by Eddie Pipkin

Photo by Pipkin

My son purchased an Advent calendar for us.  It’s a Lego botanicals Advent calendar, and each day there is a decorative box that contains a bag of tiny plastic pieces and a slip of instructions for assembling them, resulting in a lovely flower or succulent.  It’s fun.  It’s exasperating.  The exasperating part stems not only from the frustration of the difficulty in following painstaking directions about sequentially connecting hard-to-handle tiny plastic pieces, but from the challenge, as each arty construction takes shape, in applying the perfect amount of pressure for adding each part.  The goal is to snap the next addition into place without popping loose the parts that came before, and it’s not for the fainthearted.  Leadership is like that, too!  In any complex leadership task, we must always be judicious in applying the right pressure in the right place at the right time – or things fall apart!

The problem for me in my Lego quest is that I am pushing to make that satisfying “click” sound when two pieces join together in the manner they were designed, and as more and more pieces accumulate on a Lego flower, pushing on one side inevitably dislodges a piece that was already in place on the other side.

My wife can hear me from the other room as I grumble my way through the process.  “Oh, putting together today’s advent flower, I hear,” she will teasingly observe.

Man, it’s exasperating.  Those pressure-ejected pieces don’t just fall off gently, they go flying across the table, bouncing along the kitchen floor until they come to rest under the fridge.  Tiny, colorful blooms, retrievable only by getting on one’s knees and shining a flashlight into the gap and fishing them out with a long, wooden spoon.

As a metaphor – and leadership metaphors are what we do here – it’s a good one.

We put pressure on the people we lead, and as we drive them at a frenetic pace towards the goal of the moment, something or somebody gives way on the other end.  We push them, and they push somebody else in their management chain (staff or volunteer).  Maybe the project gets done the way we want it in the time frame we have demanded, but people get burned out and relationships get damaged.  Sometimes the short-term gain is eclipsed by the long-term damage, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the long-term damage is not worth the short-term gain.

It’s hard to make those kinds of calculations in the heat of the moment, but we should make them if we want to safeguard the lasting health of the organization we lead.  And what’s true for organizations is true for interpersonal relationships, too.

The best ways to think in more expansive ways about the impact of pressure points is to listen carefully and ask good questions.  When we feel frantic and we want to pile on the pressure and ramp up our expectations of others, those are exactly the moments when we should slow the process down, take a beat, and ask what impact will be created by pressing down harder on the throttle.  Talk it through; give people a chance to push back or suggest alternatives.  If they have concerns, this is the time when those concerns can be addressed, and just by being asked the questions, people will feel valued and have agency.  Often, just by getting to talk the issues out, people will buy into our call for greater urgency.

Do you have a habit of putting the pressure on others when you are feeling the pressure on yourself?  It’s a great question to ask your team in a calmer, more reflective moment.

Some people respond to pressure better than others.  Heck, some people thrive on it.  But they are the exception, and we have to be careful that we don’t assume our own wiring is the same as everyone else’s wiring.  A strong team is always a good mix of those who enjoy the intensity of pressure and those who want to slow things down.  Help everyone be aware of the balance in styles and strategies and be mindful as to who is best equipped to handle the heat when the fires get hot.

If you apply the pressure evenly and carefully when attaching your final Lego pieces, you end up with a beautiful, intricate final product.  This requires forethought and a steady, methodical, judicious handling of the relevant parts.  People are even more sensitive than plastic.  Handle them with caution, mindful of the beautiful results that can come when we work together, exhorting and intervening as needed, but always with a gentle, loving touch.