When Pressure Replaces Alignment
There’s a kind of pressure that shows up when a leader steps into a team they didn’t build.
You don’t fully trust how things are working yet, so you start tightening your grip, assigning tasks to individuals, checking progress closely, filling in gaps yourself. It feels responsible. Like you’re helping.
But over time, the team starts to fragment.
People focus on their own tasks instead of shared outcomes. Decisions slow down because everyone is waiting for direction. And the very things you were hoping to see: initiative, experimentation, sound judgment…don’t really take hold.
I’ve been on both sides of this, and what I’ve noticed is that pressure often steps in where alignment is missing. If the team doesn’t have a clear sense of what matters, or how they’re meant to work together, it’s easy for a leader to default to managing individuals instead of enabling the team.
But that shift – from individuals to team, from tasks to purpose – is where trust starts to build. It doesn’t happen perfectly or all at once, but enough for people to move without being pushed.
I’m still figuring this out in my own work.
When you step into a team, that isn’t yours yet, how do you resist the urge to add pressure and instead create alignment?
Kerain Shah4 Comments
What has helped me is focusing more on context than control. The clearer the “why” and “what matters,” the less the need to manage the “how.”
Still a work in progress for me as well.1
@tojewunmi I agree. I’ve worked with people in roles like Product Owner, Architect or even Directors who default to a high-pressure management to control the “how” without investing time into communicating the context of “who” (specific user or customer personas) or “why.”
When I witness this dynamic as an Agile Coach, I must remind myself that I’ve felt that same urge, be it from impatience or fear of the team failing. To combat my urge to judge the controlling person I’m coaching, I’ve started reading The Advice Trap: Be Humble, Stay Curious & Change the Way You Lead Forever, by Michael Bungay Stanier.
Wish me luck!
I don’t pressure rather I work closely with the new team and I tried to embed myself with the team hoping to understand the way the team worked
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@kerainshah I like your approach of leading with curiosity about how an existing team works. I’m interested in hearing about ways you found that worked (and didn’t) as you lead a team from task-focused misalignment toward empowerment.
