Fine Lines is a weekly newsletter at the intersection of commercial performance and human development - for founders and sales leaders of growth-stage B2B companies who have already tried the obvious fixes and are now asking better questions. Each Tuesday: one idea from real commercial experience and research, examined with enough rigour to be useful and enough honesty to sting slightly. The equation running underneath every edition: Capability × Ability = Performance. Most interventions address the Ability side. Fine Lines addresses the variable nobody is measuring. If you want frameworks and inspiration there are better newsletters. If you want your thinking challenged and, occasionally, your assumptions dismantled then you are in the right place.
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It's very easy to have values when there's no pressure
Published 24 days ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader
3 seconds.
That's how long it takes.
One question without a clean answer, and the person who was leaning forward, listening, asking good questions is…..gone.
What replaces him pushes back in his chair, tips his head to the ceiling, and starts talking at the room. Not to it or with it.
The team doesn't react. They look down at whatever is in front of them and wait.
They've seen this all before.
Why your authenticity cracks under pressure....read on
A thirty-year veteran coach said something in my MSc research that I haven't been able to get out of my head since.
"It's very easy to have values when there's no pressure."
I was studying how coaches behave under competitive pressure, stakeholder opposition, political dynamics etc inside governing bodies. What I found was consistent and uncomfortable: the coaches who articulated the clearest values in calm conditions were not reliably the same people who held those values when the ground shifted.
It transfers directly. I've seen it in commercial settings more times than I can count.
I call it ‘Authenticity Collapse Under Pressure’ and it’s a predictable, measurable gap. Not to be confused with a character flaw. The specific finding that rings true: trust doesn't erode most sharply when leaders fail. It erodes most sharply when they fail inconsistently.
For example, a start-up/company founder who is always difficult is manageable. A team learns to work around that.
But a man or woman who is sometimes excellent and sometimes unrecognisable creates something worse; a team that can never fully relax and never be fully honest because they don't know which version is walking in today.
This is what capability looks like when it fails. Again, it’s not incompetence; the founder in this story is often genuinely talented. But talent operating through a collapsed capability ceiling produces something that looks, from the outside, nothing like what it could.
Remember my PQ (Performance Quotient) equation - C x A = P - from a couple of editions ago?
Authenticity under pressure is not a soft skill sitting outside the commercial equation. It’s actually inside the multiplier.
January. The culture is real and there's a sense of solidarity.
The founder asks good questions and waits for the answers. The team brings problems to the surface because experience has told them it's safe to do so. There's genuine trust in the room - the kind that takes months to build and, when present, is a genuine commercial advantage.
By August the number is shaky. Not terminal but enough to rise heart rates a little. Enough that the gap between where they said they'd be and where they are has become something everyone in the room is quietly aware of.
The question that breaks it is an impossible one: What's the one thing at the root of all of these bad numbers?
There is no one thing. There never is.
But the founder doesn't hear that. What they hear is hesitation. And the person hesitating is the newest hire - six months in, still calibrating the room.T
he body language goes first. Chair back. Head up. Eyes to the ceiling. The tone that follows is passive aggressive in a way that is almost considered; measured enough to be deniable, sharp enough that nobody in the room misses it.
The ‘veterans’ don't look up. You can see it in how they hold themselves…kind of like a quiet recalibration. “Oh, here we go again.” They've filed this. They know now that the version of this founder they trusted in January is a fair-weather performance. The real version is what's sitting at the head of the table right now.
Folks, quick request - if you're finding this edition of Fine Lines useful and/or interesting (or edition any for that matter!) I'd really appreciate it if you could share it with friends or on social media. Thanks for reading and subscribing!
What the founder cannot see is that they are not solving a pipeline problem. They are protecting themselves. The passion that built the company, genuine, real & valuable by the way, has curdled into fear.
Fear that the number reflects on them.
Fear that control is slipping.
Fear of being seen as the reason it's gone wrong.
So they do something utterly predictable and make someone else the answer. It looks like accountability. It’s the polar opposite.
And to be fair to the guy it’s an easy place to end up. The adrenaline of reacting feels like urgency. It feels like leadership. The body generates it precisely because it wants to protect something. Understanding that doesn't excuse it. But most founders who've done this once have done it more than once without ever doing the work to identify & name what happened.
The Commercial Thread
When a founder's behaviour under pressure cannot be trusted, the commercial system quietly degrades.
The next pipeline review will be cleaner on paper than it was in reality; all because the team has just learned what happens when the honest answer is the wrong answer. Deal reviews lose candour and the difficult ones stop being surfaced. Decision-making slows, because nobody wants to be holding the problem when the mood shifts.
The founder who collapses under pressure in pursuit of honest answers is the precise reason honest answers stop being given.
Trust erodes faster than the pipeline. But unlike the pipeline, it doesn't show up on any dashboard.
Time now for an honest inward look.
In your last difficult business period were you responding or reacting?
When the performance was shaky, did you create more safety in the room or less?
If the newest person on your team was asked to describe how you behave under pressure, would their answer match how you see yourself?
Your values are not the ones you articulate in the good months. They are the ones visible when times are difficult and challenging, when someone in front of you doesn't have a clean answer and the target is already behind you.
Then which version shows up?
Worth repeating….Authenticity under pressure is not a personality trait.
Be under no illusion that it’s a skill. And like any skill it’s buildable. But only by someone who is willing to watch themselves honestly - in both the calm and the difficult moments - and close the gap between the two.
You've just met that gap and learned its name. It's the first of five....the others to follow in the coming weeks.
Another Newsletter you might find useful....
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"Fine Lines" - For founders and commercial leaders who'd rather be told the truth than told they're doing fine
Fine Lines is a weekly newsletter at the intersection of commercial performance and human development - for founders and sales leaders of growth-stage B2B companies who have already tried the obvious fixes and are now asking better questions. Each Tuesday: one idea from real commercial experience and research, examined with enough rigour to be useful and enough honesty to sting slightly. The equation running underneath every edition: Capability × Ability = Performance. Most interventions address the Ability side. Fine Lines addresses the variable nobody is measuring. If you want frameworks and inspiration there are better newsletters. If you want your thinking challenged and, occasionally, your assumptions dismantled then you are in the right place.
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