Regulate the Pressure: Keeping Your Team in the Growth Zone

Significant change disrupts familiar routines and threatens cherished beliefs. It jolts us into disequilibrium—and often feels like a pressure cooker. Our instinct is to restore order, to get back to the way things were.

Avoiding the hard work of change may feel easier in the moment, but it carries hidden costs. Like living systems facing adaptive challenges, leaders and teams must evolve—or die. When the operating environment is upended, survival requires shifts in mindset. To thrive, we must face the discomfort and use it to generate new thinking, new behaviors, and new possibilities.

However, too much pressure in the cooker—and it explodes. Skilled leaders, as Ron Heifetz and his colleagues remind us, learn to “regulate distress”—adjusting the heat to keep people in the zone of productive discomfort: uncomfortable enough to face hard challenges, supported enough to stay engaged. This is the growth zone—where discomfort catalyzes learning, resilience, and the mindset shifts essential for true adaptation.

“A leader needs to know how to manage conflict, how to regulate the heat of the group so that people can do the hard work without either boiling over or shutting down.” –RON HEIFETZ

How to Regulate the Pressure

🔥 Raise the Heat

Confront difficult challenges, break out of complacency, and push past the status quo.

Try this:

1. Expose what’s at stake – Make external threats and the consequences of inaction visible. Help your team see what’s truly on the line, especially as it relates to your core mission.

2. Ask the hard questions and hold each other accountable – Surface the difficult truths and let the team wrestle with them together:

• What truth are we avoiding?
• How are we contributing to the problem?
• We agreed to do X—where do we stand?
• In what ways are our actions out of alignment with our values?

3. Increase ownership and responsibility – Involve key stakeholders in problem-solving and decision-making. Share real responsibility and delegate meaningful work that deepens commitment.

4. Disrupt business-as-usual – Shake up routines, shift roles, or pause execution to challenge assumptions, spark fresh thinking, and create forward momentum.

Leadership isn’t always about rushing in with answers. Sometimes, the most effective move is to galvanize people to face the change—and wrestle with the work themselves.

❄️ Lower the Heat

When tension becomes unproductive, it’s time to cool things down.

Try this:

1. Listen and acknowledge – Create space for people to name losses, frustrations, or fatigue. People need to feel heard. Be present. Be human.

2. Anchor in purpose and possibility – Remind the team why this change matters.Show how it serves the core mission—not personal agendas or arbitrary decisions. Share a hopeful vision, and place the current moment in a larger narrative that brings meaning and perspective.

3. Leverage cohesion and connection – Build trust and camaraderie through social interaction, humor, and shared experiences. Celebrate progress, and make space to break bread and laugh as a team.

4. Cultivate resilience – Prioritize rest, nutrition, and exercise. The team’s ability to sustain effectiveness depends on maintaining physical and mental energy.

5. Break the challenge down and act – Make challenges feel more manageable by creating milestones and focusing on tangible next steps. Get people moving.

Leadership isn’t just about driving forward—it’s also about knowing when to pause. Sometimes, the most effective move is to create space for people to recharge and reconnect—so they can stay in the fight.

Put It into Practice

Take five minutes to reflect on your team right now:

1. Where’s the heat?

Identify your team’s level of disequilibrium. Do you need to raise or lower the heat?

2. What’s one adjustment you could make?

Choose one action from the lists above to adjust the heat and keep your team in the growth zone.

3. What did you learn?

Reflect on the experience—and share your insight with one person.

*What makes this especially difficult for leaders is that they are in the pressure cooker too.

In Closing

Two points to leave you with.

First, adaptability is not a solo effort. It’s a collective process. Leaders and teams work together to make sense of shifting conditions, challenge limiting beliefs, and imagine compelling possibilities. Adaptable leaders foster resilience in themselves and others, creating a culture where people grow more comfortable with uncertainty, learn from setbacks, and keep pressing forward.

Second, remember: you’re in the pressure cooker too. Candidly assess your own level of disequilibrium—and adjust the pressure to the extent that you can. Too much, and you risk burn out. Too little, and nothing changes. The goal is to keep yourself and your team in that dynamic, difficult zone where real growth can happen.

Further Learning

Leading Through Adaptive Challenges (CLI article): A nice introduction to the Adaptive Leadership approach

Challenge and Support: The Key to Healthy, High-Performing Culture (CLI article)

Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Change, a book by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky (Harvard Business Review Press, 2017).

Two quotes from the book worth contemplating:

“You need to let people feel the pinch of reality to stimulate them to adapt. But you also need to provide enough structure and direction to contain the distress.”

“If the temperature is too high, people will panic or burn out. If it’s too low, they will ignore the problem.”