How can leaders build resilience to manage stress in the workplace?

Mindset is extremely important! A positive & growth mindset helps in being unstoppable, overcoming setbacks & obstacles in your path and embracing change. Calm & composed leaders are more effective & can achieve much more! It also creates a better environment for the team. A clutter-free, organized & systematic working environment also reduces stress. Taking breaks helps in reducing stress & boosting creativity. Self-care such as exercise, meditation, hobbies, listening to music and doing anything that you love must be part of your daily schedule. Don't use your energy to worry. Instead use it to grow, develop, create & heal!

Reducing stress in the work place, despite it can differ from one person to another.yet, it is the leader mindset and communication style that can have a great impact on the team morale and stress levels, I believe in tough times, the leader has to build a north star goal for the whole team to aim for, be more transparent about the situation and state facts, also build more connections and foster interactions more often. In my opinion resilience is built over time, and it comes from commulative experiences and challenges, the most important is that experienced leader cultivate the growth mindset in the culture of the team and company.

Leaders can build resilience to manage stress in the workplace by fostering a supportive organizational culture. Encouraging open communication and creating a psychologically safe environment allows team members to share concerns and seek help when needed. Providing resources for stress management, such as wellness programs or workshops, contributes to overall employee well-being. Additionally, leaders who lead by example, demonstrating healthy coping mechanisms and self-care practices, inspire their teams to prioritize mental health. Developing adaptive leadership skills, including the ability to navigate change and uncertainty, helps leaders model resilience and cultivate a resilient workforce.

Leaders can build resilience to manage stress in the workplace by developing a supportive culture, prioritizing mental well-being, and fostering open communication. Encouraging regular breaks and work-life balance helps reduce burnout. Training in stress management techniques, such as mindfulness and problem-solving skills, empowers employees to handle challenges effectively. Regularly recognizing and celebrating achievements can also boost morale. Adaptability, by being open to feedback and willing to make necessary changes, further strengthens resilience.

Leaders build resilience to manage workplace stress by: Self-awareness: Recognize stress triggers and emotional responses. Mindfulness: Practice mindfulness to stay present and manage stress in the moment. Time Management: Prioritize tasks, set realistic goals, and avoid overcommitting. Problem-solving: Approach challenges as opportunities, focusing on solutions. Social Support: Cultivate a strong support network for guidance and encouragement. Adaptability: Embrace change and view setbacks as opportunities for growth. Healthy Habits: Prioritize sleep, exercise, and a balanced diet for physical well-being. Boundaries: Set clear work-life boundaries to prevent burnout. Continuous Learning: Positive Perspective:

Embrace a holistic approach to self-care by addressing physical, mental, and emotional aspects equally. Balance is key to building lasting resilience and maintaining high performance.

“The Self-Care Vision Board” is an introspective exercise I give to support leaders in prioritizing their well-being. In this creative activity leaders gathers images, quotes & symbols that represent activities & practices contributing to their self-care, ranging from personal hobbies to mindfulness techniques. This exercise not only encourages leaders to identify and prioritize self-care practices but also provides a tangible and visually appealing reminder to make time for well-being amid their leadership responsibilities. “The Self-Care Vision Board, empowers leaders to proactively integrate self-care into their routines promoting overall health & resilience.

The more demanding the role, the greater the demand for self-care. Resilience is the comeback after giving up. Part of self-care is to knowing when to give something up, be it an expectation of your team, or revising strategy that is not working. Striving against what is not working because of a fear to admit defeat is also very detrimental to mental health. Make self-care meaningful by assessing your performance in and expectations of the team.

While there are episodic big stressors that leaders face, a majority of stress is that seemingly continuous slow drip. To counter the constant requires daily resilience rituals and routines. What resilience ritual(s) gets you ready for a day of work, what resilience ritual(s) refresh you during your workday, what resilience rituals help you recover from your day, what rituals help you to recharge during your time away from work. Weekends and vacations aren’t the answer to building resilience and fostering wellbeing.

Best ways to practice self-care: 1)prioritize yourself over anything and in return everything else will significantly get better! 2) Say no, more 3) Have a tribe that is very similar to your level with the positive culture of “iron sharpens iron” 4) allow others to take on responsibility as you find a mentee, if they can do it 80% as good as you, let go of the control

Treat resilience as a skill that can be honed and refined over time. Just like any other competency, it requires practice, patience, and dedication to reach your full potential.

The best place to learn from is your team. Ask your team the hard and humiliating questions. Subject yourself to scrutiny lest you think that you're doing it all right. Their positive and negative feedback may help you bounce back from even personal challenges.

A growth mindset is a characteristic common to many of the most resilient leaders. A growth mindset says there is always more to learn and experience. So when events take an unplanned turn bringing curiosity to the space invites you to ask more questions. Rather than trying to find answers look for better quality questions. And look at the model of triple-loop learning. What are you DOing differently? What are you THINKing differently, And how are you BEing differently. When you plan to experiment look to these areas for different places to experiment.

As an executive coach I use CBC technique to support leaders in cultivating a growth mindset. CBC technique help leaders identify & reframe negative thought patterns that may hinder a growth-oriented perspective. By exploring and challenging self-limiting beliefs, leaders can develop a more positive and adaptive mindset. CBC techniques, empowers leaders to foster a growth mindset both within themselves & throughout their leadership approach, positively impacting the entire organizational culture.

Spot on! Adopting a growth mindset turns every challenge into a stepping stone for improvement. It’s like having an ‘upgrade button’ for our skills every time we face a hurdle. Stress becomes less of a monster and more of a mentor, guiding us to innovate and collaborate more effectively. Let’s keep growing!??????

In my experience it can feel difficult to reach out for help and support, as sometimes there feels to be an expectation that leaders can handle everything without assistance...however I have noticed that the best leaders reach out frequently and embrace the support that is out there for them.

Be strategic about your support network. Include a good number of fellow leaders, peers, mentors, friends, and family. The reason you want the group to be diverse is that each sub-group will have unique perspective and nuanced feedback. You can only benefit from this.

Make sure you have a good friend to talk to. Many leaders still use the phrases "I come to work, not to make friends" and "leave your emotions at home" as protective armours not to show vulnerablility. But this hinders not only their resilience, but their hability to connect at a human level with their team, build trust, credibility and the creation of psychological safety, so necesary to build antifragile teams that thrive and learn from adversity. Having a good friend at work creates an "Island of sanity" that allows us to engage more, vent, re-charge, feel supported, connected and recover from falls, which in turn helps us become more resilient. Cultivate friendships and allow space for friendships to be built in your team!

A core capability of resilient leaders is the ability to ask for help. And to accept and receive the help offered. You'd be surprised when see just how many leaders either do anything to avoid asking for help or find reasons to dismiss and not accept it when offered. Doing this reduces possibility. Your goal here is to increase possibility and choice.

Agree 100 %. Its not important that one can know or understand whole thing. Even sometime your collogue either junior or senior can give you a perspective or solution which we may have not visualized or think. So important to seek support and get feedback , its all about learning , growth and team-ship and many times re-frame approach and mindset.

In my experience, many people expect the leaders to know and therefore the hardest part is to accept that you don't and accept to learn. In a uncertain world reflect and learn probably are the most important skills to get for a leader. The best leaders I know have surrounded themselves with people from diverse backgrounds as they will question the industry as noone from the industry would. It also implies to have a feedback culture within the organization in which great ideas can thrive whereever they come from

In this life you either win or you learn! Be honest about what stresses you and what went wrong. Ask for feedback, make a list of what worked and what needs to be improved for the next time. But also make a list of the things you have overcomed and that went right! List the tools and strengths you used to do so. Share your learnings with your team and ask them for ideas for the future. Model the humility to learn, the permission to be human and make mistakes, the trust to ask for help and the process to document the learnings so your team becomes antifragile.

Reflection is for the successes and failures; not the latter. Learn what you did right and make notes. Identify where you went wrong and why. Make notes. Work on the whys and be brutally honest. Learn from reflection and optimise what you need to personally and professionally for the future.

The famous phrase "Leaders are born" is not entirely true. Humans start from scratch and learn everything they need to become effective leaders. However, the speed of our learning is directly proportional to our interests. Therefore, it is crucial to equip oneself with personality tools and the necessary knowledge to build effective leadership skills. Learning from failures and reflecting on what went wrong or where we went wrong is equally important. Through continuous learning and self-reflection, one can emerge as an effective leader, capable of handling stress.

Prioritize intentional reflection to maximize learning and track your gains to build confidence and resilience. Some strategies to get you started: 1 - Set a block of uninterrupted time each week. Block your calendar and silence all distractions. It might be helpful to create a reflection space away from your desk. 2 - Adopt a gains perspective. In every situation, whether you consider it a success or not, there are gains to be found. Listing your gains each week builds confidence and resilience. Keep a gains journal to track them all in one place and review it at the end of each month or year. 3 - Integrate. Make it a habit to ask yourself how you can use what you've learned to build upon your gains. Celebrate yourself and repeat.

“The success Canvas” is the exercise I use for leaders to visually represent their professional journey and accomplishments on a canvas. Leaders’ Canvas includes key milestones, challenges overcome & impactful achievements. I encourage leaders to use colors, symbols and words that resonate with the emotions tied to each success. “The success Canvas” fostering a culture of recognition & inspiration within the leadership team and contributes to a positive and celebratory leadership mindset.

When you are low on resilience the way forward can look longer, more dangerous, more uncertain and more daunting than it might actually be. You do hard things. Make a habit of pausing once in a while and looking back over your should to acknowledge the huge distance you have travelled in life. All the hard things that felt daunting at the time, that you navigated and came through. Notice how much smaller they look in the rear view mirror than they felt at the time. That same thing is true now.

Celebrating achievement can help build resilience by reinforcing the positive aspects of one's performance and progress. Resilience is the ability to cope with and overcome challenges, setbacks, and failures. When one celebrates achievement, one acknowledges and appreciates the hard work, effort, and skills that led to the successful outcome. This can boost one's self-confidence, self-efficacy, and motivation to pursue further goals. Celebrating achievement can also help one focus on the learning and growth that occurred during the process, rather than the difficulties and obstacles. This can foster a growth mindset, which is the belief that one can improve and develop through practice and feedback.

Leaders can build resilience to manage stress in various ways. They should encourage work-life balance, foster open communication, ensure workers are given proper recognition, deliver constructive feedback, and provide resources for stress management like workshops. It's also beneficial for leaders to model healthy coping mechanisms and resilience themselves. Personal development, mindfulness, and other forms of training may also be helpful. Regular check-ins and a supportive environment can also go a long way in reducing workplace stress.

In addition to those noted, I find having an external professional group/network extremely valuable in building resilience. Having an exclusive group of mentors and leaders provides a safe space to seek positive feedback and advice. It also helps in creating a sense of control amidst stress and chaos. Too often, when our environments feel unsecure, chaotic and toxic, having this group helps to reset and maintain focus.

The implementation of what we have been learning about stress management is as important as the knowledge itself. Every leader has a different background, character and style, as well as our colleagues within our teams. We need to create our own style, using the techniques of transformational leadership and even altering the methods. The perception of stress is generally negative. However, it is a must have feeling in order to survive in human history and to achieve, succeed within the deadlines in business life. The threat starts when the stress becomes an obstacle to proceed with the tasks, and a cause of loss of healthy assesment skills and even somatic problems. We must observe and determine which is healthy stress and which is not.

It is important to learn that things do not always go as planned. After all these mitigation activities, you might still face situations that make you stressed out. In such scenarios, it's important to seek help to manage them rather than hide and try to appear very resilient. Remember, we are all humans, even the leaders.

There are 2 things that have helped me manage stress at work. 1) Being self aware i.e. not just understanding stress triggers but understanding your personality / leadership style etc. leverage assessment tools like DiSC / MBTI. That way you know what are things that you enjoy and comes to you naturally and what are the things that requires effort that could lead to stress. You can then have strategies for those later things. 2) If possible, take emotions and egos out of your day to day at work. Being objective and focusing on the way forward helps a lot and avoids stressing over what you can’t change or control.