Here are two ways to hand off the same piece of work. The first: a ticket appears in someone's queue with a clear title, acceptance criteria, and a due date. The second: a two-minute conversation where you explain what the work is actually for, who is stuck without it, and why you thought of this particular person to do it. Same task. Completely different thing to carry home in your head that evening.
Both have their place — I am not about to argue that we should replace tickets with campfire stories. But over the years I have noticed which of the two actually moves people, and it has quietly changed how I try to hand off anything that matters.
Push and pull
Warren Bennis and Joan Goldsmith named two ways of getting things done through people. Push runs on position power: deadlines, requirements, KPIs, the machinery of accountability. Pull draws people toward the work by connecting it to meaning and to a relationship of trust. These are not opposites you must choose between. Most real work needs some push, and clarity and commitments are a kindness, not a cage.
But push on its own has a ceiling. It reliably produces compliance, and it almost never produces commitment. Think of asking a teenager to tidy their room. You can push — a deadline, the threat of losing the phone — and you will likely get a technically clean room and a closed door. What you cannot do is put a deadline on them caring whether the room is clean. That part, if it ever comes, comes slowly and from somewhere inside them; and on the day it arrives, they tidy the room without being asked, because it has quietly become their space rather than your instruction. People at work are no different. Under push alone, they will do exactly what the deadline demands and not one degree more, and you will never quite know what the team had in it that the pressure never asked for.
A picture from sign language
There is an image I have never been able to forget, from a talk Warren Bennis once gave. Someone in the audience, whose child was deaf, described how these two ideas look in sign language. To sign manage, you hold two fists in front of you and move them as if gripping the reins of a horse — steering, controlling, keeping a powerful thing on the road. To sign lead, you fold your arms and rock them gently, the way you would cradle a newborn — protecting, nurturing, making room for something small to grow into whatever it is going to become.
I think about that more than almost any framework I have read. Two fists on the reins, or two arms around something you are trying to help grow. Most of us, under pressure, reach for the reins by reflex. Both gestures are sometimes exactly right. But only one of them quietly tells the other person that they are a life to be grown, not only a force to be steered.
Why pull is harder and slower
Push is fast and legible. A deadline lands the moment you set it; everyone can see it and measure against it. Pull is quiet accumulation — you cannot put a deadline on someone caring. It is built in how you frame the work, in the honest stories you tell about why it matters, and in the trust you have banked over months of small, ordinary interactions.
From the outside, while you are doing it, pull can look like nothing is happening at all. There is no artifact, no ticket closed, no number that moves. And then one day the team is moving because they want to rather than because they were told, and you realize the thing was being built the whole time, underground, the same way roots grow before anyone sees a leaf.
Tell the story, don't issue the slogan
There is a line often attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that captures the whole idea: if you want to build a ship, do not drum up people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Teach them instead to long for the vast and endless sea. Leadership communication connects the concrete goal in front of someone to something they already, genuinely care about, so the wanting comes from inside them rather than from your pressure.
One honest caveat, because it matters. Pull curdles into manipulation the instant the meaning is fake. If you connect the work to a "why" you do not actually believe, people feel it eventually — and the trust you thought you were banking quietly goes negative. The cradle only works when the care is real. A told story can inspire; a sold story, found out, does lasting damage. Pull is only safe in the hands of someone telling the truth.
When to reach for the reins, when to open your arms
Push for the floor: clarity, commitments, the safety-critical, the genuinely non-negotiable. Pull for the ceiling: the discretionary effort, the care, the creativity that no deadline can command and no KPI can capture. A team that lives on push alone is compliant and quietly tired. A team that lives on pull alone is inspired and a little chaotic. The reins and the cradle each have their hour, and most of the craft is reading which one the moment is actually asking for.
Across this short series, the same quiet thread kept surfacing — direction over busyness, craft beneath vision, messages over signals, patience over panic, and now pull over push. The thread is this: the human parts of leading are not soft additions to the "real," hard work of management. They are most of the real work. A surprising amount of leadership turns out to be helping people genuinely want to do the thing — and then having the humility to get out of their way. Thank you for reading to the end of this one. I would love to hear about a time someone pulled you toward work you did not know you had in you — and, if you remember, what exactly they said to do it.