Research has shown that as stress levels rise, leaders tend to become more binary in their decisions, shoot from the hip and end up stressing out employees – none of which are good for the company.
Stress Impacts Taking Risks
In a stressful situation, it’s possible for the fight-or-flight instinct to take over causing individuals to take risks they wouldn’t under normal circumstances. Research by the Association for Psychological Science indicated that men and women approach risk taking differently under high stress. Men tend to engage their fight-or-flight responses and make quick decisions without well thought out plans, where women tend to pull back and could risk engaging in analysis paralysis. Either way, these extremes don’t work in the long run.
Stressing Out Employees
When things start to pile up and leaders begin to feel out of control, they could either get too involved or dump everything on employees. In one extreme, leaders may feel they need to ramp up their authority and micromanage everything and everyone, which could cause disruption to their company’s work flow and overall employee happiness. Another response behavior would be leaders forcing tasks onto employees without any direction or consideration if the employee is prepared/qualified to take on these tasks and end up abandoning them to figure it out.
Delivering Bad News in the Worst Way
There’s no good way to deliver bad news. Under stressful situations leaders may opt for the “ripping the Band-Aid off” or “soften the blow” approach – neither one turns out well for the boss or employees. Under normal circumstances leadership would take time to craft out their thoughts and have a blend of both approaches. He suggests for leaders to set aside the fear and write out a clear message with non-judgmental language and no longer than three sentences.
Decisions Become Too Extreme
Under stressful conditions leaders could end up simplifying everything and narrow it down to a binary solution versus evaluating all the options available to make a healthy decision. During these moments, leaders may tend to resort back to previous paths of success that may not be relevant for new challenges. Research authors Campbell, Whitehead and Finkelstein suggest the following to help leaders avoid impulse decisions and lower stress: Make sure to list out all the options and boundaries needed for this decision, list out the main decision makers and influencers, and engage your decision-making practices set up in the organization. Read more about reducing stress levels at TechCo
