3 Ways to Spot if You're Letting Stress Guide Your Leadership
3 Ways to Spot if You’re Letting Stress Guide Your Leadership
Leaders… I’m sure you don’t need another article that shares how being in a leadership position can bring with it:
- Pressure
- Feelings of stress
- Uncertainty
- Exhaustion
- And sometimes frustration
You live this life every day, so you’re familiar with these feelings!
On top of managing the pressure, stress, and uncertainty of leadership, the added layer of everything in the world right now can make everything much more complicated.
If you’ve been holding your breath for a while now trying to keep it all together, I want to share with you that I get it. Being a leader can require a lot out of you and managing external factors can honestly be the thing that tips your feelings of stress over the edge. That’s ok, it’s very human to feel these things!
While I want to acknowledge that feelings of stress and frustration are normal (yes, we’re all human and sometimes we just need to have a moment), leading from a place of stress or frustration can hurt our teams and business.
If you’ve felt a little off-balance with your leadership lately, here are 3 ways to spot if your feelings of stress are guiding your leadership, through emotional agility, and how to turn it around to lead from calm, instead of chaos.
What is emotional agility?
Emotional agility, not interchangeable with emotional intelligence, is defined as approaching one’s inner experiences mindfully and productively (source: Harvard Business Review, 2013).
Emotional agility is when we are in tune with our own emotions without suppressing or controlling them.
When we facilitate Emotional Self-Awareness and Agility Workshops for our clients at CoCreate Work, the end goal isn’t just for leaders and participants to understand and manage their own emotions; we place emphasis on bringing awareness to what your emotions are trying to tell you so that you can take action in an aligned way with your leadership style and values.
In an article from Harvard Business Review, Susan David and Christina Congleton share that emotional agility can help people alleviate stress, reduce errors, become more innovative, and improve job performance!
And in her TED Talk, Susan David, shares an inspiring talk on the gift and power of emotional courage!
So, if you’re recognizing that your emotions are spiraling and in your inner world there are constant feelings of stress, frustration, or even anger towards your team, business, or clients - you might be letting your stress guide your leadership or decisions.
Here are 3 ways to check if that’s true and how to move past that.
*Side note here - I believe that emotions don’t make us do anything, yet they can guide us (this nuance is important to mark)!
STRESS CHECK ONE: You feel defensive when receiving feedback from your team.
If you’re noticing feelings of defensiveness around feedback from your team, clients, or partners, this might mean you’re attaching this feedback to negative stories or past experiences in your life.
Here’s how the feeling of defensiveness trickles into our beliefs and actions…
Often, this defensiveness comes from something that’s happened in our past and reinforces a negative story or belief we have about ourselves. For example, this feedback can bring up beliefs that “You aren’t a good leader” or “You don’t know what you’re doing and people are judging you.”
Now, if these are our internal beliefs that come with the emotion of defensiveness, it guides our leadership to come from feelings of stress and perfectionism because we think we have to be this way to lead.
When in reality, that isn’t true! You know from a logical point of view that no one is perfect and we all make mistakes… and still, your thoughts and beliefs might be keeping you from moving forward in a calm manner to implement this feedback from your team.
How do you lead from a place of calm when you’re feeling defensive?
First, my recommendation is to notice the pattern. Do you often experience feelings of defensiveness when someone shares feedback that you perceive as negative? Or is this just a case-by-case scenario? If you usually feel defensive, what is the thought or belief that’s attached to that?
Start there to identify thought patterns!
STRESS CHECK TWO: You blame your team if something goes wrong.
The blame game helps no one, especially if you are a leader!
Not only is it counterproductive to your leadership, but placing blame on others creates a company culture where team members often feel worried about sharing new ideas, feel unsure of their own skills and abilities, and that diminishes innovation.
If you catch yourself blaming your team and letting stress guide you because you feel like you are the only person who can do XYZ in the business, I would guess that you are also feeling overwhelmed or ‘trapped’ in your leadership role.
When we train leaders on emotional agility, oftentimes they see they’re blaming their team members because they feel a need for:
- Being in control
- Perfectionism in work
- And being the ‘stoic’ one, always
So these beliefs guide their actions and leadership, making their team ‘walk on eggshells’ and keeping them in a place of overwhelm with too much on their plate.
What can you do to lead from a place of calm if you find you’re blaming your team when something goes wrong?
I would say there are two ways to approach this:
- Let go of control and trust your team (which leads me to make a point about hiring and onboarding strategies for inclusive company culture - very important!)
- Build supportive systems for everyone so your team can be autonomous with their work, take responsibility for their tasks and projects, and you can also lean into your team’s strengths
We all want to feel supported and trusted and the ‘blame game’ does not help build that type of culture for our companies.
STRESS CHECK THREE: Feeling attacked when someone asks a question.
Ok, so we’re all human and have past negative experiences or situations in our lives that we unconsciously or consciously act on. Feeling attacked when someone asks a question or shares feedback is normal, and it also isn’t the most productive way to lead.
Similar to stress check #1 I shared above, feeling attacked might mean you’re attaching negative beliefs and thoughts to someone’s questions - either because they confirm something you’ve thought about yourself or they deny something positive you think about yourself.
For example, a client was feeling attacked every time their team member was asking clarifying questions on tasks and projects. They were experiencing feelings of stress because they either didn’t have the answers or the space to answer thoughtfully - which then made their team members ask more questions.
The thought/belief they attached to this was that “They’ll never be able to fully delegate because they need to be in everything in the business” and “They’re not a good leader because they didn’t think of every and all possibilities or know everything that could happen”.
These two thoughts made them feel stressed, which then guided them to actions that didn’t align with their leadership brand, values, or company principles.
What most of us want when we’re in leadership positions is to feel supported and acknowledged, and so do our team members! That support can come from having clear guidelines for them to follow, autonomy in their work, and intentional systems that make their work smooth and alleviate the need for us to get involved.
So how can you lead from a place of calm if you feel attacked when a team member asks a question?
Challenge the belief you have that ‘you’ll never be able to fully delegate’ or ‘you need to know everything’.
We’re human, we can’t know everything!
Wrap-Up
When we step into our leadership roles, we bring a lot of things with us…
Our charisma, energy, excitement, enthusiasm, and our big vision.
We also bring past experiences, beliefs, thoughts, stories, and negative situations with us - whether we are conscious of them or not.
A lot of these past experiences, beliefs, thoughts, and stories can cause us to lead from the past. They impact our emotions and how we show up. They influence how we act with our teams. And they can negatively affect our relationships with our teams and our work.
Cultivating emotional agility can help quiet down the inner dialogue we’re having with ourselves so that we can lead from a place of calm and in our values, instead of chaos and stress.
Emotional agility is a skill set I believe leaders, managers, and all team members can benefit from because it helps to create more synergy, an inclusive culture, and more innovation for everyone.
Are you looking for leadership support? Book a consult with me so we can discuss our intensive workshops to increase your team’s and your emotional agility for a more calm workplace, team synergy, and better cross-department relationships.
—-
>> Do you need support as a leader to support your business vision? We’d love to co-create an action plan together that helps you bring your vision to life, build an inclusive company culture, and attract your dream team! Schedule a consult call to learn how we can help.
>> Enjoyed this article? I’d love it if you could share it with a fellow leader, visionary, or small business owner in your network!
>> Looking for more leadership advice and tips to #doworkdifferently? Subscribe to the CoCreate Work newsletter for weekly tips to help you cultivate your leadership, cultivate care, and create a plan of action as a leader building the #FutureOfWork. Subscribe here. As a thank you, you’ll also get our 40+ Questions guide to help you ask powerful questions for your personal and professional growth.