PRESSURE PATTERN #8

Saturated Sponge

On holding two sets of expectations that do not agree, why the strain shows up in the person rather than the numbers, and what saying so out loud changes.

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Pressure: Some strain only shows up in the people carrying it.

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from being the only person holding two opposing forces together. On one side is what the business needs. On the other is what the people, the tools, and the current state of the system can actually produce. Neither side is wrong, and you are standing in the gap.

In most organizations, leaders are the ones who close it. Take the force in, make sense of it, hand the team a version they can act on. That is much of the work, but we often underestimate how much work it really is.

I spent a year at the top of a large version of this. A competitor announced something we did not have, the market changed complexion in a week, and in response we had committed to more than our resources could reasonably produce. Closing that distance became my week, every week. Which initiative to protect and which to let slip. What to say to investors. What to say to the board. How to keep the teams on the work in front of them and off what they could not control. Partway through, due to additional business headwinds, I paused hiring, right at the point the team most needed help.

I was not carrying the hardest part. Leaders throughout the organization ran the programs with far less room to move than I had. When I decided what could flex, they found out whether it actually could.

Each week asked for one more week, and one more surge seemed manageable. That is how it ran for nine months. We met ninety-six percent of our delivery goals, and the reviews were good.

That is the story the year told. But here is what I got wrong. I watched the same numbers the board watched, they kept looking fine, and I did not ask hard enough what producing them cost the people producing them. They were running on fumes.

A leader in this kind of position works the way a sponge does. The counter gets dry because the sponge gets wet, which means the absorbing is not a side effect of the job. It is the job. But a sponge has only so much room. When it runs out, nothing announces it. No sound. No change in shape. Water stops going in and starts going straight back out. Sponges are not evaluated by how much water they hold. They are evaluated by how well they clean up messes.

Which is why the useful question about a sponge is not how much it has held. It is how much room is left.

Pattern: A gap left unresolved gets resolved by whoever is standing in it.

There is a name for that position. Aldrich and Herker called it a boundary role, and described it as existing to process information and to buffer the organization from outside influence. The absorbing is the function. What an org chart calls a management layer is, where two sets of expectations fail to meet, a layer that holds them apart so the rest of the organization can keep working. There is no gauge on that layer. What an organization has instead is output, and output is the one thing the layer exists to protect.

It is not only a work position. The eldest sibling coordinating a parent’s care is in it. So is the teacher between what the district requires and what this year’s classroom can do.

The research splits in a way that took me a while to understand: Role conflict shows up reliably in the person: tension, anxiety, lower satisfaction, more thinking about leaving. It shows up barely at all in the work. Pooled across decades of studies, the correlation between role conflict and job performance comes out at −.07, effectively nothing. Those two results only look contradictory until you have lived a year like that one. The output held because someone paid for it privately. The organization is measuring the cleanup, the cleanup looks fine, and the people are paying the price. Which means the correction has to come from inside the position, or from the people beside it.

There is a second cost, and it does not land on you. Absorbing turns a decision into a private act. The people around you see what came out of it without seeing what went into it: a date that moves, one program protected while theirs slips, two roles that stop being open. The results are in plain view. The reasoning is inside you. People do not leave that gap empty. They experience an absence, and they fill it, often with something worse than the truth. An unexplained pattern gets explained anyway. Just not by you.

The tell is not exhaustion, which arrives late. It is not the translating either, since shaping the message for what each room can act on is the job working correctly. The tell is repetition. Look at what you decided this week and ask how much of it you also decided last week. A decision made once is a decision. The same decision made week after week is a gap you are standing in.

Two readings get in the way. The first is that the strain means you are not good enough, when the position is built to produce it in whoever holds it. Change the person and the tension stays. The second is that because it is structural it is permanent. The problem was not the absorbing. It was absorbing with no end date and a lack of support from others. It’s a difficult job to be in the middle.

Three moves, none of which require the contradiction to be resolved:

• Name the trade-offs specifically, then say what decision they add up to. “We are stretched” is a feeling, and feelings get absorbed. Say what gets slower if this gets faster, what gets thinner if this gets covered, and roughly by how much. It is rarely two clean options. Lay out the real shape, then name the decision it is asking for and who owns it. If you lead leaders, this is the thing to teach them.
• Connect with others who are absorbing organizational tension. Ten minutes with someone standing in the same place corrects more than anything else available. If you are the one people report to, you go first.
• Put an end date on the absorbing. Absorbing for a defined stretch is a plan. Absorbing with no end date is an arrangement you likely didn’t sign up for.

Shift: What gap am I closing by hand, a decision at a time, that has not actually been decided?

One question to carry this week: what are you currently treating as a temporary surge, and how long has it been temporary?

The full piece goes deeper on the research, the questions to put in front of your team, and the habits worth dropping. Read the full version.

This pattern is part of the library of leadership content at Resonant Vector published by Mark Benson to help leaders and teams thrive under pressure.