of your leadership practice. Second, develop your early warning system for yourself as well as others. Create a simple way to regularly check in on stress levels. This could be as simple as a weekly traffic light system or regular pulse surveys. Thirdly, model the behavior you want to see. Be open about your own pressure levels and demonstrate how to ask for support when needed.

Speaker 1:

Remember the goal isn't to eliminate pressure. Pressure can be incredibly energizing and can bring out the best in people. The goal is to help your team find that sweet spot where they're challenged and growing without being overwhelmed. I've seen time and time again that the leaders who master this dynamic don't just achieve better results. They create more resilient, engaged and, ultimately, more successful teams. Thanks so much for joining me today on Leadership Horizons. If this episode's been valuable for you, please subscribe and share it with other leaders who might benefit. Look out also for another free webinar on how to increase your own resilience, and a big thank you to those of you who joined me on the masterclasses in the last couple of weeks. Next week, as I said, we'll be exploring how not to lose the dressing room and I will be sharing my guest list for the autumn. Until then, keep pushing those leadership boundaries. This is Lois Burton, and remember great leadership knows no better.