As a leader, do you know the capabilities of your team? If you assign your team members tasks that exceed their ability, you will increase stress. When stress increases, you will lose your team. When you lose your team, your leadership is lost.

If your team do not know what their expectations are, you are asking them to meet their expectations far too fast, and you’re not helping them or giving them enough time to prepare then they are going to become highly stressed very quickly.

1. Your Team’s Expectations

So, the reason for them becoming highly stressed so quickly will be you as their leader. Your weakness in leadership will be the ultimate reason that work is not being carried out in a timely manner. It will also be the reason that the work is not matching yours or the organisation’s expectations.

Weak leaders don’t just lead teams poorly, they lead themselves poorly too. When leaders don’t lead themselves well, the example they give to their team will be a negative one. With this negative example from the leader, it is highly likely that the team won’t lead themselves well either.

The same goes for weak managers too. If weak managers do not manage processes and things well, then the team won’t manage processes and things well either. It is that leadership snowball effect again.

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Leadership is not easy, and it can become very complicated because it is about people. As leaders our responsibility is the people that we lead. As managers our responsibility is about processes and things.

As followers our responsibility is ourselves and the people we work alongside. It doesn’t matter if we are the leader, the manager or the follower, we must always lead ourselves well first.

2. Causes Of Stress

There will be situations or occasions when you work with a great manager who is also a poor leader. Or they could be a great leader but a poor manager. Either one of these situations can cause stress for a team.

There will always be members of a team who are not great at certain tasks, or they are not helpful to other teammates, or their attitude is wrong.

This can cause stress to the team and the leader. Believe me, I have experienced this before, and it is highly stressful. But, I knew that it was my responsibility to reduce this stress for myself and the team because I was the leader.

To reduce stress and keep it as low as possible within a team or an organisation is the responsibility of the person in charge…the leader. It is highly complicated to reduce stress and keep it low because there are so many things that can cause a person stress.

If a job is what is causing a person stress, then what will happen is, they will vent this stress to their friends and family outside of work. When that happens, they are damaging the reputation of the organisation.

Which in turn will make the organisation unattractive to other people because of word of mouth. This person will also be venting about the leader, which will damage the reputation of the leader too.

No matter the reason for the stress, if it is caused by the organisation and the leader then be prepared for some bad advertisement from the people.

When we become stressed in life, we start to doubt ourselves. We beat ourselves up and have this voice in our head that is telling us how bad we are. We start asking ourselves negative questions like “Am I good enough?”, “What am I doing this for?”, “Who am I?”

When we start doing this to ourselves, we become fearful. We start to fear doing certain tasks in the workplace, so the effort we put in is not good enough and we don’t do the task well. This causes even more stress and more fear.

When this happens, we start to look outward and blame others. We blame our teammates, we blame our boss, we blame another team or even their boss. We also start hiding mistakes instead of embracing them and learning from them.

We start to ask ourselves “Am I going to be fired?”, “Why am I to be doing this job?”, “What am I going to do next?”

3. A Highly Effective Leadership Culture

In a highly effective team with a highly effective leadership culture, we cannot have any fear, manipulation or intimidation. The leader cannot use fear to get what the organisation wants.

They cannot use manipulation to get what they want. They cannot use intimidation to get what they and the organisation wants.

A highly effective team with a highly effective leader influences what everybody wants…a highly effective leadership culture.

A highly effective leadership culture has a very strong foundation of trust. Without trust it is impossible to lead and influence a person or a team. Without trust, stress increases. When stress increases, the culture becomes weak and eventually toxic.

To maintain a highly effective leadership culture, we must care for each other by showing it, not just saying it. As the leader, we must lead by example by building trust, increasing our influence and showing our people that we care for them. When we do this, our people will do the same for others.

When we are continually growing, we are gaining confidence. When we are continually growing, we are reducing stress. It is the leader’s responsibility to ensure that their team are continually growing.

It is the leader’s responsibility to ensure that their team have the right ability to carry out the tasks they assign them. It is the leader’s responsibility to ensure that their team have the right tools to carry out the tasks to the best of their ability.

It is the ultimate responsibility of the leader to help develop their team and reach their potential.

Low performing leaders don’t believe- that it is their responsibility to help develop their team. Whether that be in the area of competency or character development.

Most low performing leaders don’t know how to help develop their team’s competency and they don’t even know what character development means.

4. Going The Extra Mile

Highly effective leaders go the extra mile when it comes to helping their team to develop in both competency and character. Especially character development.

In a lot of industries around the world, the workload is huge and the speed they want things done is overwhelming, which is very stressful. So, what you will see from a lot of the organisations within these industries is, they will shove their new starters into the lion’s den on their first day.

No need for an induction, no need for a week’s training on what the organisation is about, or their vision and values. No, we have a new number in our organisation, let’s take advantage of them and drain everything we can out of them.

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When organisations do this with their new starters, they are stressed out from day one. This is not good at all for the new starter, the leader and the organisation because bad mouthing is going to start from day one.

I have worked in organisations in the past that put me on a leadership development course for a week before I even started the job properly. That was in 2011 when I worked in Scotland and was one of the reasons why I am writing books and articles now.

This all organisations should do with all of their employees, not just the supervisors and managers. We all need to lead ourselves and each other, so we all need leadership development.

If we want to have different results within our organisations, reduce stress in our people and ourselves, then we need to do things differently.

A highly effective leadership culture leads to high performing people. High performing people leads to high performing teams. High performing teams leads to high performing organisations with low stress and high trust.

I welcome hearing how this post has influenced the way you think, the way you lead, or the results you have achieved because of what you’ve learned in it. Please feel free to share your thoughts with me by commenting below.

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All the best,

Tom (Lead, Grow, Influence)