Liane Davey
July 01, 2016
While the popular press talks of stress as a negative to be avoided, seasoned
managers know better. If you re trying to drum up new business, get a customer
s order out on time, or hit your numbers for the quarter, a little stress goes
a long way. It s even more important when you re trying to transform your
business or revitalize a sagging culture. That s when you need enough stress to
motivate action.
In its most positive form, stress results when an employee tries to do the same
old things in a new environment. Those out-of-date behaviors produce subpar
results and the growing gap in performance creates tension. It s exactly the
kind of stress you want, because it counteracts the powerful inertia of habit.
If you ve been around the management block a time or two, you ve probably also
seen the other side of stress. As stress gets too high, instead of increasing
momentum, it can counter-intuitively start to decrease it. You can immobilize
people with too much stress: You stifle the creativity required to come up with
new ideas, trigger fear of taking a wrong step in a high-stakes situation, or
unleash frenetic but ineffective activity.
Somewhere in between these two extremes is the ideal level of stress; one that
creates positive pressure in the direction of change without causing
debilitating worry. This magic zone is what John Kotter referred to as the
Productive Range of Distress. This is an extremely useful concept for managers
who are leading through change, but how do you take it from being conceptual to
being real? How can you alter the levels of stress on your team? How do you
know when you should intervene?
Your first step is to assess the current state. There are signs that the stress
levels on your team aren t sufficient to create meaningful change. Watch for
people who are too comfortable with the status quo either resisting the need
to change, referring incessantly to the way we used to do it, or generally
not applying themselves to get the job done (i.e., coming in late, taking long
breaks, and Yabba Dabba Do-ing like Fred Flintstone at the end-of-day whistle).
The bigger challenge is to identify the people who are burdened by too much
stress. It s tricky because some people will have an obvious, frenetic, or
panicked stress response, whereas others will withdraw and direct their stress
inward. Because there is no single pattern, you re looking for deviations from
an employee s normal behavior. Is someone working considerably longer hours,
failing to take breaks or to get lunch, behaving irritably with coworkers? On
the other end of the spectrum, is someone becoming disturbingly quiet? Are they
interacting with you noticeably less frequently? Is their body language
demonstrating fatigue or cause for concern? Those changes might suggest too
much stress.
Once you have a sense of the stress levels on your team, you ll know whether
you need to dial the heat up, or bring it back down from a boil to a simmer.
There are several techniques you can use for each scenario.
If you believe there is too little stress on your team and that it will take a
little more discomfort before your employees are in the productive range of
distress, you have a variety of options to choose from. To make the suggestions
concrete, I m going to use the example of the introduction of a new sales
culture. This is a common transformation and one that will stall with too
little heat and blow up with too much.
Increase the frequency and pointedness of coaching. It s easy to stick to the
status quo when no one is watching. The moment that an employee knows that you
re noticing her behavior, the stress levels will naturally rise. The secret to
coaching toward an optimal level of stress is to increase the frequency of the
feedback you provide, but decrease the intensity. Imagine you have rolled out
new sales management software but you re struggling to get all of the
salespeople to input their activity. Try simple feedback such as, It s
Wednesday and I m only seeing three opportunities in the funnel for this week.
Pair the feedback with a question such as, What time of day works best for you
to input your meetings?
If you don t see improvement, dial it up, I ve made three requests for people
to input and I ve only seen two new entries. This has become a problem. I d
like each of you to come to me today and share how you re going to change your
routine to include your responsibilities for tracking sales activity daily.
Connect the person s behavior to something bigger and more important. Sometimes
an employee hasn t made the link between how they perform and the organization
s ability to achieve something critical. The salesperson who is consistently
delinquent in entering opportunities needs to know that big decisions are made
using real-time pipeline data. Pricing, products, and promotions might all be
affected by a pipeline that appears tepid, when in fact there are just
opportunities missing. Help your team understand the trickle-down effects, by
saying something like: I had to go into the Regional Leadership Team meeting
today with a pipeline that shows only about 30% of what it should show. The VP
was alarmed and started talking about a few drastic actions. I had to assure
him that the data aren t representative, but I won t get away with that again.
Allow a natural negative consequence for a lack of action. Often, as a manager,
you re so invested in the performance of your team that you re willing to pick
up the slack from poor performance to avoid a bad outcome. That only reinforces
the employees perceptions that they don t need to change. Instead, allow poor
performance to lead to a natural consequence.
In the sales example, if you ask the Regional VP not to discuss any
opportunities that are not in the system, your technology hold-outs will be
left out of the discussion. Salespeople are fueled by posting wins and this
loss of recognition might just spur some action. Given that the missing
pipeline numbers will also reflect poorly on you and your whole team, you have
the added benefit of a little peer pressure to get them on board.
Knowing how to turn up the heat is valuable, but sometimes you have the
opposite problem. When the pressure mounts, you might need to do one of the
following to settle things down:
Provide frequent positive feedback. In the low-stress scenario, you were
coaching frequently to increase the sense of accountability. In the high-stress
situation, you should still be spending considerable time coaching and
providing feedback, but you need to change the content and tone. Your content
should be focused more on recognizing and reinforcing small victories and on
helping to problem solve to create momentum. Your tone should be calm and
reassuring. You want your team to feel that they re making headway. In the
sales example, you can pivot a conversation about a new prospect to Hey, let s
enter that into the system together now.
Break the problem into smaller pieces. Our language is full of metaphors for
the sense of overwhelm we get when we try to tackle something too large.
Whether they re swallowing elephants or boiling oceans, your employees are
signalling that they re shutting down because of the magnitude of the
challenge. At that point (or hopefully before), help each person zoom in on a
specific part of the project. You can divide the project among a group of
people so each person has a more manageable chunk.
You can also break the project into sequential steps and focus on one at a
time. The goal is to make the next task seem surmountable. You re not climbing
Everest; you re just getting to basecamp. This week, we re going to focus on
the automotive sector. Let s get all of our automotive leads into the system.
Add structure to the problem. One of the worst things you can do when stress
levels get too high is to jump in and solve the problem for your team. That can
send all the wrong messages and leave you with accountability issues over the
long run. The alternative is to go a little further than normal in helping your
team think about how to tackle the problem.
Many people get stressed in the face of too much complexity. If you can give
them a path, they can wrap their heads around it. For example, you could say,
First solve for how you re going to roll out the new pricing, then you can go
back and apply that to direct sales. Don t even worry about the indirect
channel until later.
Model confidence. Whether you believe the hype about mirror neurons or not, you
know from experience that emotions in the office can be contagious. The
simplest way you can turn down the heat for your team is to show them with your
words and your body language that you believe everything will work out. If you
re running around like a chicken with its head cut off, you ll incite panic in
everyone else. If you are calm, deliberate, and decisive, you ll help keep
employees stress levels from getting too high.
In some cases, the stress levels of your team members will be uniformly high or
low. That allows you to use one common approach for everyone. Unfortunately, it
s more likely that different people will be in very different head spaces;
some thriving on the heat of the moment and others shrivelling in it. When
different team members are experiencing the stress of the change differently,
you ll need to have more targeted one-on-one conversations that give you the
opportunity to adjust the heat. If you re accustomed to huddling your team and
sharing direction with everyone at once, this might require a temporary shift
in approach.
Regardless of whether the heat needs to go up or down, your job is to monitor
constantly and to make the course corrections that will keep your team in the
productive range of distress. That s the magic zone where change happens.
Liane Davey is the cofounder of 3COze Inc. She is the author of You First:
Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done and a coauthor of
Leadership Solutions: The Pathway to Bridge the Leadership Gap. Follow her on
Twitter at @LianeDavey.