Pushers and Pullers
Sort your top talent into two archetypes and coach each against its own failure mode.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 91%
Two archetypes cover most high performers. The pusher demands more — more scope, more recognition, more comp, more impact — is impatient with themselves and others, and can be high-friction for the team. They're exhilarating to work with because you load them up and they carry it uphill without you, but their liability is the wake they leave. The puller never complains, absorbs everything, is organised, reliable and exercises good judgment — and never asks for anything, never renegotiates, and eventually implodes or explodes. Each archetype has a fixed development area. Pushers must be told: until the people working with you love working with you, I don't think you're succeeding, and I can't keep loading you up. Pullers must be taught delegation, boundaries, rules and how to say no. The manager's job once the archetype is identified is to be all over that development area, because both will collapse without it.
Origin
Claire developed the top-talent framework herself for her book Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building, as a simplification of how high performers fail.
Core principles
- 01Manage different people differently — one management style guarantees you fail half your team.
- 02Spend disproportionate time with high performers, not with the strugglers.
- 03Every superpower has a matching liability at the same magnitude.
- 04Pushers burn out the people around them; pullers burn out themselves.
- 05Giving direct feedback is holding up a mirror: here's the beauty, here's the liability.
How to run it
- 1
Reallocate time toward high performers
Deliberately protect one-on-one time with the people who are perfectly fine on their own, instead of letting strugglers absorb it all.
Watch out High performers who sense no investment either burn out or go find investment elsewhere.
- 2
Classify the archetype
Pushers grab for scope and recognition and generate friction; pullers absorb everything silently and never ask.
Pro tip Watch what they do when overloaded — pushers ask for more, pullers say 'yep, got it.'
- 3
Hold up the mirror
Give direct feedback as two halves: here's the beauty of you, here's the liability part. Make continued loading contingent on working the liability.
- 4
Give the pusher a peer-experience bar
State the standard plainly: until I believe the people working with you love working with you, you are not succeeding.
Pro tip Frame it as winning — a pyrrhic victory where everyone dies on the field isn't a win.
Watch out Pushers keep score, so an unmeasured expectation won't register.
- 5
Turn the pusher's contempt into an assets question
When they say they don't want to work with low performers, don't contradict them — ask what those people do well and how they'd use that asset to get things done.
Pro tip Ask 'what I feel like you're doing is not appreciating what anyone else brings — why do you think that is?' before offering the reframe.
Watch out Telling a pusher their colleagues are just as good as they are is not credible and ends the conversation.
- 6
Teach the puller to refuse
Work explicitly on delegation, boundaries, rules, and the language of saying no and renegotiating.
Pro tip Ask the martyr question: did anyone actually ask you to take that on? Why do you feel you have to?
Watch out If the puller has gone too far into martyrdom and resentment, you may not be able to save them.
In the wild
Claire went through what she calls a martyr period — running the planning process, picking up projects nobody else would, doing all this for colleagues and resenting them for it. A colleague who wasn't her boss asked simply: did I ask you to take that on? Did anyone? She said no, no one was doing it, so she did. He asked why she felt she had to. She'd appointed herself the garbage collector for a whole set of things, partly believing it was her job.
→ She recognised the pattern — sacrificing herself for work someone else hadn't done, and resenting the colleagues she was doing it for.
Pushers do everything to win, which means the first thing to go is anything that doesn't obviously advance the win. Claire only started taking exercise seriously once she decided it was part of her job — a certain amount of exercise was a requirement of being a better leader, so it earned calendar time.
→ The behaviour stuck because it was reframed inside the pusher's own success criterion rather than against it.
Common mistakes
Spending your time on the strugglers
The default gravity of management pulls attention toward problems, which means the people generating most of the output get the least coaching.
Loading up the puller because they never object
Pullers don't renegotiate and don't know how to say no, so the absence of complaint reads as capacity right up until they implode.
Arguing with a pusher's assessment of peers
Telling a pusher their colleagues are equally strong isn't credible to them. Move to what each person's assets are and how to deploy them.
Is it for you?
Best for
Managers of strong, self-sufficient people who currently spend most of their time on underperformers.
Not ideal for
Diagnosing underperformance — this is a model for people who are already delivering, not a general typology.
From the transcript
“a top talent framework... I think High performers fall into two categories and I call them pushers and pullers”
“until I believe that the people working with you love working with you I don't think you're succeeding”
“they don't renegotiate they don't know how to say no and then they explode”
From the episode
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