Leadership and stress : Your performance and your levels of stress are linked

 

Since the leader is the one in front who sets the example and the pace, his or her performance will always be vital to his/her leadership. Your performance include aspects such as your levels of focus, concentration, resilience, energy,  perseverance, emotional control etc., and it becomes visible in the results you are getting. What has a direct influence on the level to which you are able to perform to your potential, is your stress level. Academics at Harvard Medical School, professors Yerkes and Dodson in the early nineteen hundreds were the first to describe the inverted u shape curve between performance and stress levels.    

 

It is clear that too little or too much stress is equally detrimental to performance. There is an ideal place to be for optimum and sustained performance. We therefore as leaders need to be able to monitor and manage our stress levels – which is easier said than done.

 

Secondly, we need to be aware of the stress levels of those who we place demands on for performance and productivity. This will help us to take pro-active steps as needed for a particular environment. People can broadly be categorised, according to the performance/stress model, into categories of boredom, understressed, ideal, distress, burnout and breakdown (developed by a South African psychiatrist Jonathan Moch). In the past number of months I was involved in the development of the 3ddiagnostic instrument which is based on this theory and can be used in organisations as a ‘blood pressure’ and leading indicator to performance.

 

Visit www.3ddiagnostic.co.za for more information and let me know if you are interested in this great product.

 

Gary Cooper wrote in the Journal of Public Mental Health ‘the enterprise culture of the 1980s and the “flexible workforce” of the 1990s and early 2000s have helped to transform the UK economy and other countries in Europe. But, as we were to discover, by the end of these decades there was a substantial personal cost for many employees. This cost was captured in a single word – stress.’ No doubt, the levels of stress in many if not most South African workplaces, is dangerously high. Primary health care practitioners experience the effect this has on people’s health. Studies prove that a minimum of 60% of visits to primary health care practitioners concern symptoms directly due to heightened stress levels.

 

There are many reasons for unhealthy levels of stress and many ways to counter the causes for it. As we know too well as leaders, we need to take responsibility for it. It is a responsibility you have to yourself and your loved ones. At a personal level we need to look in the following areas for causes: time management; attitude; relationships; toxins, lotions and potions (vitamins), rest, meditation, diet, exercise and financial management (the ten commandments of stress management – J Moch). That is a mouthful and thorough assessment and proactive planning is clearly required to make the necessary changes. Strategies to reduce stress in the workplace, according to Cooper, include

 

·         Redesigning the task

·         Redesigning the working environment

·         Establishing flexible work schedules

·         Encouraging participative management

·         Including the employee in career development

·         Analysing work roles and establishing goals

·         Providing social support and response

·         Building cohesive teams

·         Establishing fair employment policies

·         Sharing awards

 

Let us remind ourselves: ‘Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor, in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying’ – Studs Terkel.

 

On a different but related note, the opportunities I thusfar had to present my book, The leadership challenge in Africa – a framework for African Renaissance leaders, is a source of inspiration to me personally and judged by the responses I got, clearly relevant. Related to the topic of stress? The challenges we face can either paralyse us – it cannot excite or enthuse us (insufficient stress for performance) or it can make us anxious, overly emotional with no clear focus, and fill us with rage about things we perceive as unexceptable (too much stress for performance). I hope, with the book, to point to a responsible and healthy way of responding to the challenges.    

 

With happy expectations of spring and summer and a rugby World Cup crown. Till next month.

 

Best regards

 

Gerhard