I’ve been in more than a few rooms where leadership is frustrated with pace. The team isn’t moving fast enough, deadlines are slipping, and someone decides the fix is to “create urgency.”

Sometimes the word “pressure” comes up directly.

If you believe manufacturing pressure will make the team work faster, then you don’t trust the team. That’s what the move actually says, even when no one intends it that way. It signals: “On a normal day, I assume you’re coasting. I need to introduce some fear or guilt to get real output out of you.”

The team sees through this. Every time.

Especially when they shift into high gear, rise to the occasion and hit the deadline, to then watch the business slow-roll the training and rollout of their work. Then a new pressure date lands on the next effort before anyone has caught their breath.

And it produces the opposite of what was intended. They pad estimates. They stop raising problems early because problems invite more pressure. They route around whoever is asking for daily status updates. The feedback loop that was supposed to speed things up quietly chokes itself. Even worse, they work the long hours, burn out, and then claw the time back later without mentioning it.

If the team isn’t moving as desired, dig into why. The answer is usually somewhere in clarity, capacity, process, or trust. Pressure just makes everyone quieter about whichever one it actually is.