Entries tagged as ‘Stress’
I finally got around to reading this book – “The Gift of Fear” by Gavin de Becker after hearing it recommended time and time again for dealing with potentially dangerous situations and to help determine if a relationship is abusive.
This book has been on my list for a long time, but it has always been a lower priority, in the context it usually is recommended (or that I’ve seen it recommended) it didn’t apply to me at all. How wrong I was. This book applies to everyone. I was amazed at some of the common sense advice that can be easily applied to many situations at work and in your personal life.
One of the key messages that hit me revolves around how do you fire someone, and when do you do it. If you are going to fire someone for reasons other than pure performance – for example due to behavior that is threatening or otherwise intimidating you need to do it as soon as possible. This doesn’t mean that you don’t tell the person directly why their behavior is inappropriate in order to remedy the situation. The problem is that most people are loath to approach someone like this in the first place. They wait and wait until a seemingly small infraction becomes the straw that broke the camel’s back. This is bad news. First off, the behavior has been implicitly condoned rather than immediately addressed. Secondly, the perpetrator has become more and more invested in their job over time. And third, since the firing appears to be over a small matter it may be taken badly since the person knows they have done more egregious things in the past.
Another key point of this section is to make sure to treat the person with dignity. If you’re afraid of them, don’t bring muscle into the meeting. No security, no cops, no escorts. This is counter intuitive, but showing your fear and the expectation of a bad outcome actually empowers the person to create one. You are showing that this is what you expect, no? This doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be available if a situation escalates, but this backup should not be visible.
Clearly another key item is to not beat around the bush when you tell someone they are fired. Be clear. You don’t want them to assume that it is just another performance appraisal and a request for change. Also do not negotiate. I loved the boomerang line – “If you had made the decision to leave we would have respected it, and we expect the same from you.”
There are many more lessons in here that can be used in running a successful business. I’ve also added more intuitive skills to my arsenal due to reading this as well. As a woman who has extensively traveled, I’ve become accustomed to late night arrivals and dark parking lots and garages. This book helps me to be better prepared to recognize a situation before it becomes a bad one.
Categories: Book Reviews
Tagged: Attitude, Performance Reviews, Problem Solving, Stress, Women in Business
Recently I had the opportunity to reflect back upon all of the training I’ve received in order to become the leader that I am today. In my career I was extremely fortunate that I received a significant amount of management training before I was even considered for promotion into the role. I find the coaching of potential, junior, and mid-level managers to be critical to longer term success. Even as a senior manager I believe that it is important to continue learning, and to not always fall back on previous experiences.
Early in my career I worked for a company that had a mandatory training and assessment course for all potential managers. It identified if someone was ready to manage people, and the areas in which they were weak and strong. This was a course that could be failed and a person wouldn’t be promoted to a management position if it was. I remember this class as being very stressful. There were timed prioritization of work assignments, interviews, and video taped role playing exercises in which instructors acted as difficult subordinates and customers. This course started my foray into management.
I’ve also had some training that wouldn’t be classified as management training, but it helped me become a much better manager. One form of this type of training that I received is often dismissed by staff as being irrelevant – and that is diversity training. I found it helped me understand how to be sensitive to race, religion, and gender as well as realizing that different people have different motivations for what they do. Engineers may seem to all be very similar but in fact they are not. You can’t expect someone to want to do the same things that you want to do for all the same reasons. Some people care about money, some about life balance, and some about challenging work or career development. I find this to be key to being a good manager because by understanding what a person’s motivations are, you can assign them work that they can be successful at. This training course also was very clear about what is and what is not appropriate in a work environment. In a similar vein, I also took a class that included the Meyers-Briggs Inventory. This was an eye opener for me because it showed how much diversity there is in the various personality types and how the different types are perceived. It also provided suggestions for how to deal with the different types. In engineering there are a few common ones, but there are always some people that are different and harder to read and work with. I happen to be an INTJ in case you are familiar with this method of personality evaluation.
As my career progressed, I signed up for more intensive training courses that spanned longer periods of time. Another company that I worked for footed the bill for a year long class that required me to travel to San Francisco monthly. This program was designed for high potential women managers with a minimum of 7 years of supervisory experience who were being groomed for senior management positions. The program and others like it are run by an organization called Women Unlimited. If you are a woman manager or if you have one reporting to you, I’d suggest investigating this. I found it to be one of the most useful training programs that I ever attended.
Once I got to Director and VP level positions my training focus changed. Now I find it to be a lot more self-directed and individualized. I continue to read books and articles voraciously to learn about new trends and ideas. For the last few years at my last company I met weekly with a psychologist who works with leadership teams at small companies as a career coach. He taught me to depend not only on my analytical capabilities but also on my intuitive abilities. He also taught the leadership team as a whole to be more focused and to use empathy in dealing with one another as a way to speed resolution of issues. This was invaluable. A lot of times in business we focus solely on the analytic and reasoning aspects of our work and little on the people and relationship issues.
These days I also enjoy sharing the knowledge that I have accumulated. As those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know, last year I presented at the IGDA Leadership Forum. I enjoyed preparing my presentation and sharing my management experiences so much that it compelled me to start this blog and become more active in the Web2.0 world. There are a number of pages on this website that give management instruction through examples. I also frequently post and comment upon interesting articles and topics that are personal growth, business, and management related. I am experimenting with the use of twitter to share additional articles that I find interesting that I don’t necessarily feel the need to comment about. I have a regular following on both of these mediums, and it is growing. This is really cool.
Keep on learning. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like you have enough time or that it is worth the effort involved. Do it, you never know when what you’ve learned might come in handy.
Categories: Leadership · Personal
Tagged: Diversity, Leadership, Learning, Motivation, Personality Types, Stress, Women in Business
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience article research showing that having a positive attitude improves problem solving through the use of insight.
“The distinction between insight and analytic solving has been anecdotally recognized for millennia and has been the subject of scientific inquiry for nearly a century (e.g., Duncker, 1945; Maier, 1930; Kohler, 1917). A plethora of behavioral evidence details how these two solving processes differ. Analytic processing involves deliberate application of strategies and operations to gradually approach solution. Insight, which is considered a type of creative cognition, is the process through which people suddenly and unexpectedly achieve solution through processes that are not consciously reportable. Insight solutions tend to involve conceptual reorganization, often occurring after solvers overcome an impasse in their solving effort, and are suddenly able to recognize distant or atypical relations between problem elements that had previously eluded them (Gilhooly & Murphy, 2005; Smith & Kounios, 1996; Schooler & Melcher, 1995; Weisberg, 1994; Schooler, Ohlsson, & Brooks, 1993; Metcalfe & Weibe, 1987; Metcalfe, 1986). When solution is achieved, these factors combine to create a unique phenomenological experience, termed the Aha! or Eureka! moment.”
The study is pretty dry – and goes through how the experiment was setup in detail. However I think the outcome clearly is expected. I don’t know about you, but when I am in a positive mood and not anxious I am able to do much better at making cognitive leaps. The more stressed out I get, the more I fall back into “brute strength” mode and use analytical capabilities to solve problems.
Categories: Tactical
Tagged: Attitude, Problem Solving, Stress
Bear with me. This isn’t one of my usual posts today. It’s written in memory of someone that I wish I would have been able to get to know better. If he would have had someone close to him who had access to this information, he might still be with us today. Bye Reggie – I’ll miss you.
This subject is really serious, and it is really uncomfortable. In today’s economy there are a lot of people that are feeling completely hopeless for a lot of different reasons. Their jobs are stressing them out completely, they are at the end of their rope financially (and possibly at the end of their bank account and credit), many people have lost their jobs. There is a huge amount of suffering going around and some people just do not have the coping mechanisms to deal with the amount of pain that they are in. For some of those people, the only solution they can come up with is suicide. The leading cause of suicide is untreated depression. In these times, depression is a lot more common. This article talks about how work, depression, and suicide can be related.
“A 2005 UK study of 250,000 employees found people with low job satisfaction were most likely to experience emotional burnout, have reduced self-esteem and suffer from anxiety and depression. Even a modest drop in job satisfaction could lead to burnout of “considerable clinical importance”, the report said, adding: “The relationships are particularly impressive for aspects of mental health, specifically burnout, lowered self-esteem, anxiety, and depression, where it can now be confirmed that dissatisfaction at work can be hazardous to an employee’s mental health and wellbeing.” (5)
A 2007 study (6) of almost 1,000 32-year-olds found 45 per cent of new cases of depression and anxiety were attributable to stressful work. The researchers defined a highly demanding job as involving a lack of control, long hours, non-negotiable deadlines and a high volume of work (Hazards 100).
Overall 10 per cent of men and 14 per cent of women in the study suffered a first episode of depression or anxiety over the year-long study. But the risk was double in those with the highest pressure jobs, according to the paper published in the August 2007 issue of Psychological Medicine.”
Here is a resource for depression signs.
There are a lot of things that you can do when you recognize that your friend or coworker is having suicidal thoughts. When people bring this up – it is a cry for help. People who really are contemplating taking their own lives will talk about it first.
Here and here are some resource to help you talk to someone who is feeling like they can’t go on.
Categories: Personal
Tagged: Job Satisfaction, Stress
Psychology Today reports that “You’re not alone in shunning center stage—shyness and social anxiety are as natural as breathing. But doing advance prep for a party or taking small social risks can lead to breakthroughs in confidence. Here’s how to relish even the brightest of spotlights.” in this article
I find that a lot of this advice really has helped me perform better in job interviews and when giving high pressure presentations to large audiences. I am a fan of the technique of “throwing oneself into a situation”.
- Are you uncomfortable giving presentations? Volunteer to do a small one and prepare for it extremely well.
- Do you hate making small talk with strangers? Go to parties where you will only know the host.
- Do you get tongue tied during interviews? Have a friend ask you practice questions in advance.
Really – it isn’t that bad. Yes, it can stress you out, but if you look at it differently – as an opportunity to gain experience that will only last a certain predefined amount of time you can get through it. Once you get through it once, the second time isn’t so bad. Lather, rinse, repeat. Once you do something three or more times it becomes second nature and is on its way to becoming a habit.
One key strategy that I’ve employed is to really work at making the other person feel comfortable. You aren’t the only one who dreads these types of situations. Complement a pretty dress or unique piece of jewelry. Poke fun at a common acquaintance (Don’t be cruel though). Self deprecating humor tends to work pretty well too.
Categories: Tactical
Tagged: Confidence, Learning, Stress
Not too long ago I wrote about surviving the pressures cooker and some strategies that can help keep you healthy during periods of extended crunch time at work. Recently I found
this Harvard Business Review article that echoes a lot of my thoughts but also discusses how stress can be good for your productivity and how to recognize when you have gone past the tipping point into unhealthy stress. I had an AH-HA! moment when I saw the Yerkes-Dodson Curve. I’ve seen other people hit that tipping point many times, and I’ve experienced it personally. Just knowing that it happens to everyone at some level or stress or another is reassuring.
Categories: Tactical
Tagged: Stress
Have you ever worked on a high-stress project where it seems like the entire team becomes ill? Typically a cold or flu runs rampant through the organization. It hops from one key person to another and it seems that nobody is spared. People work until they drop, making others sick. I’ve found that this happens near the end of a long hard push. Everyone is tired. Everyone has been working long hours. It seems to be at its worst when a deadline just isn’t being met no matter how hard the team works. Everyone is disappointed, people feel like they are failing, no matter how audacious or impossible the goal.
I firmly believe that the people affected this way have some key characteristics in common.
- The first one is that they care. I mean they really care about the success of the project and they will do everything within their power to ensure that success.
- The second is they don’t have experience with failure. I’ve found that once you’ve looked into the ugly maw of a botched project or a failed company and survive that you realize that no matter how much you want to succeed that sometimes you can’t force that success no matter how hard you try. There are times that these things quite frankly are out of your control.
- The third is that they don’t take care of themselves first.
I’ve been in situations where I’ve worked 100+ hour weeks. I’ve worked 6 and 7 days a week for long stretches at a time. I’ve spent death march weekends and holidays in the office. I’m not proud of it, it doesn’t reflect well on work-life balance. At the time it was necessary for company survival. When I made sure to spend some time to take care of myself – eat right – exercise – get enough sleep I fared much better. Yes, that meant that a lot of things got dropped in my life. My yard was a wreck, my house didn’t get cleaned, my husband had to pick up all of the slack and his job isn’t a cake walk either.
I’ve learned through personal experience that the third item is key. Well, at least it is for me. I put exercise pretty close to the top priority in my life. It improves my outlook on life, reduces my stress and helps me sleep well at night. These days I work out every day at lunch including weekends. I lift weights twice a week, I do body weight exercises (pushups, chinups, dips, burpees etc) twice a week, I play volleyball for a few hours on Sundays, and I get some sort of interval training/aerobic exercise two to three times every week. Now that the weather is getting nicer I try to walk for an hour now and then, or I do yoga inside instead in the evening.
Most people resort to other tactics to survive long stretches of overtime. They live on caffeine, sugar, and fast food. They stop exercising. They get little sleep. Unfortunately this not only makes one less productive it also makes a person much more likely to get really really sick.
Remember – take care of yourself first. You’re the only you that you’ve got.
Categories: Tactical
Tagged: Balance, Productivity, Stress
Engineers by nature have to deal with uncertainty. If there is a species that always can come up with a worst case scenario, it would be the engineer. That is what we do for a living. Build something, and then figure out what can break it. Next, determine a contingency plan. All good engineers do this. We can’t help it. Normally this is a really good thing, unless the anxiety it provokes prevents you from being able to do your job successfully. Just remember, there are a lot of people out there who don’t ever think about what can go wrong. Sometimes those people are meandering through life without a plan, sometimes they are going through foreclosure on a house or a car they didn’t realize they can’t afford, and worst case they are in jail wondering what the heck happened. If you are anxious about the negative possibilities you are much less likely to have them happen to you.
What do you do if your anxiety over the worst case scenario paralyzes you? This is a hard thing to overcome, but in order to really be successful in business there are times when you have to just go with your gut feeling. You need to make sure that you don’t over analyze everything. If you do, you can spend more hours worrying about what can go wrong and rejiggering your plan than it would take to actually get the job done! Sometimes it is necessary to just give yourself an arbitrary deadline. After so many hours (or days) you just need to choose a direction or make a decision. Usually providing a self-imposed end date will be enough to motivate you to do what is needed to figure things out, without spiraling down into fearful scenarios and worry. Eventually you will learn that making a decision – any decision – is better than wallowing in indecision for an extended period of time. Worst case you can always change direction if things aren’t working out quite as planned. Getting that experience, figuring out what isn’t working can be quite invaluable. Yes, it takes extra time, but so does not making a decision in the first place.
Some of you might be thinking – well – what if my worst fears come true? So what? As long as you aren’t endangering life how bad can it be? Seriously… You’ll just need to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and try again. I’ve started companies that didn’t quite get off the ground like I had hoped. I’ve gone without a salary for a year. I’ve taken on positions that I was completely unsuited for and that caused great personal stress. I’ve missed critical deadlines. What happened? Well, I am still here and I am a whole lot smarter than I was when I started in my career. Everything that I didn’t succeed at the first time was a terrific learning experience for me. In retrospect surviving failure and really crummy times has reduced my anxiety level.
If this is the first time that you are faced with this type of situation it might feel overwhelming. The first time you are afraid that you will really mess something up and fail is a stressful situation. Do your best to realize that it *will* get better. The maturity that comes with hardship is key to your personal and professional growth. No one succeeds at everything they try. If you expect to, you are just setting yourself up for a really rough experience psychologically.
Categories: Tactical
Tagged: Stress
