The permanence of pressure

There were stretches in my career — months at a time — when I worked as hard as I knew how, then looked back and honestly couldn't tell you what it had produced.

It happened when I was leading teams. It happened when I was working entirely on my own. The worst part wasn't the lost time — it was the pressure it added to the pressure. I'd end up feeling I now had to make up for all the months that hadn't moved anything.

I've come to think this is one of the most common ways leaders cope with pressure, and one of the ways that fails most reliably.

We work more. Which feels like control.

But...

Stanford's research on working hours found that output per hour falls sharply past 50 a week and collapses after 55 — someone putting in 70 hours produces no more than someone working 55. The extra hours are buying nothing more than the feeling of having tried, and an illusion of control.

The other move is to carry it all alone — to project steadiness while privately white-knuckling the pressure. Harvard Business Review found that half of CEOs experience real loneliness in the role, and most of them believe it's degrading their performance. It's a striking irony: the strategies we deploy to protect ourselves end up corroding the very judgment everyone depends on us for.

the strategies we deploy to protect ourselves end up corroding the very judgment everyone depends on us for.

Here's what I think we miss. The pressure we feel on the ground — the commercial pressure and the operational weight — usually isn't the source. It sits on top of something older and more existential: a drive that's perhaps different for everyone but stirs under the surface of all of us, or hangs in the cloud over the work. It's there even in people who love their lives and look wildly successful from the outside.

A couple of weeks ago I sat with a client — an industry leading managing partner in financial services — who told me, "If I'm being honest, I start every day worried we'll lose all our clients today."

That drive shapes how we behave. How we behave shapes the choices we make. And those choices are what put us in the high-pressure rooms to begin with. The pressure of the day is downstream of something we rarely stop to look at.

Working harder can't reach that. Performing steadiness can't either. The only thing that does is understanding what's actually generating the pressure you carry — before it keeps making your choices for you.

Pressure, at this point in our lives, is a fixed variable. We are morally, economically, societally, spiritually or relationally called to get involved. Perhaps to lead. Undeniably, to produce. The variables up for adaptation are how you understand your pressure and what you choose to do about it.