Why pressure is not the answer to failing public services
Monday morning. Cold. Damp. Another defeat at the weekend.
The team is effectively relegated. The best players have been sold. Contracts are running down. The club is skint.
At Sheffield Wednesday, there is no bonus for winning. No real consequence for losing. No clear future.
So how do you motivate the players?
Because this isn’t really about football. It’s about what happens when the usual levers stop working. And across the UK public sector, that moment has already arrived.
In the NHS, waiting lists remain stubbornly high and staff shortages acute. Local government continues to absorb rising demand with shrinking resources. Schools struggle to retain experienced teachers. The civil service reports falling engagement despite constant restructuring.
The response from the centre is familiar. More targets, more scrutiny, more pressure.
As if the problem is effort.
It isn’t.
Decades of research—from Frederick Herzberg to Daniel Pink—point in the same direction. Pay and conditions matter, but they do not create commitment. They prevent dissatisfaction. They don’t inspire people to go the extra mile.
And the data is just as clear. Gallup consistently finds that only around a fifth of employees are actively engaged at work. The rest are either not engaged or, worse, actively disengaged.
Management matters. A lot.
Yet when organisations come under pressure, many leaders revert to what feels tangible. Targets, metrics, compliance. The managerial equivalent of shouting from the touchline.
That’s not motivation. That’s management panic dressed up as leadership.
This is not simply a failure of individual managers. It is what happens when systems reward compliance over leadership and short-term performance over long-term capability. A decade of austerity, coupled with increasing central control, has created organisations that are tightly managed but poorly led.
Targets were meant to drive improvement. In many cases they have become a substitute for it.
Back in the dressing room, the good manager knows this. You don’t motivate a losing team by reminding them they are losing. You don’t inspire effort by threatening consequences that no longer carry weight.
You change the story.
No one expects anything from you. No one rates you. No one thinks you care.
So prove them wrong.
Not for the owner. Not for the league. Not even for the fans.
For each other.
There is solid evidence behind this. Teams under pressure often respond to a strong sense of shared identity and purpose. When external rewards weaken, internal drivers—belonging, pride, mutual accountability—become more important.
The same applies in public services.
I saw this in a struggling frontline team dealing with rising demand and fewer staff. Targets were missed. Morale was low. The response from above was predictable—more monitoring, more reporting, more pressure.
Performance got worse.
What changed things was not a new system. It was a different kind of management. The manager stopped talking about targets and started talking about impact. Real people. Real consequences. Why the work mattered.
And then something more difficult. He backed his staff. Publicly. Consistently. Took the flak himself. Gave the credit away.
Effort improved first. Then consistency. Then results.
Senior leaders often talk about culture. But culture is what they tolerate, measure and reward. If everything points to compliance, that is what you get. If nothing reinforces trust, it quietly disappears.
And when management defaults to pressure over support, it is often those already under the greatest strain who feel it most.
Back at Sheffield Wednesday, the manager who survives a season like this does a few simple things well. They pick players who will fight for each other, not just the most talented. They praise effort, not just outcomes. They celebrate small wins. They reduce fear of failure—because the team is already failing.
And they raise the importance of something unfashionable.
Pride.
Strip everything else away—bonuses, promotion, job security—and pride is often what remains. The determination to do the job properly. To not let colleagues down. To walk away knowing you gave something.
Most people still have that.
But it is fragile. And poor management crushes it.
Bluntness has its place. Standards matter. But blunt without belief demoralises. Pressure without support is just noise. Targets without meaning are just numbers.
When the usual incentives disappear, you find out very quickly what kind of organisation you are.
And more importantly, what kind of managers you have.
Because when belief goes, performance follows. But so does something bigger.
Trust.
And when people lose trust in the institutions they rely on, the consequences go far beyond the workplace.
