The Pace And Pressure Paradox
- Rashmi Kulkarni
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
When a founder’s speed becomes the team’s anxiety
Some workdays don’t derail because of workload. They derail because of pace. At The Workshop … the same growing design firm readers will remember from earlier chapters … the day didn’t start with tasks or priorities. It started with Rohit’s walk.
By 9:10 a.m., the team already knew what kind of day it would be.
Not from the sprint board. Not from Slack. Just from the way Rohit entered the room with fast steps, tight voice, eyes already three decisions ahead. He wasn’t upset. He wasn’t angry.
He was simply moving fast — the only speed many founders know when the stakes rise. But speed creates signals. And at The Workshop, the signal was unmistakable: “Brace yourselves.”
The Sprint That Went Sideways
Here’s what happened in the first ten minutes:
Aman started defending tasks no one had questioned.
Priya clipped her sentences short, afraid long explanations might trigger scrutiny.
Meera shuffled her notes, rehearsing answers no one had asked for.
Two interns opened Figma reflexively … even though the meeting had nothing to do with design.
Nobody said the words. But everybody understood the agenda: Survive the founder’s tempo.
This is the heart of the Pace & Pressure Paradox: Leaders feel urgency. Teams experience anxiety. Founders feel the push of customers, deadlines, and cash flow. Teams feel the push of emotion, tone, and unpredictability.
Passion Like Pressure
To Rohit, urgency meant momentum. To the team, urgency meant something might be wrong. Because when leaders operate at high emotional speed, teams don’t interpret velocity as enthusiasm … they interpret it as evaluation. In scaling companies, urgency tastes like crisis even when it’s not. What begins as passion in the founder quietly becomes pressure in the team. And the workplace becomes synchronized not to systems… but to mood.
Pattern 1: When Urgency Becomes the Default Setting
Urgency works beautifully in short bursts. But when everything is urgent, nothing feels safe.
Inside teams, this shows up as:
Work becoming reactive
Planning becoming optional
Delegation becoming chaotic
Reflection becoming a luxury
Calm weeks feeling suspicious
At The Workshop, urgency had become structural. And structural urgency always leads to exhaustion. Founders celebrate speed. Teams survive it. Until they can’t.
Pattern 2: The Mood-Driven Company
Most organisations don’t run on processes. They run on emotional weather. And the founder becomes the climate. At The Workshop, there were three seasons:
Clear Skies: Rohit upbeat, team relaxed
Pressure Winds: Rohit stressed, team cautious
High Alert: Rohit intense, team silent
People began calibrating behavior based on Rohit’s facial expression, not the sprint plan. Speak less. Move faster. Ask nothing. Avoid friction. Stay invisible. They weren’t managing work. They were managing the boss. Once that shift occurs, performance stops being system-driven. It becomes emotion-driven. And nothing slows a company faster than emotional governance.
Pattern 3: The Aggression–Passivity Cycle
Founders rarely see this. Teams live it.
The cycle looks like this:
Phase 1: Overdrive
The team mirrors the boss’s intensity.
Phase 2: Silent Compliance
They stop pushing back. Execution becomes obedient, not intelligent.
Phase 3: Passive Breakpoint
People lose nuance. Creativity collapses. Ownership shrinks. The founder sees this slowdown and thinks, “They’ve lost energy.” The team sees the founder’s speed and thinks, “We’ve lost permission.” Both are wrong. Both are right. That’s what makes this paradox so expensive.
Case Study: The Agency Pitch Night
A creative agency we worked with experienced the same spiral. The founder burst into a pitch room at 7:45 p.m.: “We need to redo this deck. The client won’t get it.” Three designers, two strategists, one copywriter … everyone leapt into panic execution. At 11 p.m., the founder casually reversed course: “Let’s go with the old version.”
The team didn’t feel relief. They felt whiplash. Two people quietly began job-hunting the next week. It wasn’t the workload. It was the volatility.
Case Study: The Logistics Ops Escalation
In a logistics firm, a six-hour delay led to a founder shouting: “Fix it now!”
No one clarified priorities. No one asked what “fix” meant. Everyone sprinted. By morning, 42 orders were mishandled. Speed didn’t solve the problem. Speed multiplied it.
Why Scaling Makes This Paradox Stronger
At 10 people, the founder’s pace is inspiring.
At 30, it becomes confusing.
At 50, destabilizing.
Because: Speed stops being charismatic and it becomes chaotic. Teams confuse urgency with crisis. Leaders confuse anxiety with disengagement. Founders often burn out teams long before teams burn out founders. Not from workload but from emotional velocity.
The real cost isn’t fatigue. It’s strategic shallowness. Companies become excellent at reacting and terrible at thinking.
The Real Paradox
A leader’s pace is their superpower. Inside a team, it becomes their shadow.
What energizes a founder destabilizes a team. What feels natural to a boss feels like pressure to everyone else. That’s the Pace & Pressure Paradox:
One person’s urgency becomes everyone else’s uncertainty.
(The writer is Co-founder at PPS Consulting. She writes about the human mechanics of scaling where workplace behaviour quietly shapes business outcomes.)