Leadership provides an opportunity to make a positive difference by empowering your team and creating successful outcomes. But it does come with a certain amount of stress. Stress can be healthy and motivating when properly managed, but very often, it accumulates and can negatively affect your health, focus, and leadership capabilities.
Learning to identify and eliminate sources of stress is one of the most important skills a leader can develop. This gives you the power to spot where stress is coming from and reduce your overall stress by addressing specific sources. This gives you the time and energy to focus on healthy motivation without getting distracted or depleted. Let’s take a look at the five most predominant sources of stress in a working environment and how leaders can manage them – both in yourself and throughout your team.
The 5 Sources of Workplace Stress
- Overflowing Inbox: Too Many Emails
- Tight Deadlines: Always in a Rush
- Multitasking Overload: Distracted and Dazed
- Unresolved Conflicts: Tension on the Team
- Work-Life Imbalance: Not Enough Wellness
Leaders are as or more susceptible to these stress sources as their teams. Leaders often serve as a carbon filter for stress, able to take on extra responsibility to help their team achieve a tight focus or delegate to distribute task-related stress in a healthy way that keeps everyone on track without risking burnout.
But if you take too much upon yourself or miss the signs that one of your employees is over-stressed from one or more sources, the results can be catastrophic over time. Fortunately, each of these five common sources of workplace stress have a clear and actionable solution.
1. Overflowing Inbox =The Inbox Zero Method
Do you ever feel like your email inbox is getting away from you? If so, you’re in the majority. The average professional spends up to 28% of their work-week managing email, and they just keep coming. Every day introduces a new risk that your inbox will overflow and important emails could be missed. As unread emails pile up or constant notifications disrupt your focus, this generates a special and familiar type of stress.
You may notice yourself spending too much time sorting email or putting off looking at your email until it’s overflowing again. Whether you are overwhelmed, avoidant, or both, this situation is bad for your focus and is the cause of long-term workplace stress that will distract from optimal leadership strategies.
The Solution: Inbox Zero
Take control of your inbox by implementing the Inbox Zero Method. This is a method designed to help you keep your inbox empty or near-empty at all times so that you can focus on what matters.
- Delete Unimportant Emails - First, immediately delete emails that don’t matter.
- Sort and Organize - Sort process emails into designated folders so you can easily find and reference them later, but they don’t clutter your primary inbox, where you track and respond to new messages.
- Delegate - Forward emails to team members instead of taking care of every email-requested task yourself. Distribute responsibilities so that each person on your team eases the burden without anyone else becoming overwhelmed.
- Do Without Delay - Tackle quick and easily completed tasks immediately so they don’t pile up.
- Defer - Set aside more complex emailed requests for later, when you have time to work the task into your schedule.
In addition to implementing the Inbox Zero method for yourself, teach your team to Inbox Zero to help them reduce email-related stress and lost time.
2. Tight Deadlines = Parkinson’s Law of Task Management
Are you constantly stressing out about fast-approaching deadlines and tasks turned in at the last minute? You may find yourself rushing to complete tasks at the end of every single day, and finding yourself sacrificing good professional quality to achieve speedy completion. This situation can lead to steady anxiety about your workload and generate daily stress that builds up over time.
If you are always in a rush and worried about meeting your deadlines, what you need is a time management strategy. Applying Parkinson’s Law as an actionable solution is a good place to start.
The Solution: Applied Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s Law states that “Work will expand to fill the time available.” This means that if you give yourself a set amount of time, the work will take that long to complete, even if it’s supposed to be a sequence of short tasks with plenty of time to finish. If you are constantly coming in at the last minute, it’s time to minimize that room for task expansion.
Parkinson’s Law can be applied as a task management solution with this process:
- Estimate how long it will take to complete a task.
- Reduce the time you give yourself – as a personal challenge.
- Try to complete each task in a shorter and shorter time.
- Identify the optimal time to balance quality and completion
- Try to beat your own “high score” with fast and high-quality work on each task.
Once you master this method for task management, encourage your team to do the same. You can suddenly find yourself coming in ahead of deadlines with a team feeling confident about their capabilities as a result.
3. Multitasking Overload = Single-Tasking Focus Method
A few years ago, “multitasking” was considered the pinnacle of professional skills. The ability to do many different tasks in a short period of time is impressive, but it often leaves a person mentally frazzled and unable to focus on quality for any specific task. Are you feeling over-tasked and pulled in too many directions? Stress from constantly switching between tasks often leads to a decreased quality of work, an increased rate of mistakes, and oversights that don’t reflect your true skills or capabilities if you could only focus on one task at a time.
The answer, of course, is to focus on one task at a time. This is known as the Single-Tasking method for focusing your workflow and achieving the best quality of work that you can produce.
The Solution: Single-Tasking Method
To implement the Single-Tasking method, simply build your schedule so you can focus on one task at a time. Work on a task in designated stages or until the task is complete. Dedicate your full attention to the scheduled task before moving on to the next item on your list – or until your schedule dictates a different focus session.
You may need to mute your phone, set your computer to “do not disturb” mode, and resolve not to even check your email during focus sessions. This will allow you to give your all to each task without distractions, producing the highest quality work and even working faster than you may have thought possible.
With Single-Tasking mastered, give your team the freedom to designate focus sessions, as well. Build parallel focus sessions and respect for zero-interruption time periods into your team culture and everyone will be able to work at their best while eliminating the stress of multi-tasking demand.
4. Unresolved Conflicts = The Thomas-Kilmann Model of Compromise
In any team, conflicts are bound to arise. Even with well-aligned and professional team members, disgreements and misunderstandings can occur - and then go weeks or months without being addressed. This undercurrent of interpersonal tension can lead to avoidance or subtle hostility in meetings, decreased effectiveness in collaboration, and poor team communication between conflicting team members.
As a leader, it is your role to help resolve these conflicts in an even-handed and effective manner. Many leaders have turned to the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) for the right answer to interpersonal conflicts in a work team.
The Solution: The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI)
The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument is a forced-choice assessment that identifies a person’s preferred method for resolving conflicts. It assesses how someone behaves in a conflict situation along two dimensions: assertive vs cooperative.
The primary conflict modes are Avoiding, Competing, Accommodating, Compromising, and Collaborating. It serves as both a personality test and a guide to conflict resolution. Knowing where each person’s preferences lie can help you guide your team toward solutions to conflicts while respecting each person’s perspective.
5. Work-Life Imbalance = The Four Burners Theory of Balance
The final source of workplace stress is well-known and often discussed in modern leadership training: Work-Life balance. Or rather, imbalance. When you focus more on work, spend too much time at work, and don’t take enough time for personal wellness outside of work, this leads to stress accumulation. A person needs a balanced life that involves decompression, social fulfillment, the pursuit of personal art or expression, healthy meals and exercise, and plenty of good sleep. Without these things, you can’t be your best, most focused, and productive self at work or achieve your full professional potential.
If you (or a member of your team) is experiencing stress from work-life imbalance, the natural solution is rebalancing using the Four Burners theory.
The Solution: The Four Burners Theory
The Four Burners theory of life balance proposes that life has “four burners” of personal needs. These include:
- Family
- Friends
- Health
- Work
A person needs to balance all four to achieve happiness and success. If one is neglected, it may need to be prioritized in order for a person to feel fulfilled, rested, and reduce stress from an imbalanced life. If your life lacks one of these aspects, rearrange your schedule and make time to prioritize which ever “burner” is missing or getting too little time. The same is true for your team members who may be suffering from work-life balance challenges and accumulated stress.
Master Stress to Achieve Your Leadership Potential
Whether you are experiencing heightened workplace stress or you can perceive stress among your team members, a great leader knows how to identify sources of stress and reduce them with effective methods. Platinum Group can help you achieve your leadership potential and aptly guide your team to success. We offer an all-in-one, cloud-based HCM system, isolved.
isolved provides you with a seamless, efficient, and reliable way to manage your employees’s needs from hire to retire. As your company evolves and expands, we can help you limit change-related stress by streamlining critical Human Resource functions. Get in touch to see how our HCM platform, isolved, can optimize the way you manage your people!