Hitting our goals but missing the mark: What happens when stress wins?
Petaluma Hill Road | Jeff Bramwell | jeff@bramwellphoto.com
Decembers are tough. As the holidays approach it feels like there’s so much to get done in our personal lives alone. Ensuring the house is festive. Finding the perfect gifts. Social events. And the inevitable stress that starts to build up in anticipation of spending an extended amount of time with the people we love most but, if we’re being honest, can also make us a little nuts if we’re together in close quarters for a long period of time.
To make it even worse we're also managing the pressure that the end of the year creates at work. The pressure to exceed our quota. The pressure to ship that final project before the year wraps. The pressure to perform, especially knowing performance reviews are right around the corner for many of us.
When we’re feeling stressed at work our tendency is to focus on delivering results. However, our desire to get it done can cause us to forget the importance of staying connected to the people around us, especially when they’re directly impacted by the work we’re driving.
What makes it difficult to connect when we’re stressed at work?
In our experience one of the greatest obstacles we face when we’re under pressure to perform is speed. When we’re stressed we’re moving fast and reacting quickly, which research shows have consequences.
When we’re cool, calm, and collected at work, we take 2 seconds to think before we react. However when we’re stressed we respond to things we perceive as “danger” at work in two-hundredths of a second. At the end of the year, these dangers can look like competing priorities that distract us, pushback from colleagues challenging our approach, and out-of-the-blue escalations from senior leaders that require our attention now.
In research he shares in his book The Happiness Hypotheses: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls what our brain does in these moments a neural shortcut, which activates the part of our brain that drives our fight or flight response. Essentially we’re reacting more than we’re thinking in these moments.
What’s that mean for our relationships at work? If we optimize too much for delivering results, they can suffer. Whether we mean to or not, end-of-year stress can cause us to avoid, dismiss, or even steamroll our colleagues, many of whom actually want to help.
So how do we find time to both connect and deliver?
One solution lies in something that’s counterintuitive to moving fast – and that’s slowing down. While it might be the furthest thing from our minds right now, slowing down can help our relationships with our colleagues in three ways:
We notice when our relationships are in trouble. People offer clues into how they’re feeling and these often show up subtly in our interactions with them. There’s a defensive or frustrated tone in what’s being said. There’s pushback from cross-functional partners. Colleagues are talking fast. Our peers are repeating themselves when they don’t feel heard. When we shift our focus from heads down to looking around, we start to see behaviors that may indicate larger issues.
We find time to talk about concerns. While it can often feel like our calendars are jam-packed in December, when we notice a relationship is in trouble chances are there are other things that can wait. Prioritizing time to connect surfaces valuable data: how others are feeling. Discussing those feelings reveals disconnects, provides an opportunity to re-align and creates a conversation about how you can both support each other in the remaining weeks ahead.
We build advocacy for the work we’re driving. Despite the temptation to stay focused on execution, when we stay close to the people impacted by our work, they feel like their input matters. Finding time to share updates, ask for feedback, and brainstorm ideas improves our relationships and makes it easier for people to champion the results we’re eager to deliver.
While we’ll always face pressure at the end of the year, it doesn’t have to prevent us from strengthening our relationships at work. When we’re intentional about staying connected with others, not only does it serve us well in December – it fosters collaboration, support, and trust throughout the rest of the year too.
Flouracity is a professional development company that helps managers grow in their careers, leaders flourish in their roles, and people become the best version of themselves.