🏠︎ | Past Sessions | Under Pressure Reducing Tension Within the Finance Function
- Event: Finance Forum 25
- Date: 7 October 2025
- Speaker: Alice Phillips, Co-Founder, Stillness Partners
- Estimated read time: 7-8 minutes
Quick summary
This session explored why pressure inside finance teams has intensified, and how leaders can reduce tension without lowering performance expectations.
Alice Phillips argued that stress is not a personal failing or a wellbeing issue to be patched over. It is a structural outcome of rising expectations, shrinking resources, and faster decision cycles. Finance leaders cannot remove pressure, but they can manage how it accumulates and where it spills over.
The session introduced practical frameworks to help finance leaders recognise pressure patterns, understand how tension shows up in teams, and take specific actions that protect performance, motivation, and decision quality over time.
Why tension has become structural in finance
Alice began by grounding the discussion in the realities finance teams now face. Expectations on finance have expanded sharply, while capacity has not kept pace.
Finance teams are working to tighter deadlines, with leaner headcounts, longer reports, and higher compliance demands. At the same time, CFOs and finance leaders are expected to move faster, communicate more clearly, and operate as strategists rather than controllers.
Hybrid working adds another layer of complexity. Misalignment, misunderstanding, and fractured communication become more likely when teams are distributed, especially during high pressure periods such as month end, year end, or major transformation programmes.
The result is not occasional stress, but persistent tension. As Alice framed it, expectations have doubled while resources have shrunk, creating the conditions where pressure becomes constant rather than cyclical.
Pressure is necessary, tension is the risk
A central distinction in the session was between pressure and tension. Pressure is not the enemy. Some degree of pressure is required for motivation, focus, and performance.
Alice described a familiar performance curve. As pressure increases, performance improves up to an optimal point. Beyond that point, additional pressure reduces effectiveness and increases the risk of burnout.
The challenge for finance leaders is not to remove pressure, but to stop it accumulating beyond that optimal zone. When pressure is left unmanaged, teams move into survival mode, where cognitive capacity drops and decision quality suffers.
In this state, teams experience analysis paralysis, decision fatigue, tunnel vision, and a retreat into silos. Innovation slows, mentoring disappears, and initiatives that could relieve pressure, such as automation or process redesign, stall because no one has the bandwidth to act.
How pressure triggers show up differently across teams
Not everyone experiences pressure in the same way. Alice introduced a set of common triggers that explain why similar conditions can produce very different responses across a team.
For some, status and recognition are key. When effort goes unnoticed, stress rises quickly. For others, certainty matters most. Ambiguity around priorities, expectations, or future direction can be deeply unsettling, particularly in finance roles that value precision and risk awareness.
Autonomy is another frequent trigger. Under pressure, leaders often default to directive behaviour, telling teams what to do without context. This erodes agency and increases tension, even if delivery improves in the short term.
Fairness and belonging also feature strongly, especially in hybrid environments. When finance feels held to higher standards than other functions, or when connection and trust weaken, stress compounds rapidly.
Understanding these triggers gives leaders a practical diagnostic tool. Rather than assuming resilience is a personal trait, leaders can start asking what conditions are activating stress responses across their teams.
The finance tension map, where teams get stuck
Alice then introduced what she described as a tension map, a way to visualise the competing forces finance leaders manage every day.
Finance sits at the intersection of short term pressure and long term value, and of defensive control and offensive growth. Different combinations create different operating modes, each with predictable human impacts.
In a performance push, where short term delivery dominates, teams face relentless deadlines. Individual development and diverse perspectives are often sidelined in favour of speed and certainty, which erodes belonging over time.
In growth and innovation, finance enables new initiatives but must manage anxiety around automation and AI. Teams are asked to balance profit with purpose, maintaining a sense of meaning alongside commercial demands.
In strategic risk management, teams are told to think long term while delivering immediately. This creates the feeling of sprinting a marathon, where innovation is encouraged but mistakes are punished.
In operational discipline, compliance and control dominate. Teams feel squeezed between flexibility and rules, and between transparency and privacy, unsure how much context or vulnerability is safe to share.
Tension itself is not the problem. Losing balance within these tensions is. The leader’s role is to recognise which quadrant the team is operating in, and manage the human impact deliberately rather than reactively.
Regaining balance starts with the leader
Before addressing team dynamics, Alice emphasised the importance of the leader’s own state. When leaders operate in fight or flight mode, they unintentionally transmit that stress to others.
She introduced a simple grounding approach, summarised as stop, tune in, isolate, leverage, and leap. The aim is not self care theatre, but restoring enough cognitive capacity to lead intentionally rather than reactively.
This includes recognising personal stress triggers, focusing on what is within control, drawing on available support, and taking one small, concrete action to reduce pressure rather than attempting wholesale change.
Only from that grounded position can leaders meaningfully address tension at team level.
Six practical moves to reduce tension without lowering standards
The session translated theory into six specific leadership moves that finance leaders can apply immediately.
- First, name and normalise tension. Acknowledge crunch periods openly and set clear expectations about what is fixed and what can flex. This stops teams wasting energy pretending everything is fine and surfaces issues earlier.
- Second, enable healthy trade offs. Instead of defaulting to no, frame choices with consequences. If one priority moves forward, another must move back. This builds trust and improves prioritisation across the business.
- Third, protect team capacity. Act as a gatekeeper against duplicated reporting and unnecessary urgency. Challenge long standing outputs that no longer serve a clear purpose, and simplify wherever possible.
- Fourth, build in recovery and resilience. Plan for intensity to ease, adjust meeting cadence, and stagger workloads after peak periods. Treat recovery as part of performance, not a reward for endurance.
- Fifth, celebrate progress, not just final results. Recognise milestones during long cycles, not only at delivery. This sustains motivation and reduces attrition among high performers.
- Sixth, reinforce human skills as automation increases. Reframe roles around judgment, context, and storytelling. Help teams see where they add unique value rather than fearing replacement.
These moves are not about removing pressure. They are about preventing pressure from turning into chronic tension that undermines performance.
“If we do not deal with the human side, our ability to deliver is compromised.” Alice Phillips, Co-Founder, Stillness Partners
What good looks like, practical actions for finance leaders
This session translates into clear, finance specific actions.
Questions to ask yourself this quarter- Where is pressure becoming constant rather than cyclical in my team
- Which tensions are we managing well, and which are tipping out of balance
- What reporting or routines exist because they always have, not because they add value
- How often do I make trade offs explicit rather than absorbing them silently
- What behaviours am I modelling when pressure peaks
- Whether stress is discussed openly or only surfaced after mistakes occur
- Whether teams default to speed at the expense of inclusion and learning
- Whether automation is framed as threat or opportunity
- Whether recovery is planned or treated as an afterthought
- Whether finance is trusted as a partner or seen as a bottleneck
- Treating tension as an individual resilience problem
- Assuming pressure justifies poor communication
- Allowing urgency to crowd out reflection indefinitely
- Automating tasks without redefining roles
- Waiting for burnout before making changes
What good looks like in practice
Well led finance teams operate under pressure without living in survival mode. Expectations are high, but trade offs are explicit. Leaders protect capacity, recognise effort, and make space for recovery.
Over time, this reduces errors, improves decision quality, and allows finance to fulfil its role as both guardian and enabler of the organisation’s future.
Conclusion, tension is a leadership design problem
The core insight from this session is that tension in finance is not accidental. It is designed into the system through choices about priorities, communication, and capacity.
Finance leaders cannot remove pressure, but they can redesign how it is held. By recognising tension patterns and acting deliberately, leaders protect both performance and people.
Reducing tension within the finance function is not a soft ambition. It is a practical requirement for sustained delivery in an environment where demands continue to rise.
Key takeaways
- Pressure is necessary for performance, unmanaged tension is not
- Stress often reflects structural conditions, not individual weakness
- Finance leaders manage predictable tensions between speed, value, control, and growth
- Small, deliberate leadership moves reduce tension at source
- Strong performance depends on cognitive capacity, trust, and recovery
Speaker
Co-Founder, Stillness Partners, Strategist and facilitator who helps organisations design human centred systems that support performance, wellbeing, and sustainable change.