Business and Marketing

It’s not difficult to tell when your team is suffering from stress overload. Just look for the following symptoms and check any that may apply: Increased conflicts. Team members engage in petty bickering or flare-ups over conflicts that in the past would have been easily resolved, and meet performance challenges with finger-pointing and blaming, rather than productive problem solving.

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.