The Pace & Pressure Paradox
- Rashmi Kulkarni
- Nov 30
- 5 min read
How a founder’s natural speed becomes the team’s chronic anxiety.
(The Boss Paradox, Part 3)
The Sprint That Went Sideways Before Anyone Began
By 9:10 a.m., everyone at The Workshop knew exactly what kind of day it would be.
They didn’t know the tasks.
They didn’t know the priorities.
They didn’t even know which client mattered most that week.
But they did know Rohit’s mood.
He walked in fast ... too fast ... coffee in one hand, phone in the other, already mid-conversation with a client before he reached the conference area.
His voice was firm.
His face was expressionless.
His steps were sharp.
And that was enough.
Nobody needed a briefing.
The room inhaled collectively — not from fear, but from anticipation.
Because at The Workshop, like in thousands of growing companies, the day didn’t start with the sprint board.
It started with the boss’s energy.
This is the unseen architecture of The Pace & Pressure Paradox:
Leaders feel urgency. Teams absorb it as anxiety.
When Passion Feels Like Pressure
Rohit wasn’t angry.
He wasn’t upset.
He was simply moving fast ... the only gear founders know when the stakes increase.
To him, speed meant momentum. To the team, speed meant scrutiny.
By the time the standup began:
Aman started pre-emptively justifying his backlog.
Priya spoke in short, clipped updates to avoid questions.
Meera shuffled her notes unnecessarily, trying to “stay ready.”
Two interns opened Figma reflexively, even though the meeting wasn’t about design.
No one said anything out loud.
But everyone had silently aligned to the real agenda:
Survive the founder’s tempo.
Pattern 1: When Urgency Becomes the Default Setting
Startups celebrate urgency.
Founders thrive on it.
Teams tolerate it.
Until they don’t.
For Rohit, urgency was situational. For the team, it was structural.
When everything is urgent, nothing feels safe:
Work becomes reactive.
Planning becomes optional.
Delegation becomes chaotic.
Reflection becomes a luxury.
And the team never knows whether a calm week is a pause or a trap.
This is how urgency, meant to create momentum, starts creating exhaustion instead.
Pattern 2: The Mood-Driven Company
Organizations don’t run on systems alone.
They run on emotional barometers.
And in founder-led companies, the founder’s emotions set the weather forecast.
At The Workshop, there were three unofficial seasons:
Clear skies: when Rohit was upbeat
Pressure winds: when he was stressed
High alert: when he was intense, even if silent
Teams learned to adjust their behavior long before tasks needed adjusting:
Speak less.
Move faster.
Don’t challenge.
Don’t ask for clarity.
Don’t escalate unless absolutely necessary.
People don’t manage work in mood-driven companies.They manage the boss.
And once that shift happens, work quality is no longer driven by systems as it’s driven by emotional weather.
Pattern 3: The Aggression–Passivity Cycle
This is the part founders rarely see.
When the boss goes into “high adrenaline mode”, teams respond with predictable psychological rhythms:
Phase 1 Overdrive:
The team moves fast, mimicking the boss’s pace, trying to “match intensity.”
Phase 2 Silent Compliance:
They stop pushing back.
They stop asking questions.
They nod more and speak less.
Execution becomes shallow but obedient.
Phase 3 Passive Breakpoint:
People get tired.
They lose nuance.
They default to safe decisions.
Creativity drops.
Ownership shrinks.
The boss sees the slowdown and assumes the team has lost passion.
The team sees the boss’s speed and assumes they’ve lost permission to think.
Both stories are incomplete and both are true.
Case Study: The Agency Pitch Night
A creative agency we worked with had a vivid example of this cycle.
The founder barged into the pitch room at 7:45 p.m. saying,
“We need to redo this entire deck. The client won’t get this.”
He wasn’t wrong. But the pitch was at 10 a.m.
The team, three designers, two strategists, one copywriter, went into panic mode ... all sprinting, not thinking.
At 11 p.m., the founder calmed down and said,
“Never mind, let’s go with the previous version.”
The team didn’t feel relief. They felt emotional whiplash.
Nobody asked why.
Nobody questioned the flip.
They just wanted to end the night.
The next week, two people quietly began interviewing elsewhere.
Case Study: The Logistics Ops Escalation
A logistics company experienced the same paradox in a different flavour.
A warehouse glitch delayed a shipment by six hours. and the founder exploded on the floor:
“How can this happen? Fix it now.”
Nobody asked which shipment was the priority.
Nobody clarified whether “fix” meant resolution or containment.
Everyone rushed into action under pressure.
By morning, 42 orders were mishandled because people tried to “do something fast” instead of “do something right”.
Speed didn’t clear the problem.
Speed multiplied it.
Urgency without clarity behaves like acceleration without a steering wheel.
What the Boss Feels vs What the Team Feels
Here’s the real split:
What the boss feels:
Urgency
Ownership
Responsibility
Forward movement
Pressure from customers
Pressure from cash flow
Pressure from time
What the team experiences:
Anxiety
Surveillance
Unspoken expectations
Fear of misalignment
Loss of autonomy
Mood-tracking
Cognitive overload
The boss is responding to reality. The team is responding to emotion.
And those two inputs create entirely different worlds.
Why This Paradox Hurts Companies Most During Scale
At 10 people, the founder’s speed is contagious.
At 30, it’s confusing.
At 50, it’s destabilizing.
Because:
Speed stops being inspiration.
It starts becoming distortion.
Teams mistake urgency for crisis.
Leaders mistake anxiety for disengagement.
This is how founders unintentionally burn out their teams long before the team burns out them.
Not from workload.
From inconsistency.
From ambiguity.
From emotional velocity.
The real cost of founder speed is not fatigue, it’s strategic shallowness.
The company becomes good at reacting and bad at thinking.
The Real Paradox
A founder’s pace is often their superpower.
But 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.
This is the Pace & Pressure Paradox in its purest form:
One person’s urgency becomes everyone else’s uncertainty.
KEY CONCEPTS — Part 3
1. Founder Tempo
The natural speed at which the founder thinks, reacts, and makes decisions ... often too fast for the system.
2. Mood Weather System
The phenomenon where teams base their behaviour on the boss’s emotional state, not formal priorities.
3. Urgency Creep
When a few genuine emergencies gradually turn everything into a crisis.
4. Adrenaline Governance
A decision-making pattern where speed substitutes structure, and emotion substitutes clarity.
5. The Aggression–Passivity Cycle
Teams mirror the boss’s intensity → comply silently → shut down mentally → lose creative courage.
FAQs — Part 3
Q1. Why do teams take urgency so personally?
Because urgency from a leader always carries implied judgment — even when unintentional.
Q2. Are founders wrong to move fast?
No. Speed is essential.
But speed without consistency becomes chaos disguised as passion.
Q3. Why do people stop pushing back under pressure?
Because psychological safety is lowest when emotional energy is highest.
Q4. Does this mean teams can’t handle intensity?
Teams can handle intensity — they cannot handle unpredictability.
Q5. Can companies scale without urgency?
This series isn’t about solutions.
But no, urgency needs to be designed, not dumped.
Read more deep-dive insights at www.ppsconsulting.biz/blog.
(PPS Consulting helps organizations scale without chaos through structure, governance, and people systems that grow with their teams. Views are institutional.)
The Boss Paradox series:
The Communication Gap - What bosses think they’ve said… and what teams actually hear.
The Power Paradox - Why meritocracy looks like favoritism from the outside.
The Pace & Pressure Paradox - How a founder’s natural speed becomes the team’s chronic anxiety.
The Boundary Collapse - When kindness becomes micromanagement and autonomy becomes fear.
The System Distortion - How unofficial influence quietly bends the system teams think they’re operating in.
Comments