The Zone of Productive Distress: Using Pressure Intentionally

Part II of “How Real Leaders Drive Real Change”

Last week, I published part I of this three-part series delving into how founders and executives can build better businesses by following three principles: Courage, Productive Distress, and The Power of Community.

Last week’s post focused on Courage. This week is about operating in the zone of productive distress. The zone of productive distress is the optimal level of stress or discomfort where people are motivated to learn, adapt and drive change.

This optimal zone of productive distress lives between two unproductive extremes.

→ At one extreme, there is too little stress on the system, and people become complacent. The system stays in stasis.

→ At the other extreme, there is too much stress on the system, and people freeze and can’t cope with all the change.

Effective change—cultural change, institutional change, organizational change— happens in that middle band, where discomfort is high enough to motivate action but not so high that people shut down.

In a talk that Rachel Cohen gave at a HiPower conference in November, she explained how she and her colleagues deliberately created a zone of productive distress.

As a reminder (from my last post), Rachel is the young lawyer who resigned from the fifth-highest grossing law firm in the world over its capitulation to political threats aimed at retaliating against firms for positions taken against the Administration in the past. [If you don’t know the background story that led to her resignation, I’ve added a quick synopsis as an endnote to this post.]

Before she resigned, she worked with a coalition of associates to draft and publish an open letter to the industry. This letter was a deliberate attempt to push the industry into the zone of productive distress.

The letter brought the issue beyond the confines of the legal community and to the mainstream news media. It created the heat needed so that some leaders could no longer pretend change wasn’t necessary.

And here’s the leadership lesson

Change never happens without heat. Someone needs to have the courage to turn up the heat.

The Zone of Stasis

Companies often default here because it’s uncomfortable to push people.

⛔ Product issues persist because teams avoid hard conversations.

⛔ Toxic high performers stay because removing them feels too disruptive to the business.

⛔ People work at cross-purposes to one another because leaders don’t deal with conflict head on.

⛔ Mediocre leaders survive because performance management is hard.

Leaders in this zone tend to be conflict-avoiders.

They tell themselves they’re maintaining stability, but what they’re actually maintaining is decay.

The Zone of Overwhelming Distress

Then there are organizations where everything is on fire, all the time.

🔕 Every issue is “mission-critical.”

🔕 Every project isn’t good enough.

🔕 Every meeting is a crisis.

🔕 Every quarter triggers reinvention.

These leaders believe they’re creating intensity when they’re actually creating chaos.

They mistake adrenaline for progress.

Most Corporate Cultures Live in the Wrong Zone

If I’m honest, I see myself in both extremes. At work, I often tilt toward distress—fast pace, high stakes, urgency everywhere. And outside of work? I sometimes drift toward stasis, avoiding the discomfort that meaningful personal change requires.

Rachel’s story forced me to ask hard questions, that all leaders should ask themselves:

❔ What am I avoiding because it’s uncomfortable?

❔ Am I avoiding necessary conflict?

❔ Am I afraid of failing—or of losing what I already have?

❔ Am I staying silent to preserve stability rather than drive progress?

Leaders must sit in productive distress themselves before they can lead others through it.

And leaders who cannot tolerate discomfort cannot generate change.

The Parent vs. Babysitter CEO

A multiple-exit founder once told me that CEOs fall into two categories: parents or babysitters.

Parents know that they need to push their children outside of their comfort zones and encourage them to take risks in order to achieve their dreams. Parent-CEOs push employees and their company out of their comfort zones.

Babysitters mainly focus on not having the child die on their watch.

In the end, Rachel’s coalition didn’t stumble into productive distress — they engineered it. They knew the system wouldn’t change on its own. They acted deliberately like parents, not babysitters.

That is the lesson for every leader.

If you want your team, your company, or your industry to evolve, you cannot wait for the perfect moment or the perfect conditions. You must be intentional about creating a zone where growth becomes unavoidable and action becomes the only option.

The zone of productive distress is where great change happens – individuals flourish, innovation is created, companies scale, communities thrive, and societies strengthen.

ENDNOTE:

In March, 2025, in order to avoid being targeted by President Donald Trump for prior associations with his political enemies, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, preemptively “settled” with Trump and agreed to pay $100 million towards free legal work to causes supported by the Administration.

In a public statement in March of 2025, a representative of the law firm stated “We entered into the agreement the President announced today because, when faced with the alternatives, it became clear that it was the best path to protect our clients, our people and our Firm… This agreement does not change who we are.”

And yet, fundamental aspects of who they were did change shortly following the deal it struck with Trump.

The firm canceled all future events for its employee affinity groups.

Its legal foundation altered its application criteria to remove language related to racial justice.

It scrubbed much of its past pro-bono work that might have offended Trump from its website.

The whole point of having values is that they guide you during times of crisis. What became apparent in the spring of 2025 is that many law firms, many universities and many corporations hadn’t been honest about what their values really were.