You want to get things moving.
You can see change that’s needed. A problem you could solve, an idea you could make real, a better way for people to work together. You want to be part of making it happen.
And you know how good that can feel. The joy and inner thrill of seeing people grow, sharing the achievement, and knowing your work has been meaningful. That it matters.
Then there are the days when that progress feels frustratingly out of reach.
Your team needs decisions and support. Customers want something different. New technology is opening up possibilities while you’re still working out what to do with the last lot of requirements.
Priorities shift, another urgent request lands, and the time you’d blocked out to think disappears.
You’re also trying to create the space for others to do their best work while delivering what’s already due and helping everyone navigate what’s changing.
The work matters to you… which makes it harder when it feels like you’re treading water.
You’re up for the challenge. But enthusiasm doesn’t resolve competing priorities, give your team time to experiment, or change incentives that pull people in different directions.
We want people to collaborate, adapt, take the initiative, and deliver meaningful results. What are we doing to make that possible?
It’s a question that kept surfacing in my research into how leaders are adapting to changing expectations.
We can want and enjoy the challenge… and still feel squeezed trying to make it happen. Working through something difficult together can be deeply rewarding.
But when the time, support, and decisions needed to make progress aren’t in place, the challenge changes. You can end up spending more of your energy trying to make the work possible than actually doing it.
Challenging & Rewarding
The research I started in 2024 explored the central question:
As a leader, how are you adapting to meet the rapidly shifting expectations of your teams, customers, investors, and regulators?
300+ people shared their experiences, goals, frustrations, and hopes. This became the foundation for my new book, Lead Change That Matters: Design the Conditions for Momentum.
We often talk about the pressures, but I also wanted to understand what brought people a deep sense of achievement and joy at work.
Their answers included helping others grow, solving problems, making a meaningful contribution, and achieving something together. One leader working in health captured the relationship between challenge and satisfaction:
“Making progress on hard, important and uncomfortable tasks.”
Hard. Important. Uncomfortable. And a source of joy.
I think it’s a perspective worth keeping when talking about the pressures of leading change. If we only focus on the challenges, we can lose sight of why people want to do this work – and what keeps them coming back for more.
When I asked how the expectations from teams, customers, investors, and regulators had changed over the previous three years, 83% reported increased expectations – 60% said they’re experiencing a dramatic increase.
How people felt about this varied. There was acceptance, interest, and a willingness to adapt.
There was also fatigue, uncertainty, and frustration. Some questioned how much had really changed. This wasn’t a single story of people feeling overwhelmed, or of everyone enthusiastically embracing more.
A leader working in finance captured that tension:
“Tired sometimes. Excited sometimes. It can be hard to constantly need to reinvent and push harder.”
Feeling excited about the work doesn’t cancel out the exhaustion. Feeling the fatigue doesn’t mean you’ve stopped caring about what you’re trying to achieve.
Both experiences – and the ebbs and flows between – deserve our attention.
Should We Expect Less?
When we hear that expectations have increased – maybe even dramatically – it’s tempting to jump to “less” as the answer.
It’s true that some expectations need to be challenged. Priorities and incentives can conflict. Commitments can exceed the time and resources available. And some decisions feel like they’re taking us in the wrong direction.
But a lot of the expectations described in my research feel like positive things we should be embracing.
Listening to people. Helping them develop. Making thoughtful decisions. Working across traditional organisational boundaries. Taking responsibility for the wider consequences of what we do.
When I asked people about a great leader they’d worked with and what made them great, a financial services leader said:
“They cared about their team, expected greatness and supported you to achieve it, lived the values even when it was hard.”
The leader expected greatness… and supported you to achieve it. That combination matters.
We should expect organisations to perform and deliver.
We should also expect that the people doing the work are looked after – and what the organisation does has a positive impact on customers, communities, and our environment… while being financially successful.
I don’t want to make these ambitions smaller.
Next… I’ll explore how to recognise the mismatch between what we expect and what we have to work with – including when the results still look good.
What do you expect of yourself and the people you work with?
What helps you turn those ambitions into meaningful progress together… and what gets in the way?
I’d love to hear what this looks like in your work.
Note: This is an early draft of part of Chapter 1: The Expectation Squeeze from my upcoming book Lead Change That Matters: Design the Conditions for Momentum.
I’m working out loud as I write… sharing and testing the ideas, inviting you to challenge my thinking, and learning from your experiences as the book takes shape.
