Being a mid-level manager is like being the middle of a sandwich. You get the pressure from both above and bottom, but the most delicious part is always in between.
Stress is an omnipresent part of our life and it's a kind of way we respond to a challenge. It's rather an unconscious reaction, but by understanding it consciously, we might get a little bit of control over it.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), stress can be defined as a state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation. Stress is a natural human response that prompts us to address challenges and threats in our lives. Everyone experiences stress to some degree. The way we respond to stress, however, makes a big difference to our overall well-being. Stress affects people differently.
As Health and Safety Executive describes it, workplace stress has 6 major causes:
To be more specific, here are the examples of workplace stress:
In company life, we can feel stress coming from anywhere, from above, from bottom and from our peers.
When your boss puts explicit or just unwanted pressure on you, you can feel stressed. Many sources of workplace stress are coming from above as the senior members have more power and authority to define the culture, the processes and the tasks. No surprise that a common good advice about our career is to choose the right boss and not the right job.
Nevertheless, in many organisational cultures the experts get promoted to being a leader of their respective area instead of those who have better leadership skills. But being a high performing expert or being someone who can truly manage the people are two completely different things. In the short term, the expert can assure the performance that has already been achieved. That’s being on the safe side as of now and giving up future potentials. In the long run, the right leader can take the team to the next level, individually and as a group.
While the previous source of stress is pretty common knowledge and there are many jokes about the horrible bosses, the other way around can be just as painful sometimes. As a manager, you are responsible for the right performance and the delivery in time, but you have to accomplish that with the ever changing “resources”, called people. Sometimes they’ve lost someone they loved, or they have difficulties with their children, sometimes they are just in love. The point is, work might not be in the centre of their focus at the very moment. Unlike a machine, people cannot perform the same everyday. Yet, you still have to reach your goals, so you need to plan with this performance swing and you need to calculate some buffer time for it. And being responsible for the results and being exposed to the performance of your team can be stressful.
Also, managing people means taking care of them as human beings. And humans have their own problems even outside of the workplace. Dealing with the personal issues of your team can be a burden, you can become the emotional dustbin, and coping with emotions, even if these are others, can wear you down. Showing empathy and not taking it personally is demanding sometimes.
Actually, being part of a team is clearly mutually interdependent, no matter if you’re the manager of it or a team member. You can achieve great things if you work together, rely on each other and care about each other.
Even if the slices of bread are not pressing you, you can feel dependent on another. Let’s take a look at the peers.
Hannah was working on a topic with a co-worker from another department. It was a new topic for the entire organisation, requiring expertise nobody really had. So it was more about getting to know the problem and developing a solution for that. The task needed people who were willing to get into the unknown and try to figure it out. They put the necessary effort into it and after a while the solution started to shape. They arranged a meeting where they could provide the status to the management.
As there were no exact roles and therefore no exact responsibilities, it was up to them to decide how they prepared the presentation. Hannah was pretty good at making presentations and telling the story. Her colleague was active in brainstorming and generating new ideas, and read a lot about the topic. She was more of a freely flying creative mind, while Hannah was the more structured one who took care of the progress, keeping the time and the framework that had been given. They both knew the deadline, but only Hannah felt the urge to create the slides.
So Hannah prepared the majority of the presentation, and during doing so, she collected some questions that needed to be answered for the right storytelling. Hannah sent the material to her colleague. But she got no feedback. Next week they met in the office, so Hannah could remind her fellow worker who apologised and said she had been on vacation in the past few days, that’s why she had not answered the questions. She promised that she would read it soon. However, there was no reaction in the next few days either.
The day before the presentation, the creative colleague had some new ideas, however, she did not answer Hannah’s questions and she did not send the inputs Hannah had asked for. When everything should have been about finalising the open questions, new aspects were raised. Hannah wanted to be a team player, so instead of saying a simple ‘no’ to the newly identified aspects, she paid some attention to her colleague and searched for some compromises so that the valuable parts could be integrated somehow. Hannah put some extra effort in modifying the presentation. When it was finally done, her colleague sent some pictures she had been supposed to do earlier. So Hannah had to edit the slides once again.
Did it matter at the end? Nobody knows. Hannah was managing the entire process, she started to get prepared in time, but being a team player and involving the other took so much effort because of the differences in their personalities that Hannah was stressed out and exhausted.
Being dependent on others makes you vulnerable, even if you have nothing to do with hierarchy. We should pay more attention to what we can cause in others. Hannah’s colleague meant no harm, she just did not communicate what she was thinking of or doing those days. She actually was working on the project, she was just not structured enough. And she also did not think of what Hannah might have put into the presentation. She had no doubt that Hannah was fine with the process and she did not know that they dealt with situations like this in completely different ways. She did not recognise that a last minute idea caused extra and uncomfortable effort on the other side.
Not being explicit resulted in ruining Hannah’s effort in a way and making her nervous needlessly.
A simple model makes the reality look much simpler than it is, but it can help you find a good explanation that can sort things out. Earlier we saw that many things could create stress, yet, the very essence of the feeling is something like:
How can you decrease the level of stress? You might decrease the numerator or increase the denominator.
In practice, you might decrease the stake of the situation by:
- recognizing why you feel stressed;
- questioning how bad it is if your fear gets real and how probable it is to happen;
- analysing what consequences it can have so that you get prepared for it;
- staying positive even in bad situations, like at least you get some learning out of it.
You might increase the available resources by:
- asking for help from others, involving your colleagues and sharing the burden with them
- exploiting your connections: gathering information, discussing the situation;
- time management: delegating, setting the priorities, saying no;
- getting to know yourself better: your strengths and weaknesses, what to control better;
- being alright: sleeping, eating properly, sports, relaxation.
Ann was a high performing employee you could rely on in important topics. She paid attention to the details and the quality of her work, while she kept all her deadlines. She had learned what kind of tasks suited her and how much time she needed to deliver them. She was controlling her work-life balance. She also had a son, he was 7. The boy was more sensitive than the average, he easily got overwhelmed by the many impulses he got during the day. By the interactions, he got tired and he needed some time to recharge his batteries. When he could not, he got confused and behaved loudly, sometimes aggressively.
The boy attended a school where the teacher had little or no focus, interest in dealing with the ones who were a bit of an odd man out. Not accepting the needs of the boy, the teacher handled the boy just like the others, missing the opportunity to maintain the sustainable collaboration between them. As time went by, the boy got more and more tired and he started the next day already overwhelmed, then he got the next portion of dismissal.
No surprise that things escalated, the boy cursed at his teacher and even showed his middle finger to her. The teacher talked to the parents, the parents to the boy, the parents to the teacher, and the parents quickly realised that their son would not get what he needed from that teacher and from that school. They needed to change schools in the middle of the school year, but they felt they would risk an even greater problem with changing the community they had been used to. So they chose to wait for the next school year. Which meant they had some months to go in the old setup. One of the problem handling solutions was to keep the boy at home from time to time.
So the high performing employee asked for some patience for the forthcoming months. She had no other option, but still, she was stressed like never before. Her boss was cooperative, understood the situation and made sure that they would handle the workload flexible enough. Her boss told her the equation of stress and offered her to manage any part of it that was necessary. Decreasing the stake, he was open to discuss the deadlines the employee needed to meet. Increasing the resources, he offered that whenever the employee got stuck, she could ask for help from the team so that she never got alone with her tasks.
This is a great example of how you can manage the stress level of your colleagues. Take good care of them!
