68. Leading Under Pressure
by Andrew Simon
Yellow Edge explores what it means to lead under pressure in the contemporary Australian Public Service. We consider how increasing complexity, interdependence and competing demands are shifting the leadership challenge from individual capability towards judgement, collective leadership and shared sense-making. We also explore what this means for how leaders and executive teams are developed to navigate ambiguity, make thoughtful trade-offs and lead effectively when there is no simple answer.
Leadership in the Australian Public Service has never been straightforward. Public sector leaders have always had to reconcile political responsiveness with institutional stewardship, deliver outcomes while maintaining due process, and exercise judgement within complex systems of accountability.
What appears to be changing is not necessarily the existence of these tensions, but their density, simultaneity and speed.
APS leaders are increasingly expected to deliver more quickly while maintaining rigour and accountability; translate policy into real-world outcomes without controlling all the mechanisms of delivery; influence across organisational and jurisdictional boundaries; continually reprioritise; build workforce capability while delivering with stretched teams; and lead people through continuing reform and change. At the same time, they are navigating hybrid work, incomplete information, heightened digital and AI expectations, integrity obligations and increasing scrutiny.
Perhaps most importantly, these pressures do not arrive neatly one at a time. They coexist. And that changes the nature of the leadership challenge.
The leadership challenge is increasingly about navigating tensions
Many traditional approaches to leadership development are based, understandably, around capabilities: strategic thinking, communication, influencing, people leadership, decision-making, change leadership, collaboration and so forth.
These capabilities remain important. But viewed through the lens of the pressure points facing APS leaders, something else becomes apparent.
The challenge is often not knowing how to do one particular thing. It is knowing what to do when several important things pull in different directions. For example, this might entail:
Moving quickly but maintaining rigour.
Being responsive but thinking long term.
Empowering people but remaining accountable.
Collaborating but providing direction.
Experimenting and innovating but manage public risk.
Giving frank and fearless advice while maintaining effective relationships.
Investing in capability for tomorrow while meeting today's delivery commitments.
Being decisive without pretending to have certainty.
This kind of ‘pressure profile’ is about ambiguity where leaders may need to provide advice with limited data, balance risk against action and revise decisions as new information emerges. These are not problems that can simply be "solved". They are enduring tensions that need to be navigated.
That suggests a subtle but important shift in how we think about leadership maturity. A mature leader may not be the person who eliminates ambiguity, resolves every contradiction or always has the answer. Increasingly, maturity may lie in being able to hold competing realities, exercise judgement between them, make conscious trade-offs and help others move forward despite imperfect conditions.
From capability to judgement
This points towards an important distinction between having capabilities and being capable. A leader might possess excellent analytical, communication, strategic and stakeholder-engagement skills. Yet the real test of leadership is often how those capabilities are combined and exercised when circumstances are difficult. For example, leaders could reflect and ask:
Should we act now or seek more information?
Which stakeholder needs to be brought closer and which issue needs to be escalated?
What work should stop when a new priority arrives?
When should I challenge, and when should I support?
How much risk should we accept?
Where should scarce capability be deployed?
When does short-term delivery begin to compromise longer-term stewardship?
These are questions of judgement rather than simply technical competence. The pressure profile of contemporary work therefore suggests that leadership development should create more opportunities for leaders to practise discernment, sense-making and trade-offs, rather than treating capabilities as discrete competencies to be acquired one at a time.
The paradox of accountability without control
One pressure running particularly strongly through workplaces is the growing gap between accountability and control. APS leaders can be accountable for outcomes that depend upon other agencies, states and territories, service providers, vendors, stakeholders and systems over which they have limited authority.
For executive teams this becomes even more pronounced. Whole-of-organisation and sometimes whole-of-government outcomes depend upon distributed delivery, fragmented authority and significant interdependencies. The dilemma can be succinctly expressed as "We are jointly accountable for outcomes we cannot fully direct." This has profound implications for contemporary public sector leadership.
If leaders cannot simply direct the system, their effectiveness increasingly depends upon their capacity to mobilise it.
Influence becomes as important as authority. Relationships become part of the delivery infrastructure. Collaboration becomes less a desirable interpersonal behaviour and more an operating necessity. The ability to understand different interests, create shared purpose, negotiate trade-offs and build coalitions becomes fundamental to getting things done.
Leadership therefore increasingly happens between organisational units, professional streams, jurisdictions and institutions, not simply within the boundaries of the leader's own team.
From individual leadership to collective leadership
This becomes particularly significant at executive level. We often continue to develop executives predominantly as individuals. Yet many of the pressures we have seen in the workforce cannot realistically be addressed by an individual executive, however capable.
In such a context, the executive team and all leadership teams of subunits, have an even more significant role to play. For example, leadership and executive teams must maintain alignment despite different portfolio realities. They must continually reset priorities without destabilising their organisations. They must balance immediate delivery with stewardship of future capability. They must create psychological safety, integrity and collaboration while operating under significant pressure themselves.
This suggests that the executive team itself is a leadership capability. The leadership development questions therefore change from: How capable are our individual executives? to:
How capable are we together?
Can we make sense of complexity together?
Can we disagree constructively?
Can we surface competing pressures rather than conceal them in the interests of apparent alignment or harmony?
Can we make trade-offs explicitly?
Can we redistribute attention and resources as circumstances change?
Can we combine our different perspectives, experience, authority, relationships and expertise?
And can we remain collectively accountable after the decision has been made?
This is a quite different conception of leadership development. It recognises that organisational leadership is not simply the aggregate of several individually talented executives. It is an emergent capability created through the quality of their interactions.
Alignment does not have to mean sameness
One of the most interesting tensions in the executive team working can be described as "alignment versus reality", that is, the need for unity despite genuine differences in context and pressure. This deserves particular attention.
Executive teams can sometimes interpret alignment as agreement. But genuine collective leadership may require almost the opposite: creating enough trust for different realities to be brought into the room.
The policy executive may see one risk.
The delivery executive another.
The corporate leader may see workforce or financial implications.
The digital leader may see technological dependencies.
The operational leader may understand what implementation will actually demand of people.
The purpose of the executive team is not necessarily to erase these differences. Its value lies partly in combining them into a richer picture of reality.
The question is therefore not simply, "Are we aligned?" A better question may be:
"Have we brought enough of our different perspectives together to make a wise collective judgement?"
Alignment then becomes the outcome of shared sense-making rather than conformity.
Leadership development under pressure
All of this has implications for how APS leadership development might evolve.
There will always be a place for developing individual skills and knowledge. But leadership development may need to become less about accumulating competencies and more about increasing leaders' capacity to work with complexity, interdependence, competing accountabilities and imperfect choices.
That means working with real dilemmas rather than only idealised case studies; practising judgement where there is no obviously correct answer; examining the consequences of trade-offs; building the capacity to have difficult conversations across boundaries; and developing executive teams as collective sense-making and decision-making systems.
It also means paying greater attention to reflection.
The final pressure we see for both individual leaders and executive teams is personal sustainability, which is about cognitive overload, emotional labour, context switching and limited space for reflection and strategic thinking.
Reflection in this context is not an indulgence or something leaders do when the "real work" is finished. It is part of the real work. When leaders operate continuously at speed, the capacity to pause, notice, question assumptions and reconsider what matters becomes an important safeguard against reactive leadership.
Perhaps pressure is where leadership becomes visible
There is a final thought worth considering. We often describe leadership capabilities as though they exist independently of context. But perhaps capabilities become meaningful only when they encounter pressure. For example:
It is relatively easy to advocate collaboration when interests are aligned.
It is easy to value innovation when the consequences of failure are low.
It is easy to talk about psychological safety when nobody is under significant pressure.
It is easy to support long-term capability building when there is no urgent delivery deadline.
And it is easier to exercise considered judgement when there is plenty of time and complete information.
But in our view, leadership becomes visible in the space between these ideals and the realities of the moment. The pressure points facing APS leaders therefore should not simply be regarded as problems to be reduced. They can also provide a useful lens through which to understand what contemporary public sector leadership actually requires.
Perhaps the next evolution of APS leadership development is therefore not to create leaders who somehow rise above these tensions. It is to develop leaders and leadership and executive teams who can work intelligently within them. Leaders who can hold competing demands without becoming paralysed by them. Who can make thoughtful trade-offs without pretending that every stakeholder can be satisfied. Who can act without certainty, collaborate without authority, steward the future while delivering today, and sustain the human relationships upon which public service ultimately depends. And, increasingly, leaders who understand that they do not need to carry all of this alone.
Because in a system characterised by distributed authority, interdependence and shared accountability, leadership itself must increasingly become a shared endeavour.
Author
Andrew Simon is Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Yellow Edge, a Canberra-headquartered B Corp dedicated to helping individual, teams and organisations realise their potential.
Published September 2026
Yellow Edge is a local, privately owned Canberra based consulting company focused on helping individuals, teams and organisations to achieve high performance. Yellow Edge is a certified BCorp. BCorp companies make decisions that make a positive impact on their employees, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment. https://www.bcorporation.com.au/