Harnessing Workplace Pressure as a Catalyst for Growth

Pressure continues to be a pervasive presence in modern life and work - and pressure isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, in today’s world of ‘do more with less’, the feeling of being overwhelmed is almost a given. Over time, sustained pressure experienced in the workplace can turn into stress, and prolonged periods of stress have a detrimental impact on our mental health and well-being. Stress becomes a direct enemy of performance and, gradually, can lead to burnout.

While many sources of external pressures are beyond our control, how we choose to respond to them is not. With the right tools and approach, pressure doesn't have to manifest as harmful stress that affects mental health and overall well-being. Instead, it can serve as a catalyst for both personal and professional growth. The right level of pressure is a motivator that can help people focus and spark engagement as well as creativity.

To mark World Mental Health Day, in this article, I share strategies to prevent workplace pressure from escalating into stress and, instead, channel it into positive development and growth for your team.

Fostering collaboration through psychological safety

To make sure individual pressure doesn’t reach stress-inducing levels, it’s essential to cultivate a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility within your organisation. A key element of this is creating an environment of psychological safety, where individuals feel able to speak up and share their concerns as well as insights and ideas without fear of negative consequences. A psychologically safe workplace fosters openness, promotes self-expression and inspires collaborative problem-solving.

Teams should be built with collective responsibility, encouraging members to support one another and share accountability. This approach spreads the pressure load evenly across the team and ensures that no one feels isolated in their tasks, ultimately benefiting the entire organisation by enabling everyone to perform at their best.

Learning from every experience

The commitment to learning best practices and embracing improvement lies at the heart of growth. This encompasses every single member of the team and healthy behaviours should be shared between the ranks.

For leaders in particular, a significant focus of this learning should be on organisational trends. Our responses to pressure are often shaped by a blend of our previous experiences: from childhood, education and career to date. Those transitioning from education to their first role or moving between jobs are likely to bring with them different ways of handling pressure - some effective and others less so.

There is much you can do to proactively look for and identify unhealthy behaviours and help your team members reshape their default responses. Conversely, observing how others handle high-pressure situations can help you recognise and adjust your own negative reactions. The organisation’s culture should be based on openness and shared learning, drawing on each other's strengths and addressing areas for improvement.

Managing personal pressure

Although collective responses and a positive learning culture can help prevent pressure from escalating into dangerous stress, individual responsibility for emotional regulation and rationalisation is equally crucial. While we can’t change most of what happens to us, we can effectively manage pressure in a healthy way by recognising what is within our control and adapting our responses accordingly.

As a leader, you have an important role to play here as you should be empowering your team with tools and techniques for managing high-pressure situations individually, as well as ensuring they feel able to voice their concerns in a psychologically safe space. You should guide them in developing self-awareness about how their thinking styles influence their feelings and, in turn, affect their behaviours. This awareness can enhance adaptability. When team members learn to think rationally under pressure, their creativity, flexibility and ability to recharge their energy levels significantly improve.

Promoting healthy habits is essential for preventing stress. One of these is the practice of intentional recovery, a key modifiable factor in keeping pressure and stress separate from each other and the enabler for sustainable, healthy high performance. Intentional recovery consists of specific activities built into the workday that renew cognitive energy and respond to the body’s fundamental needs for hydration, movement and nourishment. Encourage your team to implement intentional recovery and foster it within your company’s culture by modelling such practice yourself.

How we respond to and cope with pressure depends on many variable factors and leads to very different outcomes for everyone. What is clear is that when the unhealthy responses become patterns, pressures can accumulate and escalate into serious issues such as prolonged stress, mental health problems and burnout. By establishing a psychologically safe culture, working closely with your team and instilling individual pressure management skills, you can help them reframe their approach and enable pressure to catalyse opportunities for positive professional and personal growth.

ENDS

Lesley Cooper is a management consultant with over 25 years of experience in the design and delivery of all elements of employee well-being management programmes. In 1997 Lesley founded WorkingWell, an award-winning specialist consultancy that helps companies manage workplace pressure in a way that facilitates growth and development. She is also the co-author of Brave New Leader: How to Transform Workplace Pressure into Sustainable Performance and Growth.