120,000 deaths a year, PUTTING A PLASTER on the problem won't save them

Recent studies estimate that in the United States alone it is costing the economy over $300 billion a year. And given the fact that workplace stress is blamed for 120,000 deaths per year, how we deal with it can literally be a matter of life and death -— and a huge determining factor in our health, happiness, and productivity.

So how can we deal with it?

Let's assume you practice mindfulness every day, you decide to stay calm and carry on, you even get a wide range of entertaining or sometimes even useful employee benefits, then you go to work and your colleague, client, staff or boss pisses you off with the same annoying thing!

Nothing changed really...trying to treat the symptoms instead of fixing the root cause of the problem is never going to give you sustainable results.

76% of 80 senior executives from 20 countries and 25 industries said the biggest barriers to long-term execution and strategy was employee interaction. In other words, people failing to work together to make things happen.

In fact, 60-80 percent of all difficulties in organisations come from strained relationships among employees.

3 main causes of conflict are the clash of values and personalities under poor leadership.

Let's be honest, it does not matter how much we meditate or read about emotional intelligence, if we don't understand why the other person behaves and thinks in a certain way, we might be able to restrain ourselves, but that is not going to solve anything.

People often generate explanations for other people’s behaviours that align with stories they have previously constructed. They notice actions and attitudes that support their stories and overlook those that don’t. As a result, their misperceptions – and the distrust, depression and burnout they cause – endure and strengthen as our stories are usually wrong in some way and we do not check them out before we act as if they are real. This is what Dr Gervase Bushe calls "interpersonal mush".

Stress is not a disease, it is the state of mind when we feel we do not have the resources to cope with a situation and the picture in our head does not match the outer reality. We expect other people to react and respond and come to the same conclusion as we do from a given set of “facts” or “circumstances” based on our own experience, expertise and beliefs.  

Cultural differences = personal differences = clashes of common senses.

That is what ICQ is about. Real cultural intelligence focuses on 3 stages:

• Self-awareness - understanding our own underlying values and drivers.
• Blueprint of why people think and behave differently to understand the logic of different common senses and perspectives.
• Strategies to turn those differences into synergy by improving behavioural flexibility.

It is very simple, the more we understand ourselves and others, the wider range of responses we have, the less stress we experience and the more success we achieve!

Global mindset is not about the statistically average values of different nationalities, but having a 360 degree view of the situation and the ability to respond in the best possible way.

Csaba Toth

Founder of ICQ Global

Multi award-winning Intelligent Global Leadership solution provider for Fortune 500 companies, national governments and local businesses.