Pressure to appease the board is a burden that many business leaders know well. But what happens when those expectations fall into unrealistic territory? Alex Olley, Chief Revenue Officer and co-founder of B2B gifting platform Reachdesk, knows the answer firsthand.
In the fifth episode of Inside the Workroom, Employment Hero’s series spotlighting the figures redefining business leadership and employment, he explains what it costs a team when a leader keeps saying yes.
After raising $43 million in a Series B funding round and delivering 600% growth for his company at the start of Reachdesk’s journey, Alex notes that the market shifted, investor expectations didn’t move with it, and targets became impossible to reach. What followed was a slow erosion of team belief.
“People are looking at you going, we’re not bought into this,” he recalls. “You just know that you’re losing faith from your team.”
When the Whole Team Stops Believing
It’s a situation that many workforces have experienced. Research from the University at Buffalo found that employees are turned off by goals they perceive as unrealistic and lose confidence in both their own performance and the organisation when those goals exceed current resources, with the effect most pronounced in recently successful businesses.
According to Gallup’s most recent Employee Engagement data for the UK, only 10% of workers are currently engaged at work. The CIPD’s Good Work Index 2025, which surveyed more than 5,000 UK workers, found that 59% experience excessive pressure frequently or occasionally, and that among those whose work has negatively affected their mental health, 34% are actively considering leaving within the year.
The Moment He Stopped Saying Yes
Behind much of this is the issue of leaders agreeing to targets they privately doubt, then passing those targets down.
“I was just like, these guys just want me to be the guy that says yes and gets it done,” Alex says of the moment he agreed to double Reachdesk’s growth without interrogating whether it was possible.
The turning point came at the end of 2024. He spent close to a month building a revenue plan grounded entirely in data that was stress-tested and realistic, then presented it to the board with a clear condition: if they were not bought in, he would not stay. Thankfully, they were. And soon after, the business started moving again.
Honest Targets as an Act of Leadership
The harder part of navigating situations like these, he argues, is not necessarily having those conversations with higher ups. It’s understanding what leaders owe their teams before that moment arrives. Setting targets that people can reach isn’t a concession to low ambition; it’s one of the most direct investments a business can make in the people doing the work. The CIPD’s research on management quality is direct on this point: workers with the worst-rated managers are 50% more likely to say work harms their mental health and roughly half as likely to go above and beyond their role, compared to those with strong managers.
If that dynamic sounds familiar, this episode of Inside the Workroom speaks directly to those challenges. In episode 5 of the series, Alex joined Kevin Fitzgerald, Managing Director of Employment Hero UK, to discuss what it takes to lead honestly when the numbers stop adding up, and why the hardest conversation a founder can have is often the one that saves the business.
Watch in full below:
