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Description:
Dr. Larry is a mental health professional and business leadership trainer of many years. Check out our Executive Leadership site for a schedule of his open trainings, as well as to consider booking a training for your company or organization.
As the holiday season approaches each year bosses and managers often think about ways to show appreciation for those who work for them, as well as to customers, vendors and associates.
The best way to show appreciation is to do right by all the people related to your business, all year long. There are many ways for the manager to do right by his or her people, far too many for any one list. Here are some bedrock ways, however. As a manager you will discover that observing these fundamental ways of treating people well brings you and them a reduction in stress. Violate these basically decent and morally right standards and everybody's stress will rise, including your own. Observe them and stress levels will drop.
Be honest and fair. Pay your workers and vendors what you agree to pay them. Pay on time. Do not "nickle and dime" anybody. Do not cut corners when it comes to compensation for hours worked, overtime or compensatio
Stress in the business world is like dandelions in the front lawn: it's everywhere. Burnout is a buzzword for too much stress over too long a period of time that finally renders people ineffective, disgusted, exhausted or disillusioned with their work.
There are distinctive kinds of burnout. Recognizing these patterns early on provides one of the avenues for countering the stress and heading off the train wreck. Make no mistake, when anyone burns out on his or her job it is a train wreck! Two of the most prevalent forms of burnout in business are what is known as "Leaving Forever" and "Trapped in a Golden Cage".
Leave Forever
This type of burnout comes from too much enthusiasm and idealism. It is common but not exclusive in the "people and helping" businesses such as healthcare, education, recreation, credit management, home repair, dining, travel, beauty, real estate, golf course
One way of describing the small business manager's typical day: organized chaos.
In clinical terms, however, it would be more accurate to say that for much of the time managing small business involves a great many frustrating episodes occurring among people who may also be angry because of other events and relationships not related to the workplace.
Consider the many daily events and situations that must be dealt with but cannot be controlled:
phone calls from everyone in North America: solicitations, charitable causes, customers, wrong numbers, vendors, employees, and family members.
persons walking in with no warning and no appointment.
complaints.
workers who arrive late or need to leave early.
production and delivery snafus.
reports that are overdue.
requests for meetings.
bills waiting for your attention and checks to be signed.
Socrates said it first and best: "Know theyself" is a good starting point in the search for wisdom. Socrates could spend all night standing still, just thinking. He was famous for what we would now call inner peace or composure: a very "low stress" person.
He was sentenced to death because he had come to the conclusion and was teaching that there could not be many gods, as the Greeks believed, but only one God. He could easily have fled and escaped the death penalty, a common practice for those sentenced to death in the Greek city-states. Instead he chose to drink hemlock as a witness to his convictions. He calmly dialogued with his closest friends as he prepared to die. His reaction to this most stressful of all events stands as a historic example of how being in touch with one's self leads to inner peace and direction.
Business managers are not called upon to die for their convictions, thank goodness! But for the business manager, and indeed fo
What we commonly refer to as "stress" begins with perception: we see, foresee or experience danger or significant change in our situation, which the brain interprets as danger.
Our bodies immediately go into fight/flight mode: adrenalin floods through us, the eyes become alert and active, hearing sharpens, our heart rate increases, blood pressure goes up, and the digestive system closes. We focus on the danger, to such a point that other things go unnoticed.
In most cases there is no fight that would resolve the situation and there is no flight because we cannot flee financial problems, illness, bad news, grief or relationship problems.
Our bodies continue on in a heightened state of alert, still prepared to fight or flee, with periodic increases and decreases of intensity.
Within a few days the reaction, for most people, be
Leave home at home and leave work at work: standard advice for business managers. There are two reasons for this advice.
First, from a business point of view, it is good to put work out of mind and then come back to it fresh the next day or after a weekend. Those who think about their work when away from work are prone to worry, anxiety and eventually to get so burned out that they begin to dread or even hate going to work. It is good for the manager, good for the business and good for any employees of the business to have the manager off the job when the manager is not at the office.
Second, from a home point of view, it is good to have a husband, father, mother, wife home instead of mentally still at work. Inevitably, if the manager does not leave work at work there will creep into the home some of the worry, stress and problem-solving that goes on at work. That, in turn, allows the manager's work and responsibilities to "move in" with the family. Even fo
What is the constant factor common to all business managers, no matter what type or size of business they manage? COMMUNICATION!
And what could all of us improve? COMMUNICATION!
The search for sources of frustration in the business manager's life need go no further than communication. This is especially noteworthy when one considers that messages go both ways: saying and writing effectively is critical in management but so is listening and reading effectively. After all, everyone else in the company and all of the customers, investors and vendors have a stake in getting messages to the manager.
The toll caused by messages not accurately received creates business loss, time lost, tempers gone out of control day in and day out. When work assignments are misunderstood production goes wrong. When safety instructions are inaccurate accidents happen. Orders improperly filled or inaccurately billed or sent to the wrong address lead to lost tempers and lost business. I
A pencil could save stress? Ridiculous? Not so. What is the most frustrating thing that happens to business managers? They lose information, get wrong information or cannot find information when they need it. Getting the information sometimes takes more minutes or even hours than the phone call, email or return letter for which the information was needed.
Information retrieval can be no better than the process of receiving and storing the information in the first place. Phone numbers for return calls, for example, can be off by one digit. The message to call somebody back might not have a date that the caller said was important. The name of the person who called might be missing or misspelled. An address is not where it should be. And so it goes: a little bit of information here, a lost number there, a zip code missing and the manager is ready to breathe fire. The tinier the details tripping us up the greater the frustration over wasting time.
Stress, especially ongoing stress, creates in most of us a craving for relief. This makes perfectly good sense in light of our survival instincts.The human instinct is to fight or flee in the face of danger. Prolonged stress regtisters as danger. We instinctively want to conquer or escape the stressful situation.
The results for those who are not careful and disciplined are the three great temptations:
Eat for relief.
Skip proper exercise.
Become sleep deprived.
Eating for relief usually takes the form of turning to junk food, snacks watered down with soft drinks, and sweets in order to compensate for the suffering. This, in turn, makes folks less hungry at mealtime. Instead of eating three nutritious meals each day, those who eat for relief end up skipping meals here and there. Then when hunger strikes they overeat. Before long they suffer from heartburn and notice that they have gained weight even though they are eating less meals.
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