Managers are often put into impossible situations. Leadership demands performance, but their people’s needs are not being met. How can they cope with these competing pressures? First, it’s important for managers to communicate the need for empathy to senior leaders and ask them to shoulder some of the weight and work with employees and executives to lower the perceived expectations of performance demands. The first can be accomplished through a tell-and-show approach. To tell is to fix the information flow with data. This can help illustrate problems in concrete ways. To show is a little more difficult but just as important. Leaders are better able to empathize if they hear about or experience an employee’s needs. Many managers recoil at this, as they want to serve as a buffer between the two tiers to control the narrative, but by facilitating skip-level conversations, executives are better equipped to create solutions. Second, managers need to alleviate the pressures of performance demands. Note that this is not about demanding leaders let off the gas and lower performance metrics. This is more about reshaping the ways this performance is encouraged to feel less stressful and more motivating. Many frontline employees don’t understand the why of performance. By helping employees understand why their performance is important and how it’s driving success, tension around performance can be alleviated.