Pressure has a way of making bad management look temporarily reasonable.
Sales are slipping. The forecast is weak. Investors want answers. Customers are hesitating. Suddenly, more meetings appear on the calendar. Reporting increases. Managers demand daily updates. People who should be solving the problem spend their time explaining the problem.
It feels like control. Usually, it is fear wearing a management title.
My conversation with Neil Thubron reinforced something I have seen in very different environments: corporate sales organizations, military leadership, and endurance events. When conditions deteriorate, the instinct to tighten control can be exactly what makes performance worse.
Thubron has spent more than 25 years leading multinational sales organizations and has also tested his thinking in environments where consequences become very tangible. His experiences include military service, offshore sailing, Ironman events, the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, and the Yukon Arctic Ultra.
The common thread is not toughness. It is knowing what requires control, what requires adaptation, and what must be entrusted to other people.
What Should a CEO Do When the Team Is Under Pressure?
The first job is not to manufacture certainty. It is to provide direction.
Thubron described an offshore sailing race from northeast Australia to China. The crew faced changing winds, storms, rough seas, and conditions that sometimes required sailing away from the destination before coming back on course. The destination did not change.
Executives often confuse commitment to a destination with commitment to the original route. When conditions change, they either cling to a plan that no longer works or change direction so frequently that employees stop believing there is a direction at all.
A CEO needs to be firm about where the organization is going and flexible about how it gets there. That does not mean standing in an executive suite repeating the vision while everyone else deals with the consequences.
Thubron made another distinction I think is equally important: being close to the work does not require taking over the work. On a yacht in a storm, the skipper may need to remain at the back of the boat because that is where the whole situation can be seen. If the skipper rushes to the bow and starts doing someone else’s job, the crew may gain another pair of hands but lose the person with the broadest perspective.
Executives face the same problem. They need enough contact with employees, customers, and operating conditions to understand what is really happening. They don’t need to become the salesperson, engineer, customer service representative, or operations manager every time pressure rises. There is a difference between being present and interfering.
Empowerment Is Easy Until Employees Choose Differently Than You Would
One of Thubron’s earliest leadership lessons came at IBM when he participated in an experiment involving empowered teams. A supervisory position opened on his team. Under the traditional model, he would have selected the replacement. Instead, the employees interviewed the candidates and made the decision.
Thubron had someone in mind. The team chose someone else. More importantly, they were right.
That is where most conversations about empowerment become uncomfortable. Executives tend to like empowerment when employees arrive at the decision management would have made anyway.
That is not empowerment. It is delegated agreement. Real empowerment means accepting that the people closest to the work may see something the executive doesn’t.
The IBM team eventually became sufficiently self-directed. Employees participated in decisions involving pay increases and promotions, with Thubron facilitating rather than dictating the outcomes.
The executive implication is straightforward. If every meaningful decision still requires approval from above, the organization has not created accountability. It has created dependency.
Why Does Pressure Turn Some Managers Into Bullies?
Fear often travels downhill. Thubron sees this particularly clearly in high-pressure sales organizations. When a senior executive becomes anxious about missing a number, that anxiety can quickly turn into demands for more forecasts, more updates, more meetings, and more explanations.
He described one sales executive whose team was behind forecast. The response from above was to require daily pipeline explanations, including a Saturday review.
The absurdity is easy to miss because the activity looks serious. Customers were not advancing deals on Saturday. The sales leader was not selling. His team was not selling. They were gathering information and building slides to explain why they were not selling enough.
The reporting mechanism designed to improve performance was consuming the time required to improve performance. That is one of the hidden costs of fear-based management. It does not merely damage morale. It redirects productive capacity toward managing the anxiety of people higher in the organization.
Executives should pay attention whenever reporting frequency suddenly increases after results decline. Some additional visibility may be necessary. But there is a point at which oversight stops helping the business and starts helping senior management feel temporarily safer.
How Do You Turn a Big Goal Into Something People Can Execute?
Thubron developed what he calls the 7P Formula while competing in the Yukon Arctic Ultra. The framework later became the basis of his book, Yucan: Achieve Any Big Goal Using the 7P Formula for Success. His seven elements are Purpose, Preparation, Plan, Pledge, Perception, Pain, and Persistence.
What interests me about the framework is not the terminology. It is the sequence.
Purpose comes first because a difficult objective needs a reason strong enough to survive difficult conditions. Thubron separates that purpose into an internal reason and an external one.
The internal reason gets someone started. The external reason can keep someone moving when personal motivation becomes negotiable.
That distinction applies directly to business. Revenue growth alone may be an objective, but what does achieving it make possible for employees, customers, or the organization? When the work becomes difficult, a number on a spreadsheet has limited emotional weight.
Preparation comes next. Thubron’s point is more specific than simply “be prepared.” Preparation should resemble the conditions people will actually encounter.
Then comes the plan, followed by the pledge: the point at which an intention becomes a commitment.
The fifth “P” is perception. It may be the most valuable for executives. A plan is necessary, but the plan does not get a vote once reality arrives.
During the Arctic event, Thubron initially planned to move for three hours before stopping. He discovered quickly that the interval was too long and changed his approach to two-hour segments followed by short breaks.
The destination remained intact. The method changed because the evidence changed.
Organizations often do the opposite. They defend the plan because changing it feels like admitting the original decision was wrong. That is an expensive form of pride.
Resilience Doesn’t Mean Working Until Something Breaks
Corporate culture has badly distorted the meaning of resilience. Thubron regularly encounters executives who treat resilience as the ability to arrive earlier, stay later, absorb more pressure, and expect employees to do the same. He described that as essentially a strategy of continuing until something breaks.
An ultramarathoner does not prepare for a difficult race by assuming nothing will hurt. The athlete expects problems and develops responses before judgment becomes impaired by exhaustion. Thubron calls this a pain strategy.
During his Arctic race, music was part of his. He deliberately associated particular music with a strong mental state during preparation so it could help him recover that state when conditions became difficult.
In business, the equivalent may be knowing who to call when judgment is deteriorating, protecting physical routines that support decision-making, or identifying in advance how the team will respond when an important deal, employee, or assumption disappears. The point is not to eliminate pain. The point is to avoid inventing the response while you are already inside it.
The People Around You Can Increase or Reduce Your Odds of Success
Anyone who has spent enough time around endurance sports learns that encouragement is not always helpful. Sometimes the person saying, “You have nothing left to prove” is giving an exhausted athlete the permission to quit that they were subconsciously waiting for. Business has its own version of that problem.
When something goes wrong, executives need people who can distinguish between a genuine reason to stop and the predictable discomfort of continuing. That does not mean surrounding yourself with people who mindlessly demand more effort. It means finding people capable of accurately diagnosing the situation and offering valuable assistance. There is a substantial difference between sympathy and useful perspective.
You Don’t Need Cheerleaders
The best advisers, colleagues, and executive teams do not simply reinforce how the CEO already feels. They aren’t cheerleaders.
They help determine whether the organization is injured or merely hurting. One requires intervention. The other may require another step.
Pressure does not suddenly make someone a better leader. It reveals the habits that were already there. Executives who respond to uncertainty by centralizing decisions, demanding constant updates, and driving people through fear may create the appearance of urgency while making the organization less capable of responding.
The alternative is not softer management. It is more disciplined management: a clear destination, informed preparation, distributed judgment, accurate perception, and enough persistence to keep moving forward.