Susan Scott's Blog, page 14

Identify and Manage Micro-Stressors

Year of Resilience Tip 3: Beware of Micro-Stressors

 

Micro-stressors are like bees. One is annoying but a swarm could be deadly. It’s rarely the crisis events that derail you. It’s the small unseen stressors that accumulate until you are overwhelmed. The resilient tip this week is to identify and manage those micro-stressors and prevent long-term stress events.

What are micro-stressors and how can you manage them?

When most of us think of stress, we think of massive traumatic events such as financial calamity, job loss, devastating health news, and sudden severe accidents. Psychologists categorize these as traumatic stressors. This is a helpful category. By using this vocabulary we can separate out the big events from the small daily stressors.

The good news is that most people handle big events with resilience.  Because we are accustomed to seeing these events on the news or in the lives of friends and family, we’ve already done mental preparation for when disaster hits. Also, this is when our communities and networks step up and assist us in these tragic moments.

Think about the most recent natural disaster you’ve seen on the news. Last year where I lived, a massive tornado swept the state around Christmas.  Wind destroyed homes and towns for over 200 miles. Large swaths of devastation ripped through neighborhoods. Many people lost their homes and several lives were lost.  Within hours people from all over the country descended upon these communities cleaning and rebuilding. Food, water, and gifts showered these towns so much that they asked them to stop. 

Even today, a year later, networks have helped most people rebuild their lives. While the survivors of this tragedy will always have scars on their hearts, they picked up the pieces and rebuilt and even thrived.  

 

Humans are amazingly resilient in the face of catastrophe but we are crushed under the pressure of little things.

Because the little stressors are so easy to ignore we underestimate their impact. Yet they build up inside our hearts and minds and eventually overwhelm us. This is what leads to burnout and anxiety in the workplace. It’s what causes many to quit or underperform. 

The buildup of micro-stressors not only damages our mental health but impacts our physical body and leads to a wide range of physical symptoms like high blood pressure, chest pain, insomnia, decreased immune function, gastrointestinal issues, etc.

If you want to tackle stress in your life you must start with the small stuff. Managing the small stuff prevents large-scale stress collapses.

Identifying Micro-stressors

According to research published in the Harvard Business Review, there are 12 main drivers of micro-stressors that can be broken down into 3 main categories.

Drain to our personal capacityDeplete our emotional reservesChallenge our identity or values

Micro-stressors that drain our personal capacity would include tensions in the ways we work with other people. You’ve felt this when you are asked to do more work than you expected or have limitations placed on your ability to do your job. 

Those that deplete our emotional reserves cause negative thoughts and feeling to bubble up inside. A great example would be stressful or confrontational conversations or interactions with negative people. 

When we feel internal friction because someone damages our confidence, forces us to violate personal values, or disrupts our network, these cause stress by challenging our identity.

Most of us have accepted these as a part of normal life, and rarely find ways to manage their impact internally or externally. However, your ability to be resilient is dependent on addressing these daily stressors.

So how do you begin managing those micro-stressors?  

Cultivate self-awareness

First, realize your stressors are as unique as you. It’s easy to see in others but hard to see in ourselves. Do you know the stress buttons you can push on friends to stir up their emotions?  Of course, you do. In fact, you probably push them occasionally, sometimes intentionally (for fun).

What are the buttons people push that get under your skin and even send you into high anxiety?  Take some time to do a quick inventory of the events and actions that irritate you. Use the three categories of micro-stressors to help spur the process.  Reflect at the end of the day for a week or two and notice what increased your agitation.  Shortly, you will have a list you can begin managing. Until awareness happens you can’t manage it. 

Unfortunately, even for the most self-aware among us we still have blindspots. In fact, those blindspots are the ones that really damage our inner peace and lead to higher levels of stress. How do you uncover those blindspots so you can develop a strategy to manage them?

Develop external resources

This is why therapy or honest friends can be so helpful. They can help you find the areas you can’t see.  

Over the past several years research has been done to find biomarkers that indicate a stress event in your life. Not only do stressors impact your mental peace and internal state but impact your physical health. Various hormones elevate, blood pressure rises, and heart rate increases during times of stress. One key indicator that continues to appear in research is heart rate variability or HRV. The beauty of HRV is that it has become easier to measure due to wearable tech like Apple Watches and Fitbits.  

Noticing spikes and anomalies in all these biomarkers indicate a micro-stressor has happened in your life. 

Now you can have a microscope on your inner world.  Matching up those events to your daily calendar can help you discover those blindspot stressors

If you need a tool for finding blindspots and micro-stressors, Fierce built one for you. The Pulse App is built on the latest stress biomarker research. It syncs with wearable tech and connects to your calendar to find these hidden stress events.  We compiled the experience of 20+ years of helping the Fortune 500 manage conflict, create personal connections, and navigate workplace relationships into a library of stressors you experience. An AI coach matches the information in that library and directs you to skills fully customized to what stresses you so you can manage it.

In summary, if you want to build true resilience, pay attention to your micro-stressors and use them as a personal development tool for greater workplace success.

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The Power of Good Communication

I was doing some self reflection the other day and was struck by this notion that where I am in my career and in my life, goes way back, I can trace it back to my childhood. I was a child of the 70’s and the 80’s and watched far too much television. What I recall from that is that I was often frustrated by these shows that I watched.

There was all kinds of discord and disharmony and it all came back to communication. Person A was not clear in their communication to person B. It caused that person to behave in a certain way, which was less than desirable. Or person A chose not to communicate, not to say something, it led person B to behave in a certain way. While that’s good television and it’s keeps you coming back, it’s not good for our lives and companies that were a part of.

Good communication can be incredibly powerful to organizations and individuals alike.

The work that comes out of the Gallup organization with focusing on workplace engagement shows us the importance of creating clear expectations for people. We all want to know clearly, what’s expected of us and where we have room to bring our strengths to bear.

We can recognize companies like Cognize, out of the UK, has shown us how costly miscommunication can be. It causes rework, duplication of efforts or missed opportunities that exist in the workplace day after day. Good, powerful, strong, clear communication can help to avoid that and to minimize that.

While that can be overwhelming, because communication can be so broad to define and can feel really overwhelming. What we focus on are the conversations that each one of us has day in and day out. They’re the work of every single one of us in an organization, the workhorse of an organization like yours and like mine. They get things done. Conversations determine what’s going to happen or not going to happen based on what you’re talking about, who you’re talking with, and who shows up to the conversation.

Which then leads us to ask, as individuals…

How do I do it, how do I communicate more effectively?

Here are a handful of things that I encourage you to try to put into practice for yourself over the course of the coming days and weeks. See what impact they have on your communication and your conversations.

The first one is to be fully present from conversation to conversation. Be here, prepared to be nowhere else. Show up, get rid of your smartphone, put it out of arm’s length. Close your e-mail so that you don’t hear the ping of a new e-mail showing up in your inbox. Really be present with this person in front of you so that you can focus on the conversation and achieve the outcomes that both you and they desire.

The other thing I’d encourage you to put into practice is some curiosity. I know a lot of people are consider themselves to be very clear and straight shooters, they tell it like it is. Maybe you’ve said that before. You’ve heard others say that which I think is great.

Being able to name things without judgment is critical for all of us.

What I would ask you to consider for yourself is, why do you believe what you believe you know? How did you come to that understanding? Is there some data that you might be missing? Is there new data for you to consider that might in fact cause you to shift your view of a certain situation? Or perspective to expand your view of the information in front of you.

Getting curious and interrogating your own reality, your own view of the world, is essential and you do that in in the course of a conversation by being curious.

One more thing I’d encourage you to put into practice is paying attention to how you leave people feeling after your conversations are over. Every single one of us has, within our power, the ability to lead people with an afterglow after we’re done talking with them.

The unfortunate truth is that we can also leave an after taste, or even aftermath. I invite you to take responsibility for the emotional wake that you leave behind. You own it and pay attention to it.

While communication is broad and it can be overwhelming, it doesn’t need to be

I invite you to pay attention to the conversations you’re having with those around you. The people that are most important to you, colleagues, managers, direct reports, people at home, people that you love and that are valuable to you.

All of this can be achieved one conversation at a time. One conversation at a time, starting with the next one that’s in front of you.

 

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How to Be a Bold and Resilient Leader Who Leads Change

 

What organizations need now more than ever are resilient leaders willing to be bold and lead their people through change. Times are disruptive. Employee morale may be at its lowest level in years. We are all still recovering from the effects of the pandemic. 

Unfortunately, the burden rests on the shoulders of leaders. But you can lead your people through these unprecedented times by developing and displaying the qualities of resilient leaders throughout the ages. 

Harvard Business School Professor Nancy Koehn states:

“Resilience is the capacity to not only endure great challenges but get stronger in the midst of them. This is such an extraordinarily important capability because we live in a world that’s one nonstop crisis—one calamity, one emergency, one unexpected, often difficult surprise—after another, like waves breaking on the shore.”

By becoming resilient you communicate power and commitment to your people and enable them to do more than they could on their own. Let’s look at the qualities you need to become a bold and resilient leader. 

 

Characteristics of Bold & Resilient Leaders

 

Self-Awareness

Everyone is watching you. Are you watching yourself? One of the most difficult tasks of leaders is to be self-aware. When surveyed, people think they have high levels of self-awareness, but when tested, the percentage of people with true self-awareness is low. 

Self-awareness makes you an observer of your actions and emotional responses. You take back a measure of control over how you respond to the events that happen in your life. The most interesting outcome of self-awareness is that it actually makes you more open and empathic to others, allowing you to communicate with them more effectively.

Self-awareness is a key trait in becoming more resilient because you understand how you respond to stress and recognize the stressors in your life. Knowing your stressors allows you to build systems to manage their impact on your performance. 

 

Delegates to Develop

In order to accomplish great outcomes and inspire the people around you, you must focus on your strengths and what the organization really needs from you. This will require you to delegate those tasks to keep you from doing those high-priority-focused actions. 

Delegation is difficult because we are fearful others won’t do the tasks up to our standards. Guess what? They won’t be. In fact, it may be better, and it will always be different. Don’t despair over this. Rather than delegating to remove work from your plate, view delegation with a second purpose — team development. You allow your people to develop new and deeper skills when they take on your tasks. Yes, they may not do it perfectly the first time, but you can coach them through the task and have conversations on how to improve. 

Once your people develop the skills to tackle tasks that once distracted you, you’ve increased your own workload capacity and the teams.

 

Confronts with Compassion

Confrontation is a necessary part of leadership. While there may be a handful of leaders who relish the opportunity to prove themselves right and put others in their place, the majority of us dread those difficult conversations. In fact, the leader who finds joy in “toxic” confrontation creates a culture of fear and easily diminishes morale throughout the organization.

Rather than going into a difficult conversation without preparation, it is helpful to have frameworks that you can practice and role-play. When we work with clients in confrontation training, having a framework you can fall back onto when having a discussion creates confidence, and immediately empowers the conversation. Also, remember to make confrontation a conversation where you hold accountable but seek to understand. The goal is to change behavior and hold responsible but due so with respect and honor, so the relationship stays intact.

 

Continuous Learner

When you read biographies on great leaders throughout history, you rarely find one who isn’t a reader and continuous learner. Building on the other competency of self-awareness, part of focused learning should always be to enhance areas of weaknesses. Being curious and willing to expand your knowledge base even outside your industry and areas of expertise. Often the best ideas related to innovation come from interacting with spheres outside our normal work. 

Being a continuous learner also means having a growth mindset. Rather than living in a fixed world where no improvement can occur, you deeply believe change is possible in yourself and others. This motivation is what drives you to explore and continue to learn.

Learn to see every challenge and obstacle as the ability to grow and become stronger, more resilient, and bold in action.

 

Risk Taker

It may be an urban legend, but Albert Einstein is reported to have said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” This accurately describes why leaders are willing to change and take risks. Even the best plans and operational strategies miss the mark. Everyone may be working productively and following plans at a high level, but metrics don’t seem to move. You aren’t getting closer to your objectives.

This is where leadership is needed. Leaders must step in and make the best decisions to shift course. This is often seen by those inside the organization as risky, but staying put and doing the same unproductive action is a greater risk.

Taking risks and communicating those changes clearly to your team is the hallmark of a great leader. Sharing a vision of where the new changes will take them and how it will improve their own performance will garner support and build motivation.

 

Optimistic

Resilient leaders are optimistic regarding their people and the future of the organization. This is not pollyanna positive thinking where you ignore reality with fake smiles. That type of positive thinking can easily be labeled as “toxic positive”. You place a veneer of optimism on a bad situation without taking action to make things better.

The true optimist has a vision of a better tomorrow, recognizes the challenges, and makes the necessary changes to get to that vision. Communicating this type of optimism is magnetic and encourages people to follow your lead because you are supporting them to reach their goals regardless of the obstacles they may encounter.

 

Communicates with Clarity

In a recent Interact/Harris poll, 91% of 1000 employees believe their leaders lack good communication skills. The biggest problem with communication is we all tend to make it one way. For communication to have the clarity it needs to persuade, inspire, or instruct it must be part of a conversation. You have to understand to be understood.

Most of us know this but in the rush to distribute instructions or deliver information we often communicate with the assumption that we are being understood. To communicate with clarity, we must always check to see if our message is being heard. This can only happen through conversation. 

 

Relationship Focused

People are your number one asset in your organization. Just like any asset, it can grow or possibly become a liability. A resilient leader builds a resilient team by deepening the skills and talents of the team.

Relationships can drive progress toward objectives. You bring others along your resilient journey by building trust and being open to differences. When you deepen the relationship with your people, they will be willing to make dramatic changes and accomplish outcomes they could never have done on their own.

 

The Fierce Summary

Becoming a resilient leader can dramatically improve the quality of your employees and team members. You become the example they mirror. Your resilience and boldness begin to rub off and create a culture that becomes stress-proof and focused on achieving growth and objectives.

As we researched the qualities of the resilient leader, we noticed something and if you followed Fierce you might have noticed as well.  Many of those qualities embody the Fierce leader that is the focus of all Fierce programming and the Leader’s Journey we help organizations build. 

If you are looking to build resilience in yourself and your team, check out the resources inside our Leader’s Journey.

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Stress as Energy – use stress to increase your work capacity

Year of Resilience Tip 2: Use stress energy to improve bursts of performance.

 

Have you ever felt the rush of wind and spray of powder speeding downhill on snow skis? The first time you strapped on skis and stood at the top of a hill your stress responses went crazy. Despite the cold, you could feel yourself sweat. Anxiety skyrocketed throughout your body and you had to do some serious self-talk to begin your descent. Even down the hill feelings of panic and fear struck as you worried about falling. But you survived, and if you kept practicing, those stress responses didn’t disappear. They transformed.

Watch interviews with proficient skiers and they all describe those same feelings of exhilaration and excitement that terrified you the first time down the slopes.

What happened?

Your experience transformed those stressors into energy. Stress became performance fuel. 

 

Embracing Eustress

When Selye first defined stress as a phenomenon in the early 20th century, it was originally used for a situation of distress that generated a biological and emotional response. Over time, he noticed that those same responses occurred even in positive situations. To distinguish between negative and positive stressors, he used the term eustress.

The stress response is a normal natural survival mechanism that brings alertness and attentiveness to a dangerous or challenging situation. The problem with the stress response is when it becomes chronic and we stay in a heightened state of awareness eventually leading to physical disease and mental health issues such as anxiety, burnout, or depression. 

Decision-making and problem-solving are heightened in the immediate interaction with a stressful situation. Yet, in a chronic state, those needed skills begin to diminish and worsen. 

The problem isn’t stress, but chronic stress. Avoiding stress altogether would prevent skill acquisition and the ability to become resilient over time. Increased stress can increase productivity, but the stress curve is steep and once you go over the pinnacle of the stress curve, negative effects accumulate. 

 

Stress is rooted in emotional responses and internal energy.

Identifying feelings of stress gives you the ability to funnel those emotions into productive energy. To use it effectively you need to be sensitive to the early warning signs of stress overload before it becomes damaging. 

We have all done this before. Think back to your school days when you procrastinated on a project or exam prep. Suddenly the deadline appears and you find yourself frantically cramming. The panic of being unprepared helps you master the information to successfully pass. But if you lived in that world of daily and hourly deadlines with no recovery periods, you would fail. Unfortunately, that is the world we have often constructed in our work lives.

 

Benefits of Stress

Positive use of stress can give us something to look forward to. It can help us grow and develop into stronger individuals.

Here are several ways that eustress can benefit us:

It provides you with a burst of energyIt can motivate you to reach your goalsIt sharpens your attention and focusesIt can help you accomplish tasks more efficientlyIt can alert you to danger It can help you build resilience It can help you develop a deep connection with others 

 

Psychologist Lev Vygotsky observed that individuals learned best when they were challenged just outside their current comfort zone. He called this the “zone of proximal development”. This is the gap between what you have mastered and what you can achieve with new development.

 

Using Stress to Your Advantage

Researcher Kelly McGonigal identified the stress paradox — “happy lives contain stress, and stress-free lives don’t guarantee happiness.” 

If stress has potential positive benefits by giving us bursts of energy, and enhanced focus, how can we use it to increase our performance and work capacity?

Notice and acknowledge it. Once you notice feelings of stress, don’t fight them. Ask yourself what it is trying to tell you or what you are going to get from it. This places you outside of the stress event as an observer where you can have greater control over your response.Don’t give in to worry. For many of us, our immediate response to feelings of stress is to assume something bad is happening. We begin to worry because it gives a sense of control. Unfortunately, worry drains away your energy.Look for opportunities. Reframe the feelings of stress. The stress response is your body’s way of saying “pay attention to this.” Ask yourself why you feel stressed and if there is an opportunity for you.Use your imagination. Recall a stressful situation you overcame in the past. Your memory can stir feelings of confidence that builds resilience.Create time to recover. To continually use stress as energy for greater productivity, you can’t live in the state. You will crash. You must build time to recover after pushing through the stressor.

These are all mindset shifts you can practice that will increase self-awareness.

 

You will begin to use stress to your advantage and build resilience skills.

Regardless of the occupation, we all are put into high-stress environments from time to time. 

Those events can also build resilience and increase performance when tackled with care. “Training in high-stress situations increases what psychologists call “situational awareness.” Defined as the ability to absorb information accurately, assess it calmly, and respond appropriately, situational awareness is essentially the ability to keep cool when all hell breaks loose,” wrote Steven Kotler in The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance.

Stress is usually triggered by anxiety and uncertainty. Reframing the event allows you to remove one of these components. Anxiety is internal but pausing and asking yourself questions lessens the anxiety. Uncertainty is external. You may not be able to control it, but you can analyze what you already know and understand which gives you partial control.

Integrating these tips into your work life will help you to begin reframing stress and using it to your advantage. Self-awareness is the secret. If you are looking for resources to quickly build self-awareness skills, check out the latest Fierce tools with the Pulse App and the new Fierce Resilience Program.

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Understand Your Stress: Awareness is the Key to Managing it

Year of Resilience Tip 1: Awareness of your stress response is the key to managing it.

The tip this week is to slow down enough to notice what your stressors are.

Let’s start with the stressors.

Can you define stress? 

Believe it or not, this is a fairly new term in human language, and since its invention, the definition has constantly been debated. Physician and endocrinologist Hans Selye coined the term in 1936. Selye noticed biological and hormonal changes in lab animals when exposed to acute stimuli such as blaring lights, loud noise, extreme temperatures, and perpetual frustration. If these conditions became persistent, the animals developed chronic diseases.

The term caught fire but became an amorphous descriptor of any bad experience, especially if connected with negative emotions. The proverbial “fight or flight” response became a stand-in metaphor for stress. When encountering a negative situation, a survival mechanism kicks in as we react. But this reaction doesn’t account for the detrimental effects we all experience from “stress”.

The World Health Organization defines stress as “any type of change that causes physical, emotional or psychological strain. Stress is your body’s response to anything that requires attention or action.”

A Better Understanding of Stress

Rather than focusing on negative reactions as the cause of stress, a better understanding is any event or interaction that causes an internal physical reaction. Your heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure increase. Your muscles tense, and you even sweat more. These reactions cause a rush of chemicals through our body that improves awareness and alertness and can create a wide range of emotional responses. 

Viewing stress as a physical and emotional reaction to life events broadens the definition beyond the negative. Many life events can be exciting and surprising and create the same response. 

The stress response is unavoidable and a natural part of our life. If this response is functioning properly, it works like a wave. An event happens where we need to respond. We become alert and energized and manage the obstacle. Once complete we enter back into a restful mental state to recover from the effects of the event.

Unfortunately, stress becomes negative and disastrous to our mental and physical health when stress overwhelms us in a massively traumatic event or remains high over time.

Traumatic stress vs. Micro-Stressors

How does knowing these facts about stress help you manage those negative emotions and feelings of burnout and anxiety?

Thinking of stress events differently can help you manage stress in your life. Throughout life, we experience two types of stress. Traumatic stress and micro-stressors.

Traumatic stress can be any big event such as hearing bad news about your family, your health, or your job. It could be a catastrophic event or sudden accident. 

Micro-stressors are those daily and sometimes hourly events that cause internal reactions you may never notice because they are so frequent. 

Most of us recover quickly from the traumatic stresses of life because they are sudden and concrete. Usually, we have a network of others who can come alongside us and help us through those events. Segments of our society are built around helping people through these catastrophic events.

It’s those small micro-stressors that others around us never see that can be more detrimental because they put us in a chronically heightened state of stress without any periods of recovery. It is those small micro-stressors that can be damaging to our physical and emotional health long term.

Continued research demonstrates that this form of long-term stress or chronic stress contributes to a range of health problems such as digestive disorders, headaches, sleep disorders, and other symptoms. Studies at Yale revealed that continual stress exposure can cause changes in the brain that decrease resilience and make us more vulnerable to stress. Research from the University of California found that chronic stress increases impulsiveness lowering our decision-making ability.

To build resilience and mitigate the effects of stress in your life it is critical to begin managing your response to the micro-stressors in your life.

Personalized Stress & Self-Awareness

Knowing that daily micro-stressors are the root of the debilitating effects of stress, how do you begin identifying and managing those stressors?

Generic stress management is not the answer to building resilience and blunting the effects of stress.  You must be surgical in the way you approach stress. 

The key is to realize that stress is personal. 

Not everyone responds the same way to stress. Some events that may create a rise in stress levels in some won’t touch another person. You can begin the process and manage stress response by spending some time in self-awareness and watching how you respond to the events of your day. Look at your reactions to the news, meetings, types of work, and interactions with people in your life. 

Ask yourself these questions to get clarity into your stressors: What stressors are distinct to you as an individual because of your unique perception?What events or people stress you out?What tasks cause spikes of emotions?How do you recover from heightened events and emotions?What type of stress management works for you, and the stress you are feeling?

 

Developing stress self-awareness takes time to reflect on your work life and how events impact your internal state. Journaling has proven to be an effective tool and discovering the stressors that impact performance. While effective this process can take time before results become apparent. Self-awareness is hard. Studies have shown that while 95% of people think they are self-aware, only 10-15% truly are. But there is good news.

Recent research has found several biomarkers that indicate levels of stress response. With the prevalence of wearable technology such as the Fitbit or Apple Watch, this data can be mined to quickly build self-awareness. Fierce researchers and developers used this technology to build the Pulse App that identifies those biomarkers of stress. Through a sophisticated AI, those stress markers can be connected to the user’s calendar, identifying stress levels, and tailoring actionable steps to mitigate stress and instill new skills.

Early testing demonstrated stress levels decreased on average by 10% and resilience increased by 11% in as little as 2 weeks. One organization was able to show a $300K increase in revenue and showed a 13% increase in the successful execution of strategic initiatives since implementing Pulse within their organization.

Bottom Line

Focusing on self-awareness skills is a necessary step to beginning to build resilience and mitigate the effects in your life. As self-awareness increases, you will notice other positive side effects such as greater empathy and openness to others. You will be able to manage your energy outputs more effectively. You will utilize your strengths especially as they relate to stressful events.

Take time daily to cultivate self-awareness. To accelerate your progress, the technology inside the Pulse App can help you and your teams develop this skill faster than you thought possible. Coupled with Pulse, Fierce offers the new Fierce Resilience Program built on a better understanding of stress, self-awareness training, and targeted tools to manage your personal stressors.

 

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5 Ways to Make Your Meetings Matter

Comics and critics lampoon meetings for their soul-sucking ineffectiveness. Back in 1957, Satirist and British Naval Historian Northcote Parkinson described a typical committee meeting starting with 4 to 5 members, quickly growing to 9 to 10, then ballooning to 20 members plus. The irony is that as meetings balloon in size less gets done and the work is usually accomplished by 4 or 5 members before and after the meeting.

As Fierce has doubled down its efforts at building resilience and defeating stress, we’ve learned something interesting about meetings. Meetings can be a major stressor that diminishes the capacity for work and can even lead to burnout. One specific client discovered a particular meeting was creating high levels of stress. After analyzing the reasons, it was not intense confrontation or fear of presenting, it was apathy and boredom driving the stress.

Meetings are essential to get tasks done and move forward with the goals of any organization. They provide time for communication, planning, and innovation, but done poorly they can sabotage your efforts at growth. 

When meetings are a waste of time, job satisfaction declines.

And when job satisfaction declines, happiness in general falls.

But it’s not your fault!  Numerous surveys of managers and business schools continually show that less than 25% of managers receive any training on conducting meetings. It’s an assumed skill, but a lack of guidance could be destroying our productivity.

So how do you become more effective at meetings as both a leader and a participant?  Let’s look at some practical tips and then communication strategies that make meetings more effective.

Tips For An Effective Meeting

Many of these tips are simple but can be used as a checklist to determine the effectiveness of meetings prior to putting them on the calendar.

Determine If Necessary. So many meetings are just “rocks” on the calendar. We do them because we’ve always done them. However, there may be no purpose for the meeting. Evaluate the necessity of a meeting and don’t feel bad for trimming them off the calendar.

Invite only the people that need to be there.  Who has the perspectives necessary to make good decisions and those willing to take action on the task at hand? Limit meeting attendance to only those essential to decision-making. This doesn’t mean you only include the c-suite and managerial class in meetings. In fact, including individual contributors allows for leadership development and creates a diversity of perspectives. 

Research into effective meeting size continually points to groups of 5-8 people.

Harvard researcher J. Richard Hackman concluded that four to six members are the best size for most tasks and no work team should have more than 10 members. When you go beyond 10 people, meetings develop performance problems, and interpersonal friction increases “exponentially as team size increases.”

Consider the Ringelmann effect (named after the French engineer Maximilien Ringelmann), as the size of a group increases, the average individual effort falls.

Set A Clear Agenda & Framework. The person in charge of a meeting should create an agenda with purpose prior to the meeting. Feedback from participants as to the agenda topics can be considered as well. To make the meeting run much for effective time limits and schedules should be set in stone. 

Our familiar satirist, Parkinson, is also credited with Parkinson’s Law which states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Make meetings more efficient by having a clear agenda and getting right to the point, and making a commitment to finishing within a reasonable time frame.

Pre-Meeting Action Items. Along with establishing an agenda, clarify any action items or preparation participants will need to take prior to the meeting. Especially for brainstorming, it helps if people can generate ideas prior to the meetings when they are in a private judgment-free zone without influence from the group. 

Take Notes For Publication. Establish one person in the group to be the note-taker. Make sure to summarize key topics and action items. For action items, have those assigned before concluding along with timelines and any follow-ups.

Communication Strategies to Upgrade Your Meetings

Through the development and execution of the Fierce Team program, we’ve learned many essential components that create effective meetings that provide forward progress to any organization

These communication strategies will help improve the content and outcome of your meetings.

Expect Active Participation. Make sure all participants understand that by virtue of the invite they are to actively participate. Setting this expectation prior to the meeting will bring a different level of enthusiasm and engagement. Otherwise, participants assume this is another perfunctory attendance-only meeting.

Create Psychological Safety & Trust. In order to gain the maximum value for all participants during meetings, you must create an environment of trust where there is psychological safety to speak your mind. Building trust is essential, especially for participants that lean toward introversion. Make clear that they are participating because they are valued, and will be expected to contribute.

Create Space for Divergent Thinking. Learn to solicit multiple and even competing perspectives especially when facing a big decision or opportunity. Having competing perspectives brings clarity to the action needed and also to how decisions will be executed. Even when consensus about a decision is reached, divergent perspectives will help to clarify and sharpen the final outcome of the meeting. In fact, if everyone assents to every agenda item, the meeting was pointless and a simple email poll would have been sufficient.

Build Collaboration and Alignment. One of the major stated outcomes of every meeting must be collaboration and alignment. Both only happen through effective conversations. Before the meeting ends make sure everyone understands and is aligned on the same decision. Remember, alignment doesn’t have to mean agreement.

Fierce has built multiple frameworks and tools for developing deep effective conversations.

Practice Effective Conversation Skills –  A good place to start improving your own conversation is through the 4 C’s: clarity, candor, commitment, and completion. Make sure you understand and are understood. Be honest and allow others to show honesty. Express your commitment to one another and the outcomes of the meeting. Understand the exact actions needed at the conclusion of a conversation.

Meetings don’t have to be filled with dread but should be an effective part of work life. Great meetings will enhance and deepen the relationship with your time creating more collaboration and innovation over time.

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4 New Years Resolutions All Leaders Should Consider

Have you started thinking about resolutions for 2023? Over 38% of adults admit to setting New Year’s resolutions each year. Unfortunately, 23% quit within the first week, and only 36% make it past the first month.

Only 9% of adults who set resolutions successfully keep them each year. These dismal numbers might make you throw out the idea of resolutions. However, even if you are unable to keep a resolution, the exercise of developing them and attempting new resolutions is incredibly beneficial. 

Unfortunately, we don’t have secrets to keeping those diet and exercise goals for the New Year, we can help you consider some worthy leadership goals for 2023. 

To simplify all the potential priorities for resolutions you could achieve in the New Year, we’ve pared down a list of the…

4 Most impactful goals to consider.

Even if you choose only one of these items and build action items, your leadership will improve and your team will thank you for it. 

 

1. Listen to Your Team

As leaders, it is so easy to focus on the end goal and major objectives of your organization that we forget to focus on the people who help us meet the goals we need. Often our people are closer to the customers, the service, and the product and have insights that can help us make the best possible decisions to advance more quickly.

Having regularly scheduled feedback sessions is a good practice to keep up with the pulse of your people. Improving your ability to listen by asking great questions is the best way to make those conversations more meaningful.  

Beyond the scheduled meetings, incorporate more informal listening sessions by dropping into teams, sharing a meal, or grabbing a cup of coffee. Showing interest in the activity and work of team members will improve morale. 

One aspect of listening to teams is also being willing to engage in difficult conversations. Many leaders would rather avoid these interactions, but it will help strengthen accountability and build collaborative relationships with all stakeholders. You will also be able to eliminate the negative trade-offs that pit the interest of one stakeholder group against another.

 

2. Consider Employee Well-Being 

Post-Covid, employee engagement, and well-being are constant topics. Quiet quitting and the great resignation along with record levels of burnout forced all of us to reconsider life at work. Hybrid work settings and remote workers have made this task much more difficult than in the past.  If engagement and well-being were not part of your 2023 strategies, now is the time to begin implementing ways to improve well-being.

Continued research at Fierce demonstrates that people need to find purpose and value in their work. In doing so, engagement increases. A key part of increasing engagement is giving people greater autonomy with their decision-making, but also providing development opportunities to improve their skill set.  

 Avoiding isolation and helping people connect through a greater purpose will improve well-being across teams. Stress and burnout continue to be on the rise and helping your people develop greater resilient skills will improve their overall quality of life and workplace happiness.

Celebrate the small wins and continually look for ways to recognize people for their contribution to your team.

 

3. Embed agility into your culture

Because of the speed of change we all experience regardless of your industry, we must adapt and move quickly. One of the quickest ways to become adaptable in your leadership is to increase your agility. 

Agility is a mindset change where responding proactively to changes by adapting quickly as change manifests. Rather than being fully committed to one path, you set action toward a goal and be willing to iterate along the way as more information arises.

It takes brave leadership to allow the freedom for teams to live in an agile world, but doing so leads to greater outcomes. 

To embed agility you must instill an entrepreneurial drive in every employee. This will create a greater sense of autonomy in each contributor and not only get you to your goals faster but increase employee engagement as well.  

In an agile workplace, you provide opportunities for people to showcase their unique abilities.

 

4. Practice self-care

While the first three resolutions were outward-focused, as a leader, self-care is critical to maintaining the ability to make clear decisions, inspire your people, and have the energy to tackle the obstacles and tasks before you.

It’s not only employees who are suffering high levels of burnout, anxiety, and depression. Leaders bear the burden of managing people and achieving organizational outcomes. Learning to manage your stressors will help you become more resilient and self-aware. Increasing resilience will help you bring greater energy and decision-making capabilities to your team. 

Fierce has committed a large portion of our research and development over the last year to understanding stress and how to build resilience. Out of this research, we developed the Pulse App and Fierce Resilience to help individuals and teams to identify stressors throughout their work life and provide tools to mitigate their impact. 

You can begin the process of improving self-care by analyzing those minor stressors in your life. Think through your past year, and what interactions increased internal indicators of stress. Once you identify those areas you can begin to adjust your behaviors, maximizing your strengths and improving your weaknesses. By focusing on your responses to work and becoming more self-aware, you will develop resilience and improve your leadership ability.

 

Resolution Wrap-Up

Whatever resolution you choose, the key to successfully implementing resolutions is to create internal motivation to achieve the resolution. You can do this by developing a strong “why” or reason as the backbone of every resolution. The “why” will keep you on track when distraction and difficulty arise.

Create meaningful and measurable action steps and find ways to turn the resolutions into regular habits. Find others within your organization to share your resolutions so you can keep each other accountable. 

If you are looking for programs to install any of these resolutions, check out the many Fierce programs to further increase Resilience and Teamwork in 2023.

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5 Year-End Workplace Stressors and How to Handle Them

It’s that wonderful time of year of holidays and celebrations. We should be joyful and grateful, enjoying the success of another great year together at work. But, we are often stressed with unfinished work and high-priority items to close out the year. 

The news and social media remind us every day of the rush of year-end and how to cope with holiday stress. We feel it in our work lives too. Staffing is often limited due to vacation time, but work still needs to be completed as we prepare for the next year.

So what are the biggest stressors organizations face throughout the year and how do you manage yourself and people through this time of the year?

Let’s look at….

5 common workplace stressors and how you can minimize the impact on your team…

and set yourself up for a successful New Year!

 

1. Tight Deadlines  & Unrealistic Goals

The jobseekers platform CareerCast surveyed 1,071 of its members and found that tight deadlines were the leading cause of workplace stress. This is a long-term trend in corporate life. As a leader, you can break the cycle. Help your people keep a closer eye on deadlines. 

All of us act surprised each year at the urgent deadlines as we close out the year, but it’s the same year after year. It reminds me of everyone’s reaction to winter each year as if they are surprised by the cold and snow. The cycle is the same and the only way to respond is to prepare and keep your eye on those deadlines before they overwhelm you. We all know how our year-end will resolve and that there will be time off. We are aware of the holiday dates, yet, we are still surprised. This is a perfect time to improve team dynamics and collaboration.

Tight deadlines are often the result of unrealistic goals set earlier in the year. Many times those goals were not modified over the year as market forces or organizational changes took place. Take time at the end of the year to re-evaluate goals, so you can create better processes for the next year. Goal setting and the discussion of deadlines can be an opportunity for collaboration with your people.  Any opportunities to deepen work relationships through productive conversations will increase team dynamics and productivity in the coming year.

2. Interpersonal conflicts

Interpersonal conflicts tend to heighten during the holiday time. As much as all of us like to separate work and non-work life, there’s always a bleed over. Stressors in any area of life will begin to affect you no matter how much you try to compartmentalize yourself. Holidays are stressful times of the year for many people. With the responsibilities of gift-giving as well as family entertainment those stressors often crowd out workplace focus. 

Couple holiday stress with year-end activities such as goal setting, deadlines, and performance evaluation and you have a recipe for short fuses and high anxiety. 

Be patient with people. Realize that everyone may be slightly on edge during this time of year. Increase communication and clarify tasks and requests with greater fervor than at other times of the year.  Recognize contributions and be extra gracious and grateful for the work people perform around you.

3. Isolation

Holidays can be a lonely time of year for many people. Now that many of us work in remote or hybrid settings, we don’t have the daily in-person interactions we may have had in years past. Especially as a manager recognize that natural work isolation due to work settings can lead to greater stress for many people during the holidays

Now is the perfect time of year to celebrate your people. Make them feel an essential and embedded part of the team. Recognition and holiday parties can help immensely when people begin to feel isolated. Talk to your teams more and make sure they are interacting with others.

Set aside time during the end of the year to have fun together as a group. You can also use team events to couple fun, recognition, and work. Goal setting together as a group and identifying those success behaviors that various people and teams did throughout the year accomplishing both values of recognition and collaboration. 

4. Unclear Expectations

It’s that time of year when many of us are giving and receiving. Yet, in the workplace, it’s not a lovely unexpected gift. It’s usually the giving and receiving of performance evaluations. Evaluations create a high level of anxiety for both parties involved. Many times the anxiety is due to unclear expectations. You walk into the evaluation unsure of how you performed or how the manager will respond to your quality of work.

The easiest way to eliminate the stressors around evaluations is to make performance clear throughout the year with constant check-ins and health feedback. In fact, the evaluation time should only be a summary of previous conversations with no surprises. If both parties have been clear with each other on goals, expectations, and accomplishments throughout the year, then evaluations can be a stress-free experience. Evaluations can be a look forward to the next year with improvement plans to exceed and grow from their experience from the previous 12 months of work

5. Change

Because we are at the cusp of a new year, many organizations will use this time to realign teams, goals, and strategies for the new year. New processes and systems are adopted. In some cases, internal reorganization may be on tap for the New Year.

Facing the prospect of such changes can create great stress for many people. As a manager, survey the landscape of potential change expected at the New Year. Begin prepping your people for the changes. Most team members are looking for some sense of security and stability in their jobs and careers. Couch any change as an opportunity for growth so they can be more secure in their skills and the future of their career.

If teams are changing, begin introducing people in teams through meetings and events. Make sure every individual feels ready for potential changes on the horizon in the New Year.

Many of the Fierce programs address the challenges that bubble up during the end of the year. Often year-end magnifies those issues because they weren’t addressed properly throughout the year. You can deepen your abilities to over greater feedback and increase team dynamics through Fierce Team and Fierce Feedback.  

If you sense that stress is becoming overwhelming for your team, consider the new Fierce Resilience program that helps everyone identify stressors throughout the year, so year-end doesn’t feel like an avalanche of anxiety.

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4 Steps to Create Psychological Safety in Your Teams

 

Hello,

I want to share with you an article on Fast Company titled:

Follow these 4 steps to create psychological safety in your teams – It’s not necessarily about being comfortable all the time.

The authors talk about the concept of Radical Candor and Psychological Safety and how they seem at odds with one another. They clarify with:

Radical Candor is not about being brutally honest but instead about caring personally and challenging directly.Psychological safety isn’t about a culture where feelings won’t get hurt and everyone agrees with everything.The authors provide 4 tips to foster psychological safety in teams which include:Solicit FeedbackGive PraiseGive FeedbackGauge your feedback

At Fierce, Radical Transparency and Psychological Safety have been at the core of the approaches we have been instructing for over 20 years with an objective of creating a culture of effective feedback. This is the reason we use “Conversations” as in “WITH”… it is a two-way discussion of understanding and connecting with a focus on enriching the relationship while tackling your toughest challenge, interrogating reality, and provoking learning.

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7 Tips for Successful End-of-Year Planning

 

Your people are your greatest liability….But also your greatest asset!

How can you maximize the ROI for your human assets? Doing so would create a massive productivity increase and impact your bottom line more than any other investment you make.

It’s that time of the year when we all look back at the year and begin to project forward to the next year…

with plans for a better year. Often those plans are purely business and metric driven. What was top-line growth? How about the overall bottom line? Did we hit the milestones and targets on revenue? Did we successfully roll out new processes or products?

All this analysis is necessary and essential to growing your organization. But behind every number is a person or team of people generating that activity. Unfortunately, we all fall into the trap of sticking so closely to the metrics, we never consider the personalities and skill sets behind those metrics. As you begin looking at year-end planning, here are:

 

7 tips that will make planning more people-centered and build a team that can accomplish those objective goals we all set for our organizations.1. SWOT Analysis

The SWOT analysis is one of those old standby tools that often is overlooked because of its simplicity. However, using this tool as part of planning often reveals insights that get lost during the fog of the work year.

For a quick refresher, SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Strengths and weaknesses are internally focused. Opportunities and threats look outwardly into the competitive and market landscape. 

Running through this exercise does consider your important metrics, but it forces you to think through the strengths and weaknesses of your people and teams. It gives you the ability to see gaps in skill sets or the ability for teams to innovate and collaborate. Knowing those strengths and weaknesses allows you to begin seeking out and building plans to optimize the abilities of your people. Detailing those abilities gives you the ability to capitalize on opportunities in your market and build a defense against threats.

2. SMART Goals

SMART goals like the SWOT are tried and true planning processes, but the reason they continue to be used is that they work. The specific steps in the SMART acronym give you the steps for effective goals. An effective goal is Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Reasonable, and Time-bound. 

As you build out actions you want to accomplish, make sure the plans fit this time-tested framework. If not, any plans you create are merely hopes and dreams with no real ability to create the traction you need for the next year.

3. People Recognition

At Fierce we continually research and analyze data to optimize the people element of organizations. With burnout and resignations a constant threat, delving into the psychology behind employee engagement becomes more important. 

One of the factors that continually stands out in all research around employee satisfaction is recognition. Often our default position for recognition is monetary, and because of that, we ignore it if we don’t have a budget line item assigned. While monetary recognition may be a powerful motivator for some, it is not always the main driver. Many times being verbally recognized or given other gifts is enough to build engagement.

Here’s something different to think about regarding recognition. As you begin going through the skill sets and behaviors you wanted to improve in employees, base your recognition around those abilities knowing they will ultimately achieve the organizational goals.

4. Employee Reviews

One of the most powerful sets of data you can use to begin planning for the following year is data you collect through employee reviews. You are able to capture the reasons people are able to meet or fail to meet their goals. Creating an open honest culture that allows for reviews to be built for development rather than viewed as threatening provides the type of data an organization needs to grow.

To make employee reviews as effective as possible solicit feedback from any of the employee touch-points. Discuss their stated goals and whether they reached them. Acknowledge obstacles and also the ability to work around problems toward achievement. If any criticism needs to be delivered, do so in the shape of a developmental goal for next year.

If you are struggling with effective review sessions, both the Fierce Feedback program, as well as the Fierce Coach program, was built to find solutions and prompt real action.

5. Qualitative vs. Quantitative

Don’t forget the qualitative aspects of your organization. These are aspects of your business that can be observed but are harder to measure. 

Questions to consider when thinking qualitatively:

How were stress levels throughout the organization this year?Did people complain of burnout? Was there collaboration within teams?Did the outcomes this year feel authentic to your mission?What were attitudes like among employees and managers?Any sense of toxic culture growing inside the company?

All the answers to these questions will help when you begin putting action steps to achieving plan goals. They will also help frame whether plans are realistic or will achieving them damage the organization.

6. Assess Limitations

There’s a temptation to think of limitations as negative. But boundaries and limitations are often where great growth and innovation come from. Think of the Great Inventions throughout the last 100 years. It was often limitations that forced their creation. 

Limitations have the potential to become one of the greatest leverage points inside your organization. Make a list of the biggest limitations you currently have in your organization. Then begin thinking through Solutions on how to overcome or use this to your advantage. Any solution you create immediately empowers your organization. Now think through the tools and resources you will need to enact these solutions.

7. Think Short Term

We all love to make long-term plans. These lofty goals are perfect for keeping before you as motivators to progress. However, they are often nothing more than dreams. Especially when you create plans 5-10 years into the future. Even one-year goals can be dreams. 

So much can happen that can derail a one-year goal because life changes so fast. Economic conditions move quickly. Political situations change. Market forces evolve faster and faster. A pandemic arises that nobody expected. 

What’s the solution? Keep building out those one-year plans, but make a slight twist. Begin chopping up that plan into 12-week segments. Twelve weeks is about the time frame that most humans can conceive of accomplishing a task. Beyond that, there are too many variables at play to create realistic action steps. 

So go ahead and build out your goals for the next year but do your deep thinking on action steps for the next 12 months. Your people will thank you. Any sense of overwhelm and limited capacity will disappear. Because they will think, ” I can make that happen in 12 weeks.”

Now is the perfect time of year to set aside time and reflect on your successes and challenges. Use these seven tips to make your planning for the next year more powerful. Remember, don’t forget the power in your human assets. 

The Fierce team is here as a resource as you begin thinking through the skills you need to embed into your teams to accomplish your goals for next year. 

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