Every day, we hear more and more about anxiety, especially anxiety in the workplace. It is a significant, serious, and compounding risk for businesses, leaders, and the people they lead. Analysis of more than 300,000 U.S. cases frommental health provider ComPsych found that 24 percent of people who reached out for mental health assistance in 2023 did so to get help with anxiety, making it the number one presenting issue. In 2017, it didn’t rank in the top five. This alarming rise is unsurprising in the context of pandemics, global conflict, political instability, inflation, and an increasingly uncertain outlook for businesses worldwide. Still, it raises significant challenges as a major cause of workplace dysfunction. The organizations and leaders who understand, measure, and have specific strategies to mitigate anxiety have a distinct competitive advantage.
Understanding Anxiety
Some people are consumed by ‘fear’ in the workplace – fear of missing a deadline, not hitting the budget, missing out on the next promotion, saying the wrong thing in a meeting, losing out on a sale – the list goes on. But fear is different from anxiety. In simple terms, fear is rational worry about likely consequences, while anxiety is ‘excessive worry’ focused on irrational or improbable events and imagined consequences. If you’re a participant on the TV show ‘Alone’ on Vancouver Island, then a fear of being attacked by a Grizzly Bear is rational fear, but if you’re a contestant on ‘Love Island’ living in a penthouse in South America, that same fear is anxiety. But the lines aren’t always that black and white in the workplace. While jobs and reputations might genuinely be at risk in certain situations, many people spend way too much time imagining they will be humiliated, demoted, ostracised, and even terminated if even one minor event occurs. They imagine this will lead to them losing their status, incomes, homes, and family. In most cases, the things they imagine and fear will never come to pass.
It’s important to understand how significantly leaders can amplify or reduce anxiety. An often-heard expression is that people join companies and leave managers – this is mainly due to a leader being the first line of defence in the psychosocial safety of their people. Anxiety misdirects people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions away from actual business problems and instead toward their own imagined realities and consequences. They end up spending time in their own heads thinking about their own problems rather than focusing on solving problems for customers, colleagues, or the community. Ironically, when a toxic leader increases pressure to focus on doing a task, people may direct even more energy to worrying about what might happen if they don’t do the task!
Measuring levels of anxiety
There is a natural level of anxiety in business - people have imaginations, and a leader cannot know their baseline level of anxiety. However, it is logical to take a position that anyone can imagine something fearful and have some anxiety, particularly when tasked with solving problems in increasingly volatile operating environments. Workplace psychosocial risk legislation and management frameworks tend to measure and report ‘events’ rather than the lead indicators and causes of psychosocial hazards, meaning the damage is already done. This is like going to the site of a plane crash and trying to work out what caused it without the black box flight recorder.
To enable a high-performance culture that delivers competitive advantage, businesses need to be able to measure their people's stress and distress levels and how this impacts their confidence when applying their skills at work. This is an ‘early warning system’ of how well people are functioning in the workplace, like looking for cracks on the wings or wear and tear in the engine. However, the more advanced measurement is assessing the personality and virtues of leaders and their corresponding impact on the team’s anxiety levels and other psychosocial risk factors, akin to knowing how the pilot flies the plane. Like a world-class fighter pilot knows how much they can push the aerodynamics of their plane without causing catastrophic failures, a great leader knows how to drive business results without burning people out. This can be measured and developed.
Strategies to mitigate anxiety
First and foremost, businesses need to measure what they want to manage. Too many businesses risk catastrophic failures in their engines by measuring lag indicators like burnout, workplace conflicts, and poor engagement. By shifting focus to measuring the impact leaders have on anxiety, stimulation, conformity, and ambiguity (ASCA), businesses can better predict these outcomes and ensure leaders are hired, placed, and developed to optimize the psychosocial safety of their team.
To reduce anxiety, leaders must continually check the facts the team are operating on – is everyone clear on the business's purpose, vision, values, strategy, and priority activities, and how this relates to individual roles and responsibilities? Imagine if everyone on a plane was receiving different information on their flight tracker, some had no idea about the destination, and others thought it was fine to open the doors mid-flight. It is easy to recognize the anxiety this would cause and the corresponding chaos mid-flight. Leaders must continually check and course-correct people’s understanding of where they're going, why they're going there, and how they will get there.
Leaders must be beware of the ‘performance paradox’ of pushing people way too hard, keeping them in the dark, a little bit off balance and on edge, in the mistaken belief that this drives performance and results. While this might have a short-term impact, in the long term, it erodes performance as people spend more time in their own heads worrying about their relationship with the leader than they do solving actual business problems. Ironically, when we examined the personality of leaders who were best at lowering anxiety, it wasn’t the larger-than-life, outspoken visionaries, but rather the ‘Steady Statisticians’ with low borderline personality traits who are naturally adept at providing consistent and rational messages around the purpose, vision, and strategy.
As things get more complex and uncertain, leaders need to be even better at managing the balancing act of driving results without burning people out. To survive and thrive in turbulent times, leaders need a unique blend of personality, virtues, and motivation to be effective without increasing anxiety and other psychosocial risk factors. Boards, CEOs, WHS experts, Recruiters, and People & Culture teams need to accurately measure how leaders really think and behave so they mitigate the legislative and commercial risk of poor psychosocial safety in the business.
To find out more about how your organization can measure and improve your leaders’ impact on anxiety and other psychosocial risk factors, talk to us: http://tgsleadership.com
