SQLAndy

I’m going to finish up my thoughts on stress by talking about the philosophy I’ve evolved, some of the tricks I use, and places where I sometimes stumble. I don’t expect to ever be stress free entirely (and probably wouldn’t want to be), but I know that the better I am at managing stress the better I am at whatever I am doing.

It starts with me considering it a bad day if I get stressed at work and don’t resolve it in less than an hour. Maybe more than a bad day, it’s a personal loss, weak character! That’s the alpha geek in me, but I don’t like the idea of other people and events having that kind of control over me, so it’s up to me to control my behavior. I don’t always win, but I learn from it – it’s often the best part of the day for me driving home, figuring out how I let something got through my not insubstantial defenses!

So what causes me stress? The number one indirect cause is being tired due to whatever reason, it really does degrade my ability to look at situations calmly and think rather than react. In turn when I’m tired I mentally increase my vigilance (raise shields!) to compensate.

Beyond that, it’s often letting it become personal – working with someone that you will over promise and under deliver every time,or that continually forgets to tell you the one or two things that you need to know now,not the day before the project is due to complete. I work hard at relationships, but they aren’t all going to be solid because not everyone puts the same stock in them that I do. Said differently, many people are defensive by nature and just aren’t open to the kind of open dialog that comes with a good relationship. Part of this is that stress is cumulative, perhaps nowhere more so with people – history matters.

This seems like a good time to add that complaining often indicates stress. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t complain! If you reach such a Zen plane that nothing upsets you, you’re not going to push back, not going to push things up the chain that need awareness if not action. It’s hard to get this one right, I probably under-complain if anything, mostly because I have a good sense of what can be changed/fixed and what can’t. As I like to tell people, it does no good to shout at the rain. It will rain until it stops whether you complain or not.

So now to the tricks!

1. First, I treat stress as a game. That means learning the game, getting good at it. I don’t know if that will work for everyone (or anyone), but it’s been a good way for me to look at it, informally keeping score of how I’m doing.
2. I try to walk away if I’m feeling the “fight” response (I don’t seem geared for “flight”). That can be tuning out for a few minutes, going out for water, going to lunch early, not replying to an email.
3. For all that there are times when I’ll be under stress. Right now I’m in the final weeks of delivering a long project and it’s been hard, lots of last minute requirements, problems, etc, etc. To compensate I’ve cut back on everything non-essential, including blogging, to give myself time to recharge for the next day. It keeps me leaning forward, able to reduce or eliminate a lot of small daily stressors so that I don’t go home feeling like I’m fighting a war.
4. During the day walking helps, a music or reading break, a quiet lunch by myself sitting outside drinking iced tea! At home it’s trying hard not to turn into a TV zombie, though there are days when it’s just what you need, something to put the brain in idle for a while, though best done after a walk or some yard work or time with the kids to burn off some of the tension.

I’m better at managing stress than I used to be, not as good as I want to be, and that’s ok – not a source of stress!

I just finished up a nine month project. It was a long road with lots of challenges, set backs, and obstacles – I suppose it was a typical project. As I look back I can see a few different kinds of stresses during that time, all interesting, all maybe less interesting in hindsight, but this is the time to learn the lessons deeply.

The first type of stress was being new to the topic and the environment, being out of my comfort zone. It took about 8 weeks to get past that phase, and the only thing you can do while you’re walking that path is to be patient and listen. Hard to be patient some days.

After that the stress changed to trying to make sure we had captured all the work to be done. It’s hard to be sure of hitting the finish line if you can’t describe the finish line. The fear is missing something, or misunderstanding something – both of which happened. It was very much a moving target, often because only by doing the work could we expose areas that we didn’t know needed work. Tenacity required here, keep pulling at threads, keeping reviewing the list,knowing that even if not perfect every time you catch something is one less risk,one less unknown.

Next was the stress of getting to the finish line. It was a battle, and for a good portion of the project we were behind the curve (as best we could estimate). It wasn’t until about 6 weeks from one that I felt like it tipped over into “can win” territory, and we still had to sweat every day after that. It’s tough to stay focused when you’re behind, when you’re hitting unexpected challenges on top of that, and then to try to find ways to accelerate to make up the shortfall. One day at a time isn’t a bad strategy at all.

If all that sounds like project management challenges, you’re right. I can think of 50 places we could have done better, should have asked a different question, etc, etc. For all that it’s just about impossible to have a deadline without stress, no matter how good the plan or process for doing the work.

I want to call out one mistake I made in particular, because stress is all about mindset. When we finally hit that magical tipping point after a lot of work and couple lucky breaks, I was astounded to be in the position – finally – of thinking we might win. I started thinking if nothing else goes wrong we can make it. I’m sure you can guess what happened next – something went wrong, then something else, and it took me a good day to get my game back. The right mindset is work the problem, followed by keep your eyes on the finish line.  Giving in to fear of any kind, even the most human kind, puts you in a place where a stressor has extra leverage on your outlook – don’t do it!

I don’t know if I’ll have the same stresses next time. I’d like them to be different, but I don’t know yet if knowing them means I can prevent them.

Stress affects everyone, but it’s easy to forget that. Once you get sensitized to it, it’s amazing to pick up on the behavioral changes that happen to co-workers under certain kinds of stress. We may consider their issue to be stressful, but we don’t get to decide. Don’t dismiss their reaction or trivialize it, it’s real to them – and so to you.

Let’s start with a review of common stressors:

• Lack of sleep (late night break/fix, sick kid, etc)
• Unfair situations (why does my team have to do this work, why doesn’t team X?)
• Getting married, divorced, etc
• Financial problems
• Having to do work that they aren’t comfortable in
• Dealing with new team members (or any type of change)
• Pressure (deadlines)
• Criticism
• Frustration at short term/inelegant solutions (especially us IT geeks!)

That’s certainly not all of them, but you can see that not all are work related. Some resolve quickly, others may last a year.

Stress can lead to the “fight” response,which can mean them fighting with you to the point – if you let it – that they’ll fight themselves right into being unemployed. In the worst case that may be necessary,but more often you have to let them vent, or at least give them time to get back to center. If you fight back, which is a natural response, it will just escalate.

When I see people under stress I try to understand why. From there sometimes I can help them reduce it by showing them a different view, or by talking about doing things like taking a walk, or writing the email and deleting without sending. Sometimes they are closed off and when they are, you just have to hope that you can find someone else they trust, or that it works itself out. You can’t always remove the stress for them.

Criticism is hard to deliver on the best of days, my rule of thumb is deliver it quietly and simply, because most people (including me) just don’t like being criticized. It’s hard to know what’s best, but I’ve taken to scheduling a meeting that clearly indicates “let’s spend a few minutes talking about problems/challenges with x”. That let’s them know it may not be the most positive conversation, gives them some time to gear up their own stress management techniques. Just don’t do it a week ahead of time! A couple of hours notice is great, certainly same day. Don’t have them sweating about it across other meetings and a night at home. I should add that you can tailor this based on your relationship with them, if you know you can do a drop in and work it into a conversation it feels less formal, less threatening.

All it takes is seeing them as people under stress. If you can learn to spot that, you’re going to reduce your own stress and do a lot better job of keeping good people on the team for the long term.

Recently I suffered through a frustrating and contentious meeting, and that was stressful. I needed a walk, a few minutes to sort out why I was stressed, but instead I had to step right into another meeting. It was a follow up meeting to build out an implementation plan for a plan the team had come up with, so I expected a low level detail discussion that wouldn’t be stressful at all.

Instead I walked into a fight of sorts. The plan had been blasted by someone else uphill and now we had lost days and were at zero. I was mad. Why wasn’t I involved in the discussion that led to that decision? Why was I just finding out? Stress is often defined as fight or flight and it was triggering fight, starting with wanting to revisit the decision to cancel a decent plan to solve a time critical problem.

The team was in a uproar of stress because they had lost time and were feeling the pressure, maybe a sense of failure at picking a plan that turned out to be unsupportable.

So I just sat and listened, let them vent, and tried to think. What was important? I wasn’t vested in the plan, why spend time trying to resurrect it? I just needed a plan. They needed time to vent. Then slowly I took control of the meeting, offering no criticism, just saying “let’s come up with a better plan”. Forty five minutes later we had a new plan,they were calm,and I was calm. Strangely even my stress from the earlier meeting was gone.

It would have been easy to start blasting, in the meeting and outside. It would have felt good to drag someone else into it, to force the train back on the track, just to let loose some of that pent up aggression. But it would have taken time, emotion, energy, and no guarantee of getting it done, every guarantee of adding a lot of stress to everyone involved.

I’m not saying to never fight, or never flee bad situations. There are times when it’s necessary – just not that many times. Work the problem with the constraints you have. My approach is this: it doesn’t matter how you got here, what’s the best decision you can make right now? That approach is hugely effective for me.

It’s another example of seeing that stress wave coming at you and deciding whether it will impact you or wash around you. Awareness of stress, factoring that in as you decide the next step, that’s the win.

It’s not fair. I hear it a couple times a day. Sometimes they are right, sometimes not, but it’s how they feel and that is real enough. The first thing I do is listen, because that’s the first thing they need. Once they’ve explained (vented!) then I can tell them what I think:

• I agree, let me work on fixing it
• I agree, but I don’t think I can fix it (and why I can’t, or won’t)
• I don’t agree, and why

I find they have a hard time with anything except the first answer. I get it, it’s human. They get to decide what they think is fair and it just makes it worse when the boss can’t (or won’t) act to fix it. I can’t change how they handle it. I can try to have a good dialog because sometimes it does make a difference.

You might be curious about the “can’t fix/won’t fix”. Often that is based on an understanding of the organization – politics. My job is to  have the relationships and understand all the challenges so I can decide which fights to fight. Maybe that other manager who isn’t being helpful is under stress from another source, maybe they are short handed, maybe they just suck. Sometimes I know that I could win, but it would spending juice I’m going to need for other,larger issues. Most people struggle with that too,if it’s wrong it should be fixed, end of discussion. The world just isn’t that simple, but the only way to see that is to grow a larger view than just you, just your team.

That doesn’t mean it’s not stressful for me to listen to the “its not fair” conversations. The tendency is for me to absorb their stress. They work with me, I want to see them treated well and I want them with low stress levels so they can do good work. I’ve had days where afterward I had to go for a walk, or turn around and vent to whoever I was working for. Human, but not productive. My job is to listen, try to have this image of them projecting this cloud of stress that washes over and past me, but doesn’t hurt me and doesn’t stick to me.

There’s plenty of days when I think things aren’t fair either. Some days it makes me mad, but usually being mad doesn’t do much to change things, and it tires me, makes me less effective all around. A better response is to realize that I can fix it or I can’t, and go from there.

This is a hard one to learn.