Managing Stress Isn’t Easy, But It Can Be Made Easier

The world today can feel heavy. As the pace of change gets faster and faster, it is becoming less possible to treat it as single event or initiative, and more necessary to accept it as a way of life. As Vice President of the International Division at FranklinCovey, I travel frequently and split my time largely between the U.S and UK. The news is a lot right now, on both sides of the pond. People are in drastic lack of both optimism and confidence.

According to Gallup’s new Global State of the Workplace Report, in 2021 stress levels reached an all-time high, with 44% of surveyed workers experiencing stress daily. This stress, regardless of whether or not its work-related, follows us there. Likewise, if employees don’t experience empathy, emotional safety, and support amidst uncertainty at work, they’re more likely to take that home with them. This then spills back into work and impacts everything: relationships, performance, and wellbeing. This interconnectivity is why an organisation’s responsibility goes beyond office walls and outside the traditional 9-5.

This has always been the case, but today it is even more acute. Two years of upheaval have shifted the fault lines of our lives, reshuffling the personal and professional in ways we didn’t see coming- and can be overwhelming.

I was struck by what Twitter Senior Engineering Manager Ronnie Chen tweeted recently, as I know many were. One of her direct reports admitted in their 1:1,“I’m trying to compartmentalize but I’ve run out of compartments”.

The future is embracing the fact we don’t live to work or work to live, we’re living at work. What does that mean for how we- as individuals and leaders- manage stress and keep moving forward?

As individuals:

Compartmentalisation is a well-known and valid tactic; it can be key to setting boundaries, managing relationships, and putting things into perspective. To many it connotes strength and sensibleness. But it’s also very difficult. It’s difficult because change, like life, is messy and surprising- something we’ve all been jarringly reminded of. As such, sometimes the pressure of dividing up our lives too much can have a counterintuitive effect, leaving us feeling drained, misunderstood and at risk of burnout.

If mismanaged, juggling compartments can make it easier to drop the ball- be that in our personal or professional lives- because we leave ourselves less room to manoeuvre. No buffer zone to identify our feelings, increase our self-awareness or recognise a deficit in self-care.

Taking stock of our own circumstances and tendencies can help us identify the sticking points which might be holding ourselves or our team members back. Here are a few questions to keep close at hand:

• How am I feeling?
• What do I need?
• What can I control and what is outside my control?
• Do I need to make any adjustments to my routine?
• Are there new expectations I need to discuss and set at home or at work?
• Am I focusing too much on what I stand to lose rather than leaning into what I can learn?
• Have I taken the opportunity to share how I’m feeling with others?
• Are my colleagues feeling the same?

It is our choices which set us apart and help us lead our lives more productively.  We can’t make work or life inherently less stressful, but we can stop fuelling it and focus on filling our own well instead.

As leaders:

A stressed team is a fractured team. Whether you are leading your team through a collective change, or one individual is experiencing a unique struggle, your response affects whether results move forward.

If your concern for people getting their work done causes you to be “all business” and disregard the major changes happening in the world or the diversity of life circumstances in your team, then you’ll look like the person restocking the bar on the Titanic- oblivious to the chaos around them. Rather, your job as a leader is to gradually help people pull their heads above water and see the horizon ahead.

Part of this is making space for different reactions to change and uncertainty, which can vary from resistance to excitement, with shades in between. Not everyone will feel stress so intensely, some people will want to open up more than others, one team member may find it easy to focus on the job at hand whilst another might be too distracted by the noise swirling around them.

For example, generational differences contribute to how we see both the world and our place at work, undoubtedly influencing levels of uncertainty we experience and how change is managed. Research published by The Verywell Mind Mental Health Tracker in 2021 revealed that younger generations were struggling the most, with 62% of Gen Z and Millennials saying they’d been at least moderately stressed over the last 30 days.

When you’re consistent and purposeful about holding 1:1s which focus on how your direct reports are doing, you can meet them where they’re at and give them the tailored support they need. Often just the act of listening, using unemotional language (“How big a change is this for you—small, medium, large, supersized? Why?”), or inviting conversation about the positives in people’s personal lives can lift a weight and offer a grounding perspective.

The point isn’t to offer people a carte blanche, but to empathise with individuals as whole people who can’t be told to volunteer their whole effort in trying times…they need to see the point and opportunity themselves. They need to choose to.

Ultimately, being aware of both your own and your team members’ reactions to uncertainty and change can help you stop stress becoming a vicious cycle which spreads, complicates dynamics and stems progress. Resistance, stoicism, enthusiasm…there is no correct approach, but there is proactivity. We control more than we think and realising that enables us to manage our reactions before they negatively affect us, or our team.