Stress

Learning Stress Tolerance

I had an interesting conversation with a coaching colleague the other day. He called me to get some perspective on a difficult client that he was coaching.

Case in Point

His client is a top performer in her field and has aspirations to get promoted in her company. She is a very hard charger and a self-proclaimed perfectionist. Overall, she is respected by the team she leads, but that dynamic is starting to show some cracks. 

In meetings, she is always telling her team to push back on her, and that she is open to feedback. However, the team has recently started shying away from doing this, because when they do, her non-verbal communication says she is not in the mood for it. Her words say “I am open”, but her facial expressions say “Don’t you dare”. 

Her team says she is a workaholic, routinely sending emails around 2 AM. If someone asks her to be in a mentoring relationship, she always says yes. If her bosses ask her to do something, she will call the team together at any time of the day to kick off a project and make assignments. 

My colleague spent a day shadowing her. He went to meetings with her and observed her in her office where her phone rang and text alerts went off constantly. She answered the phone by the second ring and usually picked up the phone to answer her texts within 30 seconds. 

One of her teammates even pulled my colleague aside and said they were really concerned about her, that she rarely takes time to eat and when she does it is only half of a cup of yogurt. They said something to the effect of: “We don’t know when she sleeps. Stuff comes to us at all hours of the night. People on the team have started sleeping with their phone alerts on so that they don't miss anything. This can’t be healthy long term…can it?” 

When I asked my colleague if he had addressed any of this with her yet, he said “yes, to all of it.

Her response to him was that:

  1. She loved work, so why wouldn’t she do a lot of it?

  2. She has always strived for perfection, and that's what got her where she is today.

  3. Her bosses love her production.

  4. She feels fine. She eats when she is hungry and she doesn’t require much sleep. 

She Is Not Fine.

The lie that this leader is telling herself is that she is fine. She is not fine.

While things may seem okay to her right now, she is on a path to self-destruction. I have seen this pattern too many times in my leadership coaching. The person who is striving so hard that they never say no, and they have no boundaries.

According to Dr. John Townsend, in his book Hiding From Love, one of the most basic human needs we all have is that of “Integration; Our need for resolving good and bad”. This person just always says yes so that others feel good about them. This is the person who gets a 95% on a test and feels like a failure, so they start believing that the only way to live successfully in the world is to always get 100%. 

Dr. Townsend says that this temporary solution to the tension between real and ideal is always inadequate and involves some sort of splitting between good and bad, keeping the two apart rather than resolving them through forgiveness, both of themselves and others. 

The problem continues for folks like this leader because while it is a psychological concern, it will eventually manifest itself physically as well. 

Dr. Gabor Mate, MD, writes in his book When The Body Says No, that our immune system does not exist in isolation from daily experience. Many people unwittingly spend their lives under the gaze of a powerful and judgmental examiner whom they must please at all costs. 

Gabor goes on to write that stress is a complicated cascade of physical and biochemical responses to powerful emotional stimuli. When emotions are repressed and dissociated from our awareness and relegated to the unconscious, this confuses our physiological defenses and our immune system goes on the attack rather than being in protection mode. 

What I found most interesting in studying Dr.Mate is that almost none of his patients with serious diseases had ever learned to say NO. 

Back to our example: no, she is not fine. She is living in a self-delusion.

George Vaillant said, “It is not stress that kills us. It is effective adaptations to stress that allows us to live.” 

Stress tolerance is the ability to withstand adverse events without developing physical or emotional symptoms by actively and positively coping with stress. One way to positively cope with stress is to learn to resolve the good and the bad. It is what Brene Brown has written extensively on, to begin to look at imperfection as a gift. 

Learning Stress Tolerance

The growth of this emotional intelligence domain takes some very specific work.

The first is developing an understanding of the need leaders have to understand the tension that exists between the ideal and the real, and to resolve the need to understand between good and bad. There is at the beginning of this kind of development the setting of healthy boundaries. There is no need to try to put other coping strategies into place if a leader is going to keep unhealthy boundaries. They just need to know that at some point in the future the data suggests that the body does keep score. There will be a payment due on this kind of life choice.

Once some healthy boundaries are put into place, things like progressive relaxation, purposeful distraction, self-debate, deep breathing, exercise, and spiritual worship can be employed. 

Leaders who are experiencing feedback like my colleagues' clients need to heed the warnings.

The Feedback Is Telling Them Something

You can grow your tolerance to stress in a healthy way. A way that you can become an even better performer and leader. A way that might not have to be as costly to your psyche and your overall health. 

If Workload Is Not the Culprit For Stress...What Is?

A relatively new area to hit the leadership literature is the concept of job crafting. Many organizations are leaning more on the individual worker to “craft” their job by changing everything from accomplishing tasks, to strategizing important relationships, and mapping business goals. This idea of “job crafting” actually has been cited in leadership studies as being aspirational and motivational, allowing the individual to self-actualize and find meaning and purpose in work.

Job crafting has been cited as increasing work productivity, employee engagement, effective problem solving, and overall employee performance. Before I even knew it was called “job crafting” I always thought of it as “just do what you need to do to get the job done." Be responsible. Be accountable.

THE RESEARCH

An article in The Leadership Quarterly (the Bible of Leadership Studies) by Elizabeth Solberg and Sut Wong took on the question of what employees perceived as their ability to craft their job in the context of work overload.

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In English: If I have work overload, do I feel I can do what I need to do to get my job done?

Job crafting is often classified as a proactive behavior and reflects traits such as self-initiation to bring about any needed change. However, it turns out that job crafting is not necessarily anticipatory. Most scholars view job crafting as a behavioral response to one's current work situation. Rather than being future-oriented and strategic about what work we have, most of us will just react to the load we currently face. It really is the “tyranny of the moment” that is a key factor in our ability to be able to craft the job into what we need it to be.

THE FINDINGS

There are two important findings that come out of this study as it relates to job demand and role crafting. When employees are feeling the overload of work, their anticipation for a positive resolution and their leader’s need for structure are two very important factors.

As always in leadership studies, there is more than one variable that must be considered. When studying the leader one must also study the follower. When thinking about employee performance and work overload, the literature will support this idea.

THE EMPLOYEE

It is a good idea to ensure you have people on your team who can be proactive in adapting and initiate change in order to relieve the work overload.

The follower needs to have some skill or trait in their overall ability to be able to manage change. There is an accountability and expectation that rests on the shoulder of the follower that when work overload is occurring they can cope, manage, and make proactive changes.

Point taken. Followers need to be accountable.

THE LEADER

However, follower accountability is only half of the story. The other half of the story is how much control the leader exudes.

According to Dragoni and Kuenzi (2012), leaders engage in leadership behavior consistent with their own goal orientations, producing a work climate that influences their employees to adopt aligned goal perceptions. This research also shows that the more controlling the leader, the less willing the follower will be to exhibit autonomy and make changes that are needed to alleviate work overload.

THE LESSON

If team members in your organization are overworked and feeling stressed, maybe it isn’t the workload to blame. Maybe it isn’t all of the quarterly tasks. Perhaps it is your need to control as a leader. If our need for structure across all time and circumstance is consistent, then in times of heavy workload, your workload is going to increase even more. Why? Because in order to get things right, the followers are going to need you to think for them. If, as leaders, we want to feel less stress or have more time to think and create, then perhaps letting go of control might be just the gift to give yourself and those on your team.

What can you as a leader do to loosen your control reigns? What value would giving your team more autonomy have on the overall effectiveness of your team?