Within The Four Fundamental Forces of Leadership, I talk in in the last few chapters about stress and leadership. Chapter 30 is dedicated to discussing proactively putting stress on systems to see what might happen in preparation for when real stress comes. That chapter talks about leaders handling stress but delves more into how to set a team or organization to experiment with stress. This post gets into some of the more human components of looking at stress in yourself and those around you.
In many organizations, we stress test our equipment and products to determine where they will fail. From there, those organizations can determine if additional work needs to be done to make these items more capable or if they are ready to perform under standard to extreme conditions. We even do it for ourselves when we have various physical ailments.
With the complexity that is inherent in our brains and minds - an obviously advanced and capable piece of machinery - it's logical to believe there are breaking points for when various parts will malfunction or even completely fail.
I've found that our minds can recover from stresses, but at only a certain rate based on various factors. When stress continues to put its weight onto our mind, it doesn't have time to recuperate and we can see it not work optimally. However, complete failure is still a ways off and we can function in a general sense.
What does this mean for leadership? I'm glad you asked.
As leaders, we regularly stress test our machines and products to see if they are performing up to specs. If they aren't, we recognize that and take the appropriate action.
To be clinical and dispassionate about it (which is opposite of what this suggestion is), we should be open to 'testing' our human machines to see if they are performing capably. How can that done?
Understand your own stress factors
Probably the best way to understand if those around you are not handling stress well is to understand it within yourself. Perform your own self-diagnostic regularly. Document what's been going on in the various parts of your life and how you've reacted. Have you noticed you stepped up to the challenge, or backed off at points?
There should be no judgement in this. Just like testing a machine, it's the data and analysis that matter. You are simply looking to understand what's happening and then make adjustments to various factors and look at the results from those changes.
Extrapolate your findings to serve others
Now that you have a better understanding of how stress impacts you, you can look to serve others.
Please don't get the idea that how you handle stress will be the same or similar as to how others handle it. However, the process you went through to understand yourself can help others.
You had the chance to see where you started breaking down. Start an analysis of signs in others. Ask them how they are doing and be open to the answers that come back. The objective is not to necessarily help at that very second, but to better understand the inner workings of that 'machine' so you can help it run efficiently over the long term. You and your people have more data to collect and analyze.
Collaborate on methods to enhance 'productivity'
Now that you've obtained solid 'data' on how people react to stress in various situations, you can work together to come up with solutions. When a machine is shown to not be able to handle the strain of the work, it is either supported to enhance its abilities or processes are adjusted to a perform at the level at which the machine can perform. This isn't much different.
With a person, you can likely adjust the workload initially and jointly work on ways to add to tolerance limits so they will be able to handle more work and stress at an optimal level.
Simply committing to such a process with teammates will have strong benefits. When people know you care enough to acknowledge what they are capable of and then work with them to enhance it, they are inclined to provide more energy to the effort. Productivity not only increases, but effectiveness as well.
For decades, even centuries, human labor has been seen no differently than that of machines. IN fact, we may have treated machines better. We demanded certain outputs from people and, when they didn't meet those standards, problems ensued.
We know this is not the way it should be, but it's practiced that way in many places. Good leaders understand and appreciate what each person can reasonably deliver and works with them to increase their capabilities and their definitions of success.
