Managing Stress for Managers and Leaders

The following is an extract from The Leadership Skills Handbook.

If you find it hard to get to sleep, you are not alone. There is a quiet epidemic of stress among managers and leaders, and it comes directly from the changed nature of work. In the past, work and leisure were compartmentalized. If businesspeople had a briefcase, it was to carry their sandwiches and a newspaper. The shackles of email and the internet did not exist. But now work and leisure are co-mingled: we do personal business at work and WFH means we never leave work.

To make matters worse, work has become ambiguous. It is never clear when your work as a leader is done. There is always something more you can do. If you produce a report, it could be two pages or 200. And even if it is 200 pages, there is always another fact or opinion you could gather, another analysis you could do. And so even if we leave the office, the office never leaves us. There are armies of leaders thinking, not sleeping, each night.

There are several radical options for dealing with stress:

• Drop out and start your vegan farm
• Become a Buddhist monk
• See a shrink – or become one.

Most of us do not have the luxury of taking these options unless we want to lose our house and family. So, we need something more practical.

There are five ways you can deal with stress:

1. Take control. The difference between pressure and stress is control. If you are working very hard but you are in control, you may get tired but you will not get stressed. Now take away control: you are no longer in control of events on which your future depends. Suddenly your stress levels will go through the roof. The trick is to focus on what you can control and influence: if you can do something about it, do it. If you cannot do anything, it is pointless worrying about it. Even if it is only a small thing, do it: give yourself the impression of control and hope. Don’t worry about things you cannot control.
2. Compartmentalize your life. You do not have to answer emails in the middle of the night or on holiday. Create barriers and set expectations with colleagues appropriately. This is especially important when working from home: your team needs to agree common working hours, when you will be available for meetings and when you should respond to emails. If there are no ground rules, then you will be on call 24/7. Compartmentalizing your life is easier if you have clear goals for the week and for each day: you will know when you have reached a reasonable milestone and you can start to switch off. If you have no clear goals, then your work will never finish because you will never reach your goals.
3. Get help. The easiest way to get something done is to get someone else to do it for you. It’s called delegation. Delegation is a great way to show trust in your team and to help them grow and develop. Do not try to do it all yourself: your team will not thank you for hogging all the interesting work. Find a coach; find friends or family you can talk to. A problem shared is a problem halved. Often the simple act of talking about a challenge resolves it.
4. Find the right role. Some roles are inherently more stressful than others, and many people enjoy such high-octane jobs: stress junkies need stressful roles. If you are not a stress junkie but you are in a role where stress is part of the job description, then you may want to think about whether you are in the right role.
5. Keep perspective. Over the years I have cancelled big family events for the sake of some urgent and important crisis at work. I now have no idea what those famous work battles were all about, but I still feel the pain of missing the family events. The sky will not fall down without you holding it up for the rest of humanity. Keep a clear sense of your priorities and act accordingly.

Implementing these simple stress management tips should help you make small changes to your mindset and approach to stress. This way, you can leave work behind at the end of each day and focus on being the best leader you can be.