Stress
My work could be f*cking stressful. I mean its intense — but over the last 12 months — I’ve been experimenting with hacks to “take control”.
One realisation I’ve had is recognising that stress is an outcome of the decisions I make, and hence I can take control of it.
Stress from above
A quite common cause of stress in the modern workplace is your boss.
This manifests itself in many ways. Bosses put pressure on teams to “deliver” against plans they’ve committed to — and sometimes they put pressure on teams to deliver on plans the teams haven’t committed to.
Sometimes, for a bunch of reasons, you end up committing to your boss a bunch of stuff you have no control of. This could be to impress them; or because you feel you need to, to meet their expectations.
This causes good stress at first, as it motivates you to work hard, to prove yourself and usually to make a difference to your customers and ultimately your business, but over time you can end up lying to yourself, your team, making excuses, and compromising on the things that really matter to your customers in order to meet these kinds of commitments. Ultimately working hard to make a promise happen — that was made for a not so great reason — can drive the wrong behaviours in product and marketing.
Working hard to solve customer problems or figuring out how to reach them better should have its own positive momentum and should only need commitments to your self to move forwards.
Managing this stress
There’s a really simple solution for this kind of stress. Don’t over-promise. And if you do promise — be clear that it’s a guess.
In my current role, obsessing about growth can be stressful. The reality is that we grow at the rate at which we solve problems for our customers.
Its very hard to predict the rate at which we will do this, the most we can aspire to have are teams feeling increasingly confident of their ability to move their KPIs through building conviction on what matters to our customers.
It’s very hard to turn growth into a systemic “hack” to deliver shareholder value or positive cash flows. All I think you can sell to financial markets is positive momentum (and ideally acceleration) in product and marketing KPIs that demonstrate you are getting better at solving problems. I think it’s pretty hard to maintain the illusion of certain returns.
This is all easier said than done — and is dependent on two skills:
1. The skill of saying “No” and knowing everything is going to be ok. You’ll still have a job; you won’t be classed as a failure — and the business will continue.
2. The skill of being open to help. If someone else could solve this better than you, be open to finding them and getting them to help you — even if this means hiring a replacement to you.
For me personally — it meant driving a transparent dialogue on:
- How much are we really in control of growth.
- How much visibility do we have on how we are going to be growing over the next 12 to 24 months?
One interesting variant of this is when a startup is in the situation where it’s dependent on 2 or 3 things to deliver to “survive”. For example you are making bets on growth, movements in product metrics and marketing improvements in order for the business to get to cash flow positive. Obviously it’s trite to advise not to get into this situation — but sometimes you don’t have a choice.
You can make those kinds of bets if you feeling overly aggressive, or you have a competition in the market or financial constraints you need to meet. But in doing so you should recognise you are betting the business on solving those problems.
Second cause of stress — your team (peers)
The second cause of stress — is when the momentum of the organisation is in a direction that fundamentally compromises your values.
This is caused by other people — having a slightly different set of values to yourself. Given everyone is different this is bound to happen at some point.
This is more insidious, harder to spot when it happens as it frequently happens slowly. The root of this cause of stress is the level of arrogance that you have.
Managing this stress
There isn’t a silver bullet to make this stress disappear, only coping strategies. One I’ve seen work quite well is to start by assuming that other people in the organisation with different values from yourself are right. You need to explicitly call them out on their different behaviour and ask them to rationalise the principles behind their decision making — but do this in a way that doesn’t victimise them for being different — but encourages them to iterate the culture — as they may have had an insight
The most you can do is try to understand where your colleagues are coming from, try to have value based conversations with them — that aren’t patronising or condescending — but strive to understand their basis for decision making. They are either going to help you, or you are going to help them. Obviously hiring for values can reduce this level of stress.
Third cause of stress — yourself
The number 3 cause of stress is self-inflicted. This is the easiest to manage — and is best described as being unhappy with yourself. If you can separate it from the above — (when other people are unhappy with you) — its pretty good kind of stress.
This kind of stress keeps you motivated and keeps you turning up to work.
Mastering yourself
The key to mastering this stress is to recognise that you’ve made a deliberate decision to make a commitment that you are trying to keep. You are in complete control of this stress.
A slight variation of this is when as a leader you are stressed out with one of your teams not delivering as you would expect. i.e. you’re in danger of becoming the boss from above. I think the key to mastering this stress is to recognise if a team is not working — it’s your problem, not the team’s and you need to figure a way to help them better (one of the most effective ways I’ve found to help teams — is to leave them alone).
Conclusions
I think reflecting on the above — the key to stress — is to realise you are in control of it through the decisions you deliberately take:
- Decisions on what you choose to commit to and care about.
- Decisions about how you choose to react to peers who are heading in a slightly different direction.
- Decisions about how you help your team.
- Decisions about how hard you push yourself.
If you are in control of the decisions you make, then you are in control of the stress.
Follow me on Twitter here: @nilanp
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