Stress Management

There is something clear for any team member, constantly the stress is something we should handle with, in some situations our patience is going to be put on test and the best actions to take are based on various frameworks. However, I would like to approach this topic from the management perspective.

I can remember one manager I had during my career and his best soft-skill was the stakeholders handling during failures on the production stage of our product. Although, the users were pushing to fix bugs on production and the development team was full speed working, my manager was facing both sides and doing something I haven’t seen before, he was “absorbing the stress” and avoiding overload the development team and generate more stress. We should improve our negotiation and communication skills to convince our stakeholders that we our doing our best for them. It might seen easier for the managers move the stress to the teams and overwhelmed them, nevertheless, the movement might be received wrongly.

Accepting the unexpected and uncertainty in our projects is the best way to start controlling our stress level and avoid the perfection as goal for every task, otherwise, we will be running behind the impossible and eternally under pressure.

I would like to recommend the book “How To Win Friends & Influence People” by Dale Carnegie, in one of the chapters the author speaks about avoid confrontation and conflicts. I cannot express how useful that mindset is in project management, understanding the stakeholders point of view for requirements and team point of view for estimations is crucial to have healthy environments.