What you can change before the pressure builds

Good morning. Mid-year brings a feeling many leaders will recognise: the middling. Not crisis, not calm, but the kind of pressure that's been building long enough to start feeling like the baseline. Chronic demands that haven't eased, a sameness to the weeks, the sense that something is wearing but it's hard to say exactly what.

Some of that pressure is inherent to the work: tight deadlines, difficult decisions, high stakes. Most experienced leaders handle this reasonably well, because it comes with the territory.

And then there's a different kind: the pressure that comes not from the nature of the work, but from how it's organised. Unclear expectations. Competing priorities with no way to triage them. A workload that keeps growing without anything coming off the list. That kind accumulates quietly, and it doesn't resolve on its own.

Last week we looked at psychosocial risk as a framework: what it is, why it sits with leaders, and the three levels of response. The first level, primary prevention, is about removing or reducing the sources of pressure before they build into harm. The most useful lens for doing that comes from decades of occupational health research.

The Job Demands-Resources model, developed by Arnold Bakker and Evangelia Demerouti, identifies two categories that shape whether people can function well over time.

Demands are the aspects of work that require effort: workload, emotional complexity, cognitive load, time pressure.

Resources are what help people meet those demands: autonomy, clear expectations, feedback, support, a sense of meaning in what they do, and the personal capacity to cope with what the role asks of them.

Problems build when demands are high and resources are thin. The solution isn't always to reduce demand. Often, the more practical move is to increase the resources available to meet it.

What makes this model useful for leaders is that it gives you a diagnostic. When someone on your team seems stretched, the question isn't just "are they overloaded?" It's: what specific demands have increased, and which specific resources have depleted? That distinction changes what you do about it.

Consider a senior team member, experienced, reliable, the kind of person you trust to carry a lot. Over the last few months, they've been covering a colleague on extended, unplanned leave while the team has also taken on a new workstream. They're still delivering, but something has shifted. They're quieter in meetings, slower to respond, and mentioned in passing that they'd been working weekends.

Through a JD-R lens, the picture becomes clearer.

Their demands have increased. More volume, more context-switching between different types of work, and more relationship complexity as they manage the absent colleague's stakeholders alongside their own.

Their resources, meanwhile, have quietly depleted. There's been no clear direction on how long the cover continues or what decisions are theirs to make. They've absorbed their colleague's processes without the latitude to change them. Check-ins have focused on outputs, how's it tracking, rather than on how they're actually doing. And the extra work doesn't feel like development. It just feels like more.

A leader who sees this through a JD-R lens doesn't respond by taking everything off their plate. They rebalance the equation. In practice, that might look like:

None of this requires a formal wellbeing programme. These are ordinary leadership moves, made more deliberate by a clearer picture of what's actually out of balance.

Some roles carry regular exposure to traumatic or distressing content, emotionally demanding or hostile customer interactions, or situations that are hard to leave at the door. Leaders often treat these as fixed features of the role. Sometimes they are. More often, there are decisions within reach: how exposure is distributed across the team, what recovery time is built in, what norms exist around unacceptable behaviour from clients or customers, and whether staff know they're empowered to act on those norms. These aren't problems to eliminate. They're risks that can be actively managed.

It can reduce unnecessary pressure. It cannot remove all of it. Some roles carry inherent demands that no redesign will touch. Some workloads exist because the work needs doing. The goal isn't frictionless work, but to make sure the pressure that remains is the kind that comes with the role, not the kind that's accumulated from how the role is organised.

There's also a risk of overcorrection. Leaders who focus heavily on reducing stressors can slide into softening expectations, removing challenge, or treating every sign of strain as a signal to ease the load. A team that's never stretched isn't a well-supported one. The aim is sustainable stretch, not the absence of it.

A lot of what wears teams down can be traced back to how the work was set up. That's also where it can be changed.