Using project stress to your advantage!
A small amount of stress is beneficial to your health. In reality, stress can help you perform better and be more productive. Consider taking the PMP course online or preparing for a 5K run. This is healthy stress; it motivates you to work toward a tough but attainable goal. Consider giving a presentation to your project steering committee or upper management. You might be apprehensive or stressed about giving a presentation to such a large group of people. Hopefully, this anxiety will motivate you to provide your finest presentation. Productive stress is referred to as eustress. Eustress literally translates to “positive stress.”
In the statement above, eustress is described as “just the right amount of spice.” The appropriate amount is energising, but too much can be distressing. Negative stress is defined as distress. Distress isn’t the same as useful stress. Distress is demotivating and damaging. It results in pain.
This could be stressful if you only had five minutes to prepare for your project steering committee presentation. If you only have five days to prepare, you may not begin until the day or two before the presentation. This may be the ideal stress level for you. Alternatively, you may wait until the night before the presentation to begin. Although this increases your stress level, it may be the ideal amount of tension for you.
To continue with the spice comparison, perhaps you order your dinner with a side of extra chilli peppers. “Hold the chilli peppers, don’t put them on the side, I don’t want to see them on the dish,” a team member sitting next to you might say. This makes ordering shared items for the two of you difficult.
If stress is like a spice, necessary in the appropriate proportions to maintain a meal flavourful, it is also true that not everyone can handle stress in the same amounts, as learned in the PMP course online. Some people are stress addicts, and they thrive on it. They’ll tell you how much better they work under duress. Others will tell you that the mere mention of a deadline in two months gives them nightmares.
Someone’s eustress could be your distress, and vice versa. We all have various spice tolerance levels, just like we all have different spice tolerance levels.
Understanding how to use stress successfully is a problem you face as a leader. You must first determine your own stress tolerance, and then determine the tolerance levels of your team members. Then you must figure out how to create the appropriate degrees of stress. You’ll have to reign in your stress addicts, and you’ll have to teach your stress averse how to cope with more stress.
This can be done by recognising and rewarding appropriate stress-related behaviour. Encourage your stress-addicts to achieve deadlines sooner rather than later, and discourage them from putting out fires at the last minute. In instance, if a stress addict brags about staying up all night to achieve a pre-planned deadline, remind them that not only was this unneeded, not required, and entirely their own doing, but it also put the project at undue risk.
When a stress-averse team member baulks at a tight deadline, maintain your cool and encourage them to get to work. Show them that you believe in them and that you believe they are fully capable.
It will take several iterations and fine-tuning to achieve this. You’ll glance up one day and realise you’re all eating a plate with roughly the same level of spice!
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