Nobody likes stress. Managers of struggling teams struggle to lead their burnt-out employees and struggle to keep their company productive.
But not all stress is bad. Unlike distress, Eustress describes psychological discomfort that is beneficial to the person experiencing it. According to Alia and Thomas Crum on Harvard Business Review, people who learn to deal with stress in a positive way are better equipped to face challenges and avoid burnout.
Related: 10 Ways Successful People Stay Calm
“Stress is a natural part of life,” says Curt Cronin, former Navy SEAL and co-founder of Ridgeline Partners. "If we run away, we can't learn from it. But, if we embrace it, we come out of the experience stronger and better prepared to face tougher challenges in the future. ”
Leaders can help their teams avoid burnout and stay productive, but to do that, they must first change their own ideas about how stress works.
The right kind of stress
In evolutionary terms, stress is the state the body enters when it senses an imminent threat. It's a big part of the fight-or-flight response, prompting people to run away from problems or face them aggressively.
A little stress can motivate someone to meet the challenges of life. day and work harder to achieve important goals. Too much stress, however, turns positive motivation into negative reactions. In fact, excessive stress can cause illness, negatively affect relationships, and hamper productivity.
Unfortunately, leaders can't always control the amount of stress their teams experience. Tight deadlines, customer demands, and budget concerns can all turn normal days into panic situations. Rather than attempting to influence factors beyond their control, leaders must learn to view stressful situations as challenges they are prepared to face and encourage their teams to do the same.
Stress as a Tool Motivational
Leaders can follow these best practices to turn stress from a towering obstacle into a powerful weapon:
1. Identify stressors.
Research by a team of neuroscientists has revealed that simply recognizing a stressful situation can shift the brain from a state of panic to a proactive state. Stress will not go away on its own. Rather than hide from it, name it and confront it head-on to limit its power.
Delaying the stress response makes it easier to manage. When someone delivers bad news, don't let it create a cloud that hovers all day. Set a time to schedule a response to the problem and manage tasks already on the calendar so you can come back to the problem later ready to fix it. If the problem requires immediate action, take a minute to sit quietly and plan a response rather than bursting in without an agenda.
2. Break stress into small pieces.
Big problems create big stress. Rather than attacking big stressors directly, break them down into smaller components and delegate responsibility for each component to a different person. Communicate the whole issue to team members so they understand the context of their work.
This approach serves two purposes. First, it increases engagement by showing employees the value of their work as a whole. Second, it reduces the individual stress felt by each team member because each person is working on a specific task that is less daunting than the sum of the parts. Managers can reduce their own stress levels by tracking each component's contribution to the solution, rather than the magnitude of the problem.
3. Translate vague stress into specific facts.
Stress anxiety is directionless. In a stressful environment, people feel the stress cloud on top of all their work, unless they isolate that stress by tying it to specific, achievable actions.
Reduce the bandwidth of stress effect by connecting the feeling of stress to concrete deadlines. Research from the University of Rochester found that students who viewed their pre-test nervousness as a positive motivator performed better than students who did not reframe their feelings of stress. When team members complete the task associated with stress, they release the burden of feeling and gain a sense of accomplishment in the process.
Stress at work is inevitable, but it doesn't have to be unpleasant . By following these tips and reframing stress as a motivator, leaders can help their teams stay focused and accomplish more, no matter how big the task.
Related: The 5 Pillars of Authentic Leadership
