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U is for Understanding Under Pressure
Welcome! This article is part of an A–Z series where I’m sharing reflections on the patterns I keep seeing in teams, leadership and workplace culture.
Not theory. Not tips. Just observations from real working life.
I've been thinking about pressure in the workplace lately. Not just deadlines and workloads, but the pressure that builds when people are trying to do a good job in circumstances that make it increasingly difficult.
Because something I've noticed in my work with teams and leaders is how quickly we can turn a problem with the working environment into a problem with the individual.
Someone stops taking initiative. A manager becomes controlling. A previously enthusiastic employee starts doing the bare minimum.
And we start hearing things like:
"They need to take more ownership."
"They are resistant to change."
"They need to be more resilient."
But what if we're looking at the wrong problem? What if the behaviour we're seeing is actually telling us something about the pressure people are experiencing?
Are we helping people cope or addressing what's causing the pressure?
I think we sometimes talk about workplace pressure as though it's simply part of the job.
Everyone's busy. Deadlines happen. Things change.
And of course they do.
But there's a difference between being busy and feeling that, no matter what you do, you can't quite get on top of things.
Mental Health UK's Burnout Report 2026 gives us some interesting figures to consider.
42% of UK workers identified high or increased workload as a cause of workplace stress.
35% said they wouldn't feel comfortable telling their manager they were experiencing high or extreme levels of stress.
And 29% said their employer raised awareness of mental health, but managers lacked the time, training or resources to provide meaningful support.
Those figures really caught my attention.
Because we're talking about people experiencing pressure, people who don't necessarily feel comfortable talking about it, and managers who may not have what they need to help.
And I wonder whether we're sometimes expecting people to manage situations that the organisation itself is contributing to.
Some organisations introduce wellbeing initiatives, encourage people to take breaks or remind them about the support available. All useful things.
But if someone's struggling because they have conflicting priorities, unclear expectations or no authority to make decisions, is another session on managing stress really going to solve that?
Dont get me wrong, I'm not saying those initiatives aren't valuable.
But perhaps we need to be careful that we're not simply teaching people to become better at coping with situations that shouldn't be happening in the first place.
Pressure isn't always about workload
One of the things I find interesting is that pressure doesn't necessarily come from having too much work. Sometimes it's about how that work happens.
The Health and Safety Executive identifies six areas that can contribute to work-related stress:
Demands, control, support, relationships, role and change.
Think about those for a moment.
How frustrating would it be to be responsible for delivering something but not have the authority to make the decisions needed?
Or to be told to take ownership, only to have every decision questioned?
Or to be dealing with constant changes without really understanding why they're happening?
I have seen situations where people genuinely want to do a good job, but the way things are organised makes that increasingly difficult.
And eventually, frustration starts showing up in their behaviour.
They stop making decisions.
They become defensive.
They disengage.
And suddenly we're talking about performance, attitude and capability.
But perhaps the more useful question is whether we've created the conditions for people to perform well in the first place.
When pressure moves through an organisation
Pressure also has a habit of spreading.
Take the example of senior leader who's under pressure to deliver results.
They might start asking managers for more frequent updates, then those managers start checking more closely on their teams and people spend more time reporting what they're doing, decisions take longer and everyone becomes increasingly frustrated.
The leader thinks people aren't delivering quickly enough.
The managers feel they're being micromanaged.
The teams feel they aren't trusted.
And nobody necessarily recognises that they're all responding to the same pressure.
I find this particularly interesting in growing organisations.
Businesses grow, expectations change, responsibilities increase, but the structures and ways of working don't always keep up.
People who were brilliant at their jobs find themselves managing others without necessarily having the support they need, informal communication stops being enough, decision-making becomes unclear and the answer can sometimes be more processes, more meetings and more reporting.Which, of course, can create even more pressure.
We can end up making people busier without actually making the organisation more effective.
Is resilience always the answer?
There's a word I hear a lot when organisations talk about pressure.
Resilience.
And I understand why. We want people who can adapt, manage challenges and keep going when things become difficult.
But I do wonder whether we sometimes use resilience to place responsibility back onto the individual.
If someone is struggling, do they need to become more resilient? Or do we need to look at what they're being expected to manage?
Perhaps it's both.
But I think we also need to be willing to ask the second question.
Because if people are constantly dealing with unrealistic expectations, poor communication or a lack of support, asking them to become more resilient can feel a little like asking them to get better at tolerating the problem.
And surely that's not what we're trying to achieve.
We want people who can think clearly, make decisions, contribute ideas and work well together.
Not people who are simply getting better at surviving the working day.
This is where understanding matters
For me, this is where my work comes in.
I'm interested in understanding what's happening underneath the behaviours we're seeing.
Not just what an individual might need to do differently, but what the organisation might need to change.
That might mean looking at whether people understand their responsibilities, whether managers have the skills and support to lead their teams, whether people have enough freedom to make decisions, whether communication is helping people or adding to the confusion and whether the organisation's expectations match the reality of people's working lives.
Because not every performance problem is a capability problem, not every frustrated employee has a poor attitude and not every manager who's struggling needs another management course.
Sometimes we just need to understand the environment before we can understand the behaviour but that doesn't mean removing accountability.
People still have responsibility for how they behave and the contribution they make, but organisations have a responsibility too.
So, U is for Understanding Under Pressure
I don't think the aim should be to remove all pressure from work.
Some pressure can be motivating and challenges can help us grow, learn and achieve things we might not otherwise have thought possible.
But there's a difference between pressure that helps us perform and pressure that starts getting in the way and I think organisations need to become better at recognising that difference.
Because when someone stops contributing, becomes frustrated or struggles to take ownership, it's easy to focus on what they're doing wrong, but perhaps we need to be a little more curious about what's happening around them.
The question I keep coming back to is this:
Are we asking people to become better at managing pressure, when we should be getting better at understanding what's creating it?
Because sometimes the problem isn't that people can't cope.
It's that we're making it unnecessarily difficult for them to succeed.
And that's something we can do something about.
If this resonated, it’s probably because you’re seeing it too.
Philippa x
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