Are you juggling multiple responsibilities and conflicting priorities?
Are you managing tricky team dynamics?
Are you striving to achieve some work-life balance while being the best leader you can be?
April is Stress Awareness Month, a time to reflect on the impact of stress in our personal and professional lives. If you’ve answered yes to any of the above questions, these are likely to be sources of stress for you. Your stress vaccine contains two ingredients:
Compassionate Leadership – a strategy that not only boosts productivity and performance in your team but also reduces stress.
Psychological Safety – a culture enabled by Compassionate Leadership, that creates a healthier, more supportive environment whilst reducing leader stress.
Psychological safety – a key ingredient
Professor Amy Edmonson is a Harvard Business School professor and a leading expert on Psychological Safety in the workplace. She has undertaken decades of research on this concept, and it is this research that inspires and underpins a lot of my work. In March I had the privilege of seeing her speak in person – a wonderful way to reignite that inspiration!
Amy reminds us to consider what Psychological Safety is NOT. Here is the most important point from
the list:
It is not just being nice
Both Compassionate Leadership and Psychological Safety foster accountability. They represent the art of finding the balance between empathy and support, alongside strength and courageous decision making.
In a psychologically safe workplace, employees feel safe to express their thoughts, take risks, and admit mistakes without fear of ridicule or punishment. It doesn’t mean that there is free reign to be disrespectful or disruptive, or that all ideas will be taken forward. It also doesn’t mean that there won’t be consequences for mistakes.
A formula for productivity, performance and innovation
When Psychological Safety is absent:
- employees operate in a state of fear
- employees are unable to use their full cognitive capacity
- for leaders, this can mean dealing with more conflicts, miscommunication, and burnout.
This will never create a thriving environment because when we are operating in a state of high stress, the neurological impact on our brain reduces our ability to problem solve, communicate, innovate, in addition to many other capabilities we want online in the workplace.
A psychologically safe workplace, on the other hand, encourages openness, problem-solving, and innovation – factors that contribute to reducing overall stress for everyone.
Stress inoculation for leaders
Building a culture of Psychological Safety is hard work and takes time. But that effort will pay dividends to you as a leader. Practicing Compassionate Leadership can help alleviate leader stress in the following ways:
- Stronger Team Cohesion: When employees feel psychologically safe, they are more engaged and self-motivated, reducing the need for constant oversight and micromanagement.
- Fewer Conflicts: By fostering open communication and understanding, misunderstandings and conflicts are minimized, decreasing the emotional labour required to mediate disputes. Not to mention time saved for both leaders and HR professionals!
- Increased Trust and Delegation: When employees feel valued, they are more likely to take ownership of their work, allowing leaders to delegate effectively and avoid burnout.
- Personal Fulfilment and Purpose: Compassionate Leadership fosters meaningful connections with team members, which can make leadership roles more rewarding and fulfilling.
Three practical steps you can implement this month
1. Practice self-awareness
Being compassionate is not weak – it is quite the opposite. It involves being aware of your own emotions and responses, and then being able to regulate them effectively. And that is really hard to do. My most recommended emotion regulation tools are:
- Practice labelling emotions using a feelings wheel (google ‘feelings wheel’ or ‘emotion wheel’ and find one you like). There are several reasons this is effective; one is that putting a word on an emotion activates your frontal lobe, which helps to bring your ‘rational mind’ back online.
- Practice breathing exercises. This is a foundational skill backed by neuroscience,
which down-regulates the branch of your nervous system responsible for your fight-
or-flight stress response. It is the #1 tool I recommend for high stress situations.
2. Listen
Amy Edmonson reminded us that we need to actually listen to and act upon what our colleagues are telling us. This can feel uncomfortable because it might require us to challenge the way we are looking at something or change the way we are doing something.
We must also listen to what we are NOT hearing – silence is an important message. Amy explains that as a leader, if you’re not hearing about anything going wrong this is a sign that your organization is not psychologically safe. Unfortunately, it does not mean that everything is going well, but rather that mistakes and issues are being hidden, which prevents you from resolving issues and improving outcomes.
3. Ask better questions
If someone in a position of power asks us whether we have any objections to a plan, it’s really hard to say that we do. Make it easier for people to feed back by asking the right questions. For example:
- If you had to argue the opposite of this idea, what would you say?
- Let’s take a moment to consider alternative perspectives—what are some other
ways to approach this? - What obstacles might we run into, and how can we prepare?
The ripple effect of compassionate leadership
By leading with compassion and creating an environment of Psychological Safety, you can transform not only your workplace culture but also your own experience as a leader. A thriving team supports a thriving leader, making everyone more productive, engaged, and fulfilled. This Stress Awareness Month, take the first step toward reducing workplace stress by embracing Compassionate Leadership – it’s a win-win for you and your team.
