In a previous post, I laid out importance of being a stress resilient leader.
In order to sustain steady, high level performance, leaders must become stress resilient in order to deal with the demands of the role.
Lack of stress resilience leads to reductions in performance due to decreases in cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence, and health.
In short, chronic stress is a real danger for you as a leader.
According to Dr. Henry Thompson, the good news is that you can increase your stress resilience. This boils down to working on your stress management capacity, cognitive resilience, and stress resilient emotional intelligence.
Let’s go into each of these in turn:
Stress Management Capacity (SMC)
SMC is the “total ability the leader has to manage stress.” Every leader has a finite SMC capacity or comfort zone. Go a little above the comfort zone and you begin to experience burnout. Go a little below and rustout comes into play.
Working for too long in the burnout and rustout zones will negatively impact a leader’s cognitive abilities, emotional performance, decision-making, and health.
Burnout occurs while you are in periods of high stress. Although peak performance lies in the burnout zone, you will not be able to stay at this level for very long. I bet you’ve known leaders over the course of your career who look like a heart attack waiting to happen. You can literally see the stress coming off of them. This is burnout.
On the other hand, rustout is a low stress situation. While low stress might sound appealing, experiencing low stress for an extended period of time is not good for you. Staying too long in rustout leads to boredom, loss of purpose, and low motivation. Some studies even show the health effects of rustout are even more harmful than burnout.
How to Improve your SMC
Improving your SMC involves systematic effort to literally push the envelope of your comfort zone in order to expand your upper and lower stress boundaries. Influencing factors in this regard include:
– Meaning: having a higher purpose for your life
– Commitment: pledging to do your best
– Control: your ability to mitigate stress
– Motivation: drive to take action to deal with stress
– Awareness: knowing when you are under stress
– Reality: looking your situation square in the eye
– Sensitivity: keeping stress in perspective
– Coping: implementing stress reduction techniques
Changing your stress boundaries will take effort. Your mind and body will attempt to maintain your current ones. The best way to go after it is to work on it bit by bit, attacking the smaller stress inducers first. Ensure you choose a stress point that occurs at or near the transition areas between the comfort zone and burnout and rustout zones since work in this area is most conducive to expanding your SMC.
Cognitive Resilience (CR)
Cognitive resilience ensures that the effects of stress do not adversely impact your memory, your ability to process information, the speed at which you process that information, and your ability to reason clearly.
The idea with CR is to protect and increase the cognitive functioning you have while under stress.
You might be experience a loss in cognitive functioning if you are forgetting details, having to slow down to take in information, asking for the same information again, or having trouble with analysis, reasoning, and calculations.
How to Maintain and Increase CR
Dr. Thompson advocates a “cognitive functioning dashboard” that you can visualize to increase awareness of your cognitive state and whether or not your performance is dropping. The components of the dashboard include your memory, ability to retrieve information, and your reasoning sharpness.
One of the key enemies of CR is lack of sleep to include chronic sleep loss. It’s really important to know how much sleep you need and then to fight to get that amount of sleep each week. Short naps can be a huge help in closing your sleep deficit.
Another idea is to use performance aids. In other words, if you don’t absolutely have to remember something, don’t. Use a reference or checklists to help out. This not only includes Google, but also your employees. Strive to offload the extraneous cognitive tasks that take away from your CR.
Making decisions in advance is another way to sustain your CR. An example of this is an emergency plan in the case of a tornado. Rehearsal of these advance plans also helps with CR.
Stress Resilient Emotional Intelligence (SREI)
If you have stress resilient emotional intelligence, you have “the ability to resist the negative influences of stress on the emotional aspects of decision making by flexing and adapting to sudden change.”
When stress levels go up, a leader’s ability to act in an emotionally intelligent way goes down, sometimes catastrophically. If you aren’t emotionally intelligent you begin to miss important information coming from your own emotions, your ability to accurately assess the emotions of others, and to act in an emotionally appropriate way.
So not only does cognitive intelligence go down under stress, so does emotional intelligence. This is a negatively reinforcing spiral that you want to avoid.
How to Increase SREI
As with all components of stress resilience, it’s important to be aware when your EI is impacted by stress. Your EI dashboard includes your energy level, mood, time focus, and emotional control. Decreases in any of these areas are indicators that something may be going on that’s affecting your EI.
Signs such as increased emotional intensity, flying off the handle, putting off decisions, avoiding difficult conversations (or eagerly seeking them out) are all warning indicators.
Also be aware of bodily indicators such as increases in heart rate and breathing, sweating, redness and blotching, twitching, and hot spots.
Another technique is simple: ask yourself how you feel. Actually bringing your emotions into consciousness is a great way to step back and regain perspective.
Getting the proper amount of sleep does wonders for EI. You might have noticed that when you are sleep deprived it is much harder to keep your emotions in check, much less be aware of emotional cues from others.
Putting it all Together
When your stress management capacity, cognitive resilience, and stress resilient emotional intelligence are working together, you have the capacity and the reserves to productively deal with and manage stress.
In unison, these three aspects of stress resilience create synergy to ensure you are successful while avoiding a catastrophic leadership failure.
In my final post on stress resilience, I’ll give you 7 best practices to prevent stress.
By Joe Scherrer | The Leadership Crucible