How to avoid this major, avoidable waste of time, energy and productivity

The modern world is so stressful, isn’t it?”

“I know. Sometimes I get so stressed, I get stressed about the stress.”

“Don’t talk to me about it! I never get a full night’s sleep – 3 am every night I’m wide awake because I’m so anxious about work deadlines....”

This three-way chat is the kind of thing you might overhear in workplaces and social gatherings on any given day in 2023. But I suspect it echoes conversations our forebears had over the centuries too.

• 500 years ago, the Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne said “My life has been filed with terrible misfortune, most of which never happened.”
• 150 years ago, The British Medical Journal noted that people were exhausted by stress, which was leading to mental and physical breakdowns and a rise in heart disease.
• 80 years ago, Dale Carnegie published a book still in print today – “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living”.
• 25 years ago leaders regularly attended time management courses, designed to help them get on top of their workloads so that they could be less stressed and more productive.
• Today, you might well be focussed on meditation, mindfulness and self-care to help you manage the stress of modern living.

The advice from that same 150-year old British Medical Journal still no doubt holds true “(Human beings should)....take a little more care not to kill ourselves for the sake of living.”

And the really crazy thing is that, reflecting de Montaigne, most of our worries and anxieties never actually occur. They are the product of our worry-oriented brains. They are stories we create for ourselves. So, yes, we damage our mental, emotional and physical well-being for...nothing.

I’ve been writing about the damage that unnecessary fear and worry have in our workplaces for the last decade. It’s not a popular topic because it’s – well, it’s just so negative, isn’t it?

Now, of course, if you’re setting up a major new project plan, or you’re engaging in M&A activity, or you’re preparing to launch a project, you need to consider the risks. I’m not talking about this objective, rational analysis which is the forerunner to putting in place well-considered contingencies and mitigations.

I’m talking about the nagging worries and anxieties that ultimately lead to poor leadership behaviour. There, I’ve said it. Needless worry is making you a less effective leader.

Here are just three examples.

1. It’s stopping you celebrate success

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve facilitated team discussions where leaders say ‘we never celebrate success’ as if they’ve just made a major new breakthrough. They haven’t, of course. They’ve said this many times before. What really needs addressed is why they don’t celebrate. You know the most common reason? Worry that celebrating success of this project might be premature because, after all, the next project might go wrong. Yes, leaders avoid celebrating what has actually happened for fear that what comes next might not work out.

2. It’s making you a micro-manager

You know that check-in email you sent just to make sure someone was doing the job you know they are perfectly capable of doing??Come on, we’re all guilty of this one, aren’t we?

3. It’s stopping you being the honest, transparent leader you want to be

All those times you decided not to share information because people just won’t be able to handle the truth (even through it directly impacts them), or the conversation about poor performance you avoided because the recipient might not react well, or the question you didn’t ask your boss to make sure you understood what they really wanted and had to second-guess instead.... They’re all examples of ill-founded anxiety and worry.

Our ill-founded worry and anxiety drives us into a pattern of ineffective leadership behaviour that can only trigger anxiety and worry for those we lead. Our worry as leaders will become magnified as it cascades through the teams we lead. It wastes time and energy. It undermines productivity and it is a cost to the organisation.

As human beings and as leaders, we can’t switch off the worry brain, of course. But we can learn to manage it so that it doesn’t undermine us and others.

Here are five steps you can take to do just that.

1. Acknowledge the worry – trying to ignore it won’t make it go away
2. Be specific about what the worry is – get away from that generalised feeling that things might go wrong
3. Ask yourself if this is based on current evidence or if it is driven by historical events that have no bearing on the actual situation you are currently facing
4. Consider what factual data you have to either support or disprove your worry and then decide if you are giving too much weight to the data that supports it
5. Sleep on it and review all of this in 24 hours, or have a coffee and come back to it in an hour, or even just focus on another task for 10 minutes – anything that gets you away from that immediate powerful drive

These steps are designed to get your rational brain back in control and calm your emotional brain. They’re designed to help you step away from those stories that you’re creating for yourself about what might go wrong. And they’ll help you to take a more considered approach if you decide that your worry is founded on clear, rational data.

Worries will inevitably pop up. But that doesn’t mean we can’t help them to settle right back down again.

What worries are playing havoc for you and your team today? Try these five steps and see how many of them really need to be getting in the way.

And, as always, whatever’s on your mind, observe yourself and others with interest and learning, not with criticism and judgement,

Heather

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