Stress affects every employee regardless of rank within the company. It’s a fact, however, that stress affects people holding managerial rank differently than those who are below them. The hard part is that the way you handle stress as a manager has an inevitable impact on your employees.
Whether you intend it or not, your actions can unknowingly pass on whatever stress you’re going through to your team members. For instance, you might unintentionally vent out your pent-up frustrations – or any negative emotion in general – at your team due to your choice of words.
Unfortunately, the Harvard Business Review says, employees are very perceptive and can read between the lines. Thus, you, as a team leader, can create an environment of anxiety in the workplace by the words you use alone during meetings.
Because of the negative effects that stress can have on employee performance and turnover, you and other managers out there must find ways to effectively manage stress. To that end, here are some tips that you could give a try.
You Must Learn to Refuse Requests At Certain Times
There’s only so much that a person can do within a day at the office. Managers cannot just say “Yes” to every request that’s given them. For your part, you have to learn to say “No” to tasks that are not manageable or distracts from the timeline of the team’s collective deliverables.
Learning to focus on what’s achievable and filtering out the rest can streamline the team’s process, and remove several items of concern from your mind. The fewer deliverables to think about, the less stressful you, as the team leader, will be.
You Have to Learn to Reach Out
More often than not, managers are forced into the mindset that they must not show weakness in front of their subordinates. This has, however, the undesirable effect of making them avoid asking for help even it’s obvious that they need it.
What you need to learn is that reaching out to other managers for advice on how to handle a certain situation can actually strengthen instead of weakening you. Doing so also fosters a collaborative environment within your own team, and that benefits everybody.
You Need to Take a Break Too
Most managers understand that their team members need to take a break. However, they neglect to give themselves that same opportunity for rest and recreation. Over time, the stress builds up, and it starts to gnaw away at the manager.
You wouldn’t want to break down in front of everybody, because it affects team morale and performance. In the end, this will reflect back on you as the manager. So, you must invest in your own well-being. If you feel like the stress is taking a toll on you, you should go to human resources and file that leave form immediately.
In the end, managers like you are employees as well. The effects of stress are similar across the board. The difference now is that you’re responsible for many people, and how you deal with stress will affect how they deal with their own pressures and shortcomings. In this case, be the leader that you are, and learn how to not let stress eat you from inside.