Raising productivity raises anxiety

Your job as a leader is to drive change (otherwise you’re a manager). Most people don’t like change, and it worries them. So part of the burden of being a leader is accepting responsibility for generating anxiety. Funny they didn’t mention that at the Careers Fair...

The Rock: Drive productivity to survive and grow (both personal and organisational).

The Hard Place: Adversely affect the mental health of people in your care.

What’s the issue?

Anxiety isn’t just a mental health issue, it’s a financial health issue too. Anxiety is killing your productivity. But you don’t see that because most people are world class at keeping their anxiety hidden. The non-clinical, common-or-garden anxiety that we all feel from time-to-time about the increasingly uncertain road ahead often presents as happy and engaged. But here’s what’s going on behind those doors you haven’t really opened yet:

1 Your people are overthinking stuff, and it’s nearly always the wrong stuff. A study from Penn State showed that 90% of what we worry about never happens, but nevertheless the resulting anxiety is 100% real. So the chances are, your staff are pole-axing their own productivity by digging themselves into a hole, when they could be converting all that energy into velocity.

2 They’re self-isolating, thinking that ‘a problem shared is a problem doubled, and one which will label me as a problem’. The reason we’re all so good at curating (a.k.a. marketing) our lives on social media is that we’re all naturals at hiding our shadows. You’re no doubt striving for more collaboration, but it’s being silently thwarted by people who are holding back. Vulnerability, transparency, openness? These are great antidotes to anxiety, but to the anxious mind they can seem like kryptonite.

3 They’re risk averse. The anxious mind makes stuff up and then imagines how it could all go wrong. Risk management needs this perspective, but it also needs the balance of ‘what could possibly go right?’. Without it, you’re going nowhere fast. Which means you’re going backwards. All change carries risk, which is why all leaders generate anxiety.

Consider this

1 Ask your team how they’re doing before you ask them what they’re doing. Look for signs of withdrawal. Listen to what people aren’t saying – read between their lines. Be patient but be there for them.

2 Assume that your team is normal – which means that 73% of them have felt anxious within the last 2 weeks. Now have the roughest of guesstimates about what that’s doing to your productivity.

3 Prepare yourself in advance to have personal conversations if people do open up to you. Roosevelt: ‘People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care’.

Remember you have a fiduciary responsibility for your bottom line and a pastoral responsibility for your people. If you only drive for results without care for the people, your results will fail sooner rather than later. But care for the people, and they will deliver results forever.

Try this

Go and look for signs of anxiety: listen to people who aren’t talking; look for signs of avoidance; ask questions that will uncover symptoms of stress.

At HPC, we developed Adaptability Based Leadership with the express purpose of raising productivity through more engaged, better led staff. If that approach resonates, contact me and let’s get you started on the next phase of your journey towards mastering leadership.