Sharon, founder of Unique EQ, excels in 1:1 leadership advisement and customizes tools for teams to maximize their outcomes.
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Your winning business strategy should have a stress-management strategy so stress doesn’t sabotage your team’s ability to stay the course and accomplish your goals in this post-pandemic ocean of stress. Without a framework to transform stress into growth, attempts to achieve your goals could result in damaged people, threatened performance and a failed strategy.
Roger Martin, an HBR business strategist, describes how unknowns are a part of healthy strategizing involving risk. In his HBR video, “A Plan Is Not a Strategy,” Martin says, “Plans are likely to fail while a robust strategy is very likely to succeed…Planning is a set of activities that the company is going to do…such as…Improve customer experience, open a new plant, start a new talent development program…All this sounds good but is not a strategy…Strategy,” he continues, “has angst associated with it. It will make you feel somewhat nervous because, as a manager, you can’t prove in advance that your strategy will succeed.”
How you handle that inevitable angst can make or break your opportunity to relate to your people’s experiences, perspectives and ideas. Relating well creates strong bonds, sending employees home more secure and courageous each day than when they came to work.
Does this continuous growth cycle sound utopian? Brain science demonstrates this is not only possible but physically necessary for turning stress into strength and creating work experiences to draw out their fullest potential. But first, let’s get back to strategizing versus planning; then, we’ll put it all together for you to achieve your goals.
Strategy
Strategy sets your company up for success in the market outside the daily tasks of running your business. It’s the blueprint for forecasting market success outside the house that can determine how you plan to drive that strategy inside the house. For example, if fluctuating interest rates will drive long-term customers to seek fresh options, strategizing around that pain point is a market strategy, not a plan.
Planning
Planning is hands-on, while strategizing is visionary. Being certified in a user-friendly resource understanding strategy versus planning, I love The 6 Types of Working Genius or WG assessment. This Patrick Lencioni model reveals and celebrates who in the organization is genius at envisioning, inventing and discerning according to the big market picture outside the house and who can rally the troops accordingly inside the house to take your genius strategy to scale.
So, if strategy is essential for driving market success outside the house, managing uncertainty and angst is your strategy for driving success inside the house.
You’ve probably seen the lack of a stress management strategy play out a million times—you nail it on excellent in-house plans like lean technologies or some process improvement method but then fail to reach your goals. I strongly suspect that where stress isn’t leveraged, the strategic goals are compromised due to the discomfort Martin describes.
Studies show that 95% of behavior is emotionally driven—consider focus, productivity and engagement. Would you like to ensure that 95% of your team’s passion and focus are pouring into their work even, especially when stress is high?
Risks and unknowns are where growth or tragedy takes place. Realizing signs of stress early on can provide an opportunity to put them to work. After all, they can bring about the perfect storm for tapping into potential. When people are stressed, their vulnerabilities surface. Vulnerability-based trust is where teams build ultra-strong bonds to stay the course. Think retention.
Stress Management
To build trust, understand yourself first, then your people. Practice awareness of how your facial expression, voice tone, body language and eye contact affect others. Fairly soon, you can have a built-in radar for interpreting and identifying with others’ stress before it’s raging. Having customized tools for interpreting what others are communicating and how they’re interpreting you empowers you to utilize that 95% of emotion mentioned earlier. And please don’t shy away from considering The Influence of Attachment Styles On Employee Engagement by Dr. Ian Briggs.
In a previous article, I addressed how management styles in relation to direct reports are linked to early life and family system bonding. It’s like your employee arrives at work with a former boss in their brain that could be criticizing them and robbing their confidence for engagement. Let’s take a look at an example.
Attachment Style
My client, we’ll call him Ted, reported struggling with anxiety and losing focus when his boss, J.R., was stressed. As an emotional over-thinker, trying to read if J.R. was annoyed with him specifically, Ted lost flow trying to shake off unnecessary angst and uncertainty. Some angst is necessary. Offloading stress with me allowed Ted to be objective with it rather than stuck in it.
J.R. often seemed flat, deadpan, or annoyed. This kept Ted guessing about what was most important to J.R. He was a detailed, dominant, facts-driven guy while Ted was a visionary soft skills guy. J.R. needed tools to reduce stress on his team.
With an attachment questionnaire, J.R. self-reported having a dismissive attachment style. Ted reported having a preoccupied style. J.R. tended to dismiss his feelings; Ted tended to be preoccupied with them. To J.R.’s credit, his empathy rose quickly as he saw Ted’s good intentions shut down by insecurity resulting in lost productivity.
As they learned the reasons behind both styles, Ted took things less personally. J.R. made efforts to be more personable. They modeled greater trust, which had a ripple effect on their team and in their homes. With greater security at home and work, came a greater ability to manage stress and innovate faster. Innovation requires some level of failure and vulnerability. Recovery time from failure was faster and faster when empathy was predictable.
Attachment styles were a strategic step in their stress management strategy. Nothing “big,” just a great connection for reducing unnecessary angst.
Wrapping Up
Expanding your stress management strategy should insulate your business strategy against the economic impact threatening to capsize it. Amidst disquieting economic challenges, understand your people like never before and be certain to capitalize on this ocean of stress.
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