Turning Distress into ‘De-stress’

Turning Distress into ‘De-stress’
reprinted with permission from the HP Small Business Center

How often do you see it? An IT project team starts out collaborating well, showing great thought leadership and proactive management, only to end up in firefighting mode three months later, constantly laying blame on others and treating contradictory points of view as direct assaults. The team starts complaining and falling apart.

Is it poor project management? Dig deeper and you’ll find the ugly side of too much stress.

More employees are in a constant state of primitive fight or flight response today than ever before. Corporate problems are more complex, cycles of information and change are faster, there are fewer managers yet more to be managed, and day-to-day pressures are greater. Factor in the popular view that stress is a badge of honor–the more pressure you face the more important you must be–and instead of experiencing the occasional stress that motivates, you end up with constant stress that kicks people into survival mode and negatively impacts their work.

Stress is the pressure your body and mind feel when responding to demands and perceived threats. When you’re under stress, you use less of the front part of your brain responsible for advanced thinking, and more of the back part that handles primitive thought processes such as the fight-or-flight response. Any organization that can keep its employees relaxed, focused and using their full mental capacity is therefore going to operate more effectively–and ultimately be more competitive–than one whose employees are highly stressed and locked into a pattern of reacting, avoiding or competing with each other.

Take, for example, a busy IT executive who talks openly about the amount of stress he’s under. During an update meeting for a critical project, he’s constantly checking e-mails on his laptop, responding to messages on his handheld PDA, and referring to his calendar to see what’s scheduled later in the day. All the while, project members are presenting status reports to him. Instead of asking probing questions to ensure things are on track, he agrees with most of what is discussed and asks relatively simple questions.

Why isn’t he jumping on things that don’t seem right? Because his mind can only handle so much. He’s so busy multitasking as a coping mechanism that he isn’t using the full capacity of his brain. He misses things, he doesn’t ask the right questions, and instead of assigning priority to the requests coming at him, he gives the same level of attention to everything. In short, he’s locked into survival mode.

If you find your project team has locked into response mode and is constantly putting out fires or operating on a task-by-task level just to get through the day, chances are it’s time to replace distress with ‘de-stress’.

While you can’t necessarily change the external forces causing stress levels to rise, you can recognize the signs and take action at a grass-roots level to help employees find balance. Sometimes senior managers are under such great pressure that they depersonalize employees, viewing them as numbers, budget line items or roles. If you can see employees as unique people with individual needs, both inside and outside of work, you’ll be more likely to keep stress in check.

As a manager, you should model the behavior that doesn’t promote stress as a badge of honor, but encourages people to set healthy boundaries and teaches them when to say no. If employees are over-committing, look for ways to reduce the demands on their time and check their priority levels. Help them understand that they’re not alone and that support is available. And encourage them to take a good look at their diet, sleep and exercise patterns–the first to suffer when stress becomes unmanageable.

Awareness is the first step in dealing with elevated stress, yet one of the first things you lose under pressure is your ability to self-monitor. By asking the questions that will help a project team look inwards at how stress may be negatively affecting their behaviors and lives, you can be on the lookout for signs of elevated stress and take action to reverse it well before the fight or flight response kicks in.

Remember, high stress may be a badge of honor on the battlefield or in sports. But in business, where maintaining competitiveness means thinking and operating at our best, it’s nothing more than a liability.