Some days, leading other people feels like pushing a car uphill. You’re asking, reminding, chasing, justifying. You explain the reasoning again. You escalate slightly. You follow up on the follow-up. And it works, sort of, but it costs you everything, and the moment you stop pushing, the car rolls back.
Other days, or with other people, it’s nothing like that. You say what matters, and people come with you. No chasing required. The difference isn’t effort. It’s whether you’re pushing or pulling.
The ladder
There’s a well-worn map of how we try to get people to do things, and it runs roughly like this, from the bottom up:
- Request: just asking.
- Legitimising: “it’s my job to ask / your job to do this.”
- Rational persuasion: laying out the logic and evidence.
- Exchange: “if you do this, I’ll do that.”
- Appeal to relationship: “I’m asking you, as someone who knows me.”
- Appeal to shared values: “this matters because of what we both care about.”
The bottom of the ladder is push. Requests, mandates, and arguments delivered without much connection. They can work, but they’re effortful, they breed resistance, and they need constant reapplication. Push something and it pushes back.
The top of the ladder is pull. Relationship and shared values. When you’re operating from genuine connection, you’re not forcing motion. You’re inviting it. People move with you because of who you are to them and what you both stand for, not because you out-argued them.
Why connection is the whole game
Here’s the part that catches a lot of capable leaders, especially the analytical ones.
When connection is missing, the top of the ladder isn’t available to you. You can’t appeal to relationship if there’s no relationship. You can’t invoke shared values if you’ve never built the common ground. So you’re stranded at the bottom, stuck in request and legitimising and endless rational persuasion, wondering why leadership feels so relentlessly tiring.
And it is tiring, because push has no flywheel. Every interaction starts cold. You’re generating all the energy yourself, every time.
Pull, by contrast, compounds. The relationship you build today does work for you tomorrow, and the day after, without you having to be in the room. That’s not manipulation. Quite the opposite. It only works if the connection is real.
When the numbers don’t add up
Most leaders eventually hit a wall here, and it usually looks like this: there are the people you’re genuinely connected to, a core group, and then there’s everyone else. The much larger group beyond them, who you can’t possibly build deep relationships with one by one, and who you find yourself pushing because there’s no pull to draw on.
And it overwhelms you. You can feel the difference between the people you light up with and the wider group who drain you, and you quietly conclude you’re just not enough to go around.
But notice the hidden assumption: that you have to be the source of connection for all of them. You don’t.
Here’s the move. Pour into that core group. Build them into people who can carry the connection outward: mentors, leaders, allies who hold the relationship with the wider group so you don’t have to hold all of it yourself. You’re not trying to personally pull everyone. You’re growing more people who can pull.
The leader who tries to be the only point of connection stays trapped at the bottom of the ladder forever, pushing a bigger and bigger car. The leader who builds other people’s capacity to connect creates a network of pull that long outlasts their own energy.
A quiet diagnostic
If you want to know whether you’re pushing or pulling, notice how you feel after the interaction.
- Push leaves you depleted. You did all the work. You’ll have to do it again tomorrow.
- Pull leaves you, and them, slightly more energised. Something was shared, not extracted.
That feeling is real data. When leadership consistently exhausts you, it’s rarely a sign you need to push harder. It’s usually a sign the connection underneath has thinned, and that’s where the work actually is.
Try this
Pick one relationship where you’ve been pushing: someone you keep chasing, reminding, justifying yourself to. Before the next ask, invest in the connection first. Not as a tactic, but genuinely: understand where they’re coming from, find the thing you both actually care about.
Then make the ask from there. Notice whether the car still needs pushing, or whether, this time, it starts to roll on its own.
