Make decisions during low-stress periods. Although it’s impossible to predict with 100% certainty the types of situations that will trigger excessive stress, if you carefully track your stress over a period of days or weeks you will probably find that you experience a stress cycle of predictable highs and lows. For example, your stress level may build immediately before you are to meet with your manager or certain customers. Highlight on your weekly calendar any upcoming events or responsibilities that are likely to create stress for you.

If possible, avoid making key decisions during these periods, and save important decision-making meetings for times when your stress level is moderate and your attention is fully focused on the task at hand. Be ruthlessly honest with yourself about recognizing situations in which you are not emotionally and mentally prepared to wrestle with difficult work issues. Regulate your level of work direction.

Managers experiencing excessive stress tend to have difficulty balancing the degree of supervision they provide to their groups. Some managers intervene too quickly, resulting in micro management and nervous hovering. Others go to the opposite extreme, procrastinating about acting on stressful work situations until their stress level builds up to the point where they overwhelm their group with critical feedback on a variety of  problems.

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This is second series of Strategy performance.

Reduced effort. Members may withdraw physically or emotionally from team projects or reluctant to provide other team members with needed support, or to volunteer for “extra effort” projects, such as presentations to senior managers.

Health problems. Members appear totally exhausted two hours into the day. Other health symptoms are a high level of fatigue, or a sharp rise in absenteeism, and an increase in safety problems.

Sense of being overwhelmed. Members immediately react to any announced changes or assignments with a great deal of resistance and anxiety. Any impending change is viewed by your group as a harbinger of bad news.

Poor two-way communication. The last symptom, poor two-way communication, is so important that I want to deal with it separately. While some managers of stressed-out teams experience a sharp in crease in the number of complaints from members, a far more serious warning symptom is when your group suddenly stops communicating with you. Do any of the following situations sound familiar?
• Are members reluctant to bring you bad news? Do they intentionally hide their own or other member’s work problems from you?
• Have you ever overheard them immediately cease all conversation when you enter the room?
• Have you found that members purposely avoid you or no longer invite you to eat lunch with them?
• Have you been intentionally excluded from joining in after work social functions?
• Do members seem particularly anxious or upset whenever they communicate with you?
• Do members draw a sharp line between “you” (you and all senior-level managers) and “us”?
• Do members go out of their way to ask each other for help, rather than approach you for advice and information?
• Do members seem to mistrust the information you present?
• If your team has recently conducted an anonymous manager feedback survey on your leadership, do the results seem very out of sync with the face-to-face feedback you are receiving from your team?
If these situations sound familiar, they should serve as warnings that team members are attempting to cope with stress by erecting barriers between you and them. The problem is that the lack of two-way communication leads to a number of secondary problems, which produce even more stress for you and your team.