Decades of scientific research show that stress and anxiety are prevalent problems at work, contributing to deficits in employee morale, well-being, and productivity. While anxiety is caused by a range of factors, including issues unrelated to people’s jobs, one common and pervasive cause is something specific to the workplace: incompetent leadership.
Managers and leaders have a direct effect on their employees’ stress and anxiety levels. What they say, feel, and do hugely influences their team’s physical and emotional well-being. And the more senior leaders are, the more people they are likely to influence — positively and negatively.
But sadly, far too few leaders are aware that they have this power. And many are overconfident in their leadership skills, creating a gap between their perceived and actual levels of competence. This explains why even well-meaning bosses may inadvertently contribute to high anxiety levels in their employees and have a limited capacity to correct and improve their behavior: If you think you are leading effectively, what is the point of changing?
It is for this reason that leaders must pay a great deal of attention to how they act and communicate. The importance of this is exacerbated during times of increased uncertainty, as we often look to leaders to guide us in the face of fear, to provide us with clarity and direction, and, most of all, to give us reasons to remain hopeful and optimistic.
If you are a manager or a leader, it is useful to internalize some key psychological lessons about how your behavior — what you say, do, feel, and express — impacts your team, especially when you are not aware of it. In particular, there are five behavioral patterns that most often increase people’s anxiety level. If you can spot them, you can learn how to change them in order to become a more effective leader.
1) The use of negative language. Too often we focus on nonverbal communication as a signal for conveying emotions — how we move our hands, or which facial expressions we make — when in reality, the words we say are more likely to convey how we feel and what we think. As the growing field of algorithmic text mining and natural language processing shows, there is a systematic and robust connection between the type and frequency of words we choose to express ourselves and our moods and temperaments.
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This means that even when you think you’re discussing your business strategy dispassionately, the way you talk about it and the language you choose will convey your emotional and mental state to others — irrespective of your intentions. Leaders in particular can expect the emotional impact of their words to be even stronger when they are written. People tend to reread important messages, internalizing their affective content.
Research has shown that to avoid accidentally triggering anxiety through language, best practice is to refrain from using negative words (for example, horrific, shocking, and dangerous, as well as euphemisms such as challenging, problematic, and undesirable). In fact, the only criterion for determining whether a word is negative is whether it increases the listener’s negative affect — in other words, that it might elevate their levels of anxiety, worry, and concern. Even if two leaders are in the same situation and describing the same state of affairs, they will have a different effect on the public if they talk about “hope,” “improvements,” or “light at the end of the tunnel” as opposed to “death toll,” “mortality rate,” or “depression.”
2) Unusual or erratic actions. We often celebrate spontaneity and unpredictability as critical ingredients of creativity, as if they were integral components of a free spirit. In reality, however, most people want to eliminate as much uncertainty and unpredictability from their lives as they can, as both tend to trigger anxiety.
The Covid-19 pandemic makes this clear. We are shocked not only by the virus’s devasting effects on our lives but also by our inability to predict what will happen. There is not much certainty leaders can provide when they are equally unable to predict the future. But they can, at the very least, avoid being an additional stress agent by acting in consistent and predictable ways.
If you are a boss, don’t introduce an unnecessary layer of complexity to your employees’ lives by making them guess what you will do next. Be reliable, predictable, and even boring if necessary. You may be the only predictable factor your employees can count on in a time of great uncertainty.
In simple terms, this means providing a clear structure to your meetings and communications, sharing expectations up front, avoiding last-minute changes and cancellations, and, wherever possible, continuing with the same routine you had before the crisis or big change.
3) Emotional volatility. Excitable bosses are like a roller coaster — they may be fun for sensation seekers, but they are stressful for almost everyone else. The last thing your employees want during difficult times is to see emotional volatility in their leaders. It is a bit like provoking someone into an emotional discussion when they’ve had a really bad day — it is not going to end well.
This may be easier said than done, but being a leader requires a certain level of competence for dealing with pressure. Especially in a crisis, remember that your own stress will only amplify other people’s stress. The main implication here is that you should work very hard to manage your impressions, contain your emotions, and put on your best poker face in front of your employees.
What might this look like? In general — and this goes back to the second point — your team is looking to you for stability and guidance amid the chaos. If you are typically calm and stable, try to remain so as much as possible. Even if it may be normal to display some degree of emotional volatility during a crisis, the fewer changes your team perceive from your typical patterns of behavior, the less stressed they will be. If your natural style is volatile and reactive, however, you may be better off projecting an aura of calmness and composure, as if you had just taken up meditation. This shift may feel extreme to you personally, but over time it will help you better tame or filter your own anxiety. Once your team begins to notice the change, they may feel less on edge themselves, too.
Actions that have been found to mitigate emotional volatility include a regular practice of mindfulness, frequent exercise, better sleep quality, and internalizing feedback from others so you realize when you may be derailing.
4) Excessive pessimism. We live in a world — especially in the West — that stigmatizes negativity and condemns pessimism as if it were a psychological problem. In fact, pessimism is underrated, as it helps leaders to detect and prevent potential threats, minimize risks, and avoid arrogant and overconfident decisions. That said, during stressful and anxious times leaders’ pessimism is more likely to turn into a liability, demotivating others and pushing their already high anxiety to stressful levels.
This is why, even when you cannot find reasons to project optimism, you should still refrain from displaying outright pessimism. Even if your natural response is to feel pessimistic, projecting this onto others may further their anxiety. Being able to control it and project calmness and composure will strengthen your colleagues. Remember that leadership is not about you; it’s a resource you provide to help others.
Further, because it’s likely that your team expects a certain degree of optimism from you during uncertain times, they may already discount for this. If you say things will be great, they will believe you; but if you tell them things will be bad, they may interpret the situation as worse than it is.
5) Ignoring people’s emotions. Perhaps the biggest mistake you can make during stressful times is ignoring your team’s emotions. This error often occurs when a leader is hyperfocused on dealing with their own emotions. While you need to understand your own anxiety and get it under control, it is also critical to manage how others are perceiving your well-being. If they think you cannot manage yourself, they won’t trust you to manage them. The key here is empathy: You will only succeed if you are focused on the people around you, not on yourself.
In the past two decades, a great deal of research has highlighted the key role that emotional intelligence (EQ) plays in developing empathy. More specifically, we have learned that leaders with a high EQ are better at understanding and influencing other people’s emotions, as well as controlling their own. Some leaders are naturally better at this than others. Unfortunately, no one will suddenly wake up with a higher EQ overnight. But they can work on their willingness to understand other people.
A critical starting point is remembering that during difficult times it is more important to monitor people’s affect, mood, and stress rather than check on their work performance, productivity, or task management. Simple ways to achieve this are to have more one-on-one meetings with team members, increase the frequency of your communication, ask open-ended questions that invite people to engage, and show empathy whenever possible. As the great Dale Carnegie put it, “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.”
In short, you will be less likely to increase anxiety in others if you make a commitment to thinking more deeply about how your actions impact them. As a leader, you are an amplifier of people’s emotions. If you do things right, you can bring out the best in people even in the worst of times. If you do things wrong, you will lower morale and performance even when things are fine.The Big Idea