OneWorld – Joseph Noone's Blog

The subject of stress and how to deal with its impact on workers has become a very pressing topic in the workplace today. HR managers are becoming more and more aware of the impact of stress on employee and team effectiveness and are launching different initiatives to support their employees deal with the drivers contributing to increased stress. A lot of these initiatives focus on trying to help the individual “adapt” to his/her environment. But what if we focused on the environment generating that stress?

To my mind, some key organisational drivers contribute to increasing stress:

1) Poor communication of company vision
2) Poor definition and follow-up of objectives
3) Distant or non-existing relationships between managers and team members
4) Lack of shared objectives and team work
5) Poor definition of roles and responsibilities
6) Poor development of skills
7) Lack of career prospects and opportunities to progress
8) Jobs overly specialized and taylorized
9) Lack of employee empowerment and responsibility
10) Conflicts in the workplace due to conflicts in priorities

All of the above drivers can be acted on with strong leaders who understand their role and above all play their role effectively. So if we want to act on stress, we need to think of how we can support managers to be able to play their leadership role effectively. The less leadership, the greater the stress for managers & employees alike. A key action to reduce stress would therefore start with reigniting the leadership rocket!

Tags: leadership

This entry was posted on Jan 22, 2009 at 7:18 am and is filed under Global team leadership, Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.