Leadership Voyage

S4E8: How to Avoid Stressing Out Your Employees

• Season 4 • Episode 8

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Jason talks about the HBR article "5 Ways Leaders Accidentally Stress Out Their Employees."

  1. Negative language
  2. Erratic actions
  3. Emotional volatility
  4. Excessive pessimism
  5. Ignoring people's emotions

Other references in this episode:

3 Vital Questions

Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace Report

Managers Have Major Impact On Mental Health: How To Lead For Wellbeing

‘Everybody’s Replaceable’: The New Ways Bosses Talk About Workers


Leadership Voyage
email: StartYourVoyage@gmail.com
linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonallenwick/
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LeadershipVoyage
music: by Napoleon (napbak)
https://www.fiverr.com/napbak
voice: by Ayanna Gallant
www.ayannagallantVO.com
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wherever you are on your leadership voyage it starts[Music] here hey everybody good to be with you again this is Jason Wick your host of Leadership Voyage the podcast dedicated to your pursuit of becoming a great leader and I am honored and privileged to be with you again for another episode here in season 4 uh for those of you who are new to the show thank you for listening for those of you who've been around for a while please don't hesitate to reach out to me start your voyage@gmail.com i'd love to hear feedback input about the previous shows previous guests topics any of the above also feel free to suggest things that you might be interested in hearing about i've been getting quite a few outreaches about ideas for the show some are good fits some are not great fits and that's okay but uh thank you very much to those of you who have been reaching out with some thoughts so today I am going to uh well it's it's an episode I'm excited about um I was getting excited to prepare for it as well and it's kind of an interesting take uh of bringing a few different thoughts together around how bosses stress their employees out and I'll give you a quick glimpse here as to how this uh came to be how this episode started and I I highly recommend for any of you out there just download the Harvard Business Review app go and download HBR download it and set your notifications to get the management tip of the day every day I get a notification from the app which basically has one or two sentences about the management tip of the day and then you can tap that and go ahead and read in more detail a few paragraphs about a specific area there's usually a citation at the bottom but the added benefit of having the app is also they will have a push notification every once in a while about a particular article and one came in for me which was uh something like you know five ways managers stress out their employees and of course that got my attention so when I tapped it it actually led to an old article from May of 2020 which if you you know I don't know about you all but personally I I actually hate flashing back to CO so I don't want to dwell on that piece of it but just think of the context of uncertainty around all of us in May of 2020 uh a little over five years ago and this was an article written for uh HBR called five ways leaders accidentally stress out their employees and I'm using this as the launching pad uh using it as a framework to talk about a few things about how managers will um uh stress their employees out will will unnecessarily get them uh worked up or create anxiety for them and I think it's an important thing to talk about you know the last couple of episodes of this show I've been talking about the uncertainty that we face now looking back um in the future looking back on where we are today uh maybe it will maybe it won't be a big uh era of change it's hard to know this but there's the business volatility there's the tariff topic affects the stock market there is AI uh there is it's not a new thing but I've mentioned it the last two episodes the influence of private equity growth goals that are perhaps unrealistic or unattainable for certain businesses and there are all of these pressures All the while unemployment is pretty low but white collar workers who are unemployed are having a hard time finding work the job uh application process is evolving in front of our eyes i've covered that it doesn't necessarily seem to be an effective process however it's hard to say how much change this is in a short period of time in the big picture but it made me think about this article of the five ways leaders accidentally stress out their employees made me think about the role of managers today and the change that they are facing and that the employees who follow them are significantly influenced by the manager themselves managers themselves and it gets this kind of rock or a hard place situation where there are these exceptional business demands these evolving dynamics where we're not going to hire people if AI can do it and the middle manager is the one squeezed between strategy and contributors and it's not a new dynamic but they are the core element to having engaged employees so naturally these roles the middle managers are the ones who are going to have the biggest influence on how the organization operates the executive team that puts together strategy cannot go do the jobs that the employees are being asked to do or that AI is being asked to do so where does it leave us with the role of the manager and how important that is when they themselves are the biggest dropping cohort when it comes to engagement i don't know if you all saw that in the 2025 Gallup state of the workplace report which came out uh April or May of of 2025 managers are the ones who are dropping the most so that is going to have uh a cascade a trickle down a snowball however you think about that on employees but it made me think about how important it is to talk about this idea that leaders so easily can accidentally create stress for their employees and this article is 5 years old but I wonder if it doesn't really matter because these ideas transcend humans don't evolve that much in five years i hope but here's the deal the article says and there's a link to this in the show notes the article says that essentially leaders often overestimate their own skills and that's why they don't realize the power they have over the employees they think they're doing just fine quite often i found that was interesting a lot of the managers and leaders that I interact with they seem to carry themselves with a level of humility but I suppose that doesn't inherently mean that they don't think they're doing a good job and so they tend to overestimate their performance and their skills and they're not aware of how much power that they have over the employees so why are we talking about this on leadership voyage it's not for me to bring this up to guilt leaders and managers into thinking they're not good at leading it's actually to empower them and empower you all to realize the power you have to influence your employees and with this article maybe it'll help you avoid five traps so that's the point of this discussion realize the power you have and embrace that in a positive way become more informed with some of these five accidental stressors and then you know as always hopefully you can pick something that you might work on or help be or try to be more aware of so we're going to go through uh the five things that are in this article the five accidental stressors uh but before I do that I want to mention um there was a show in season 2 season 2 episode 8 that covered uh a writeup by Tracy Brower about the emotional impact that managers have on employees and it had a stat in that article that said uh 69% of employees their direct manager uh had the equivalent mental health impact of their partner and I highlight that before we get to this list just to remember that yep it's a big responsibility to be a manager but the good news is if you're making progress if you're if you're making strides if you're taking steps if you're showing those who follow you that you're aware of your leadership and you're trying to improve it I genuinely believe that that is half the battle that that builds relationships that the employees see that and understand that and I want to make sure to highlight that as a positive you as a manager have a tremendous power to help make the people around you's lives better and that's fantastic how often do we get that opportunity in people's lives so that's a good thing that's a great thing so from the HBR article five ways leaders accidentally stress out their employees here we go uh number one and the way the format's going to go here is I have a few that I'll I'll expound upon but but the format is what is the issue why does it matter and then maybe I've got some extra uh supplemental info to add to it but not in every case so number one avoid negative language and uh you know a lot of these when you when you look back at the list you'll be like okay that seems pretty simple but you know who knows how you're acting in the moment talking to your team in a one-on-one being reactive responding to situations team meetings whatever it happens to be so number one avoid negative language and the main reason for this is that it uh heightens employee anxiety and this reminded me of a book called three vital questions transforming workplace drama and I was in this leadership group uh for a few years called Dose of for a couple years called Dose of Leadership University uh filled with a fantastic group of individuals from around the world actually and a subset of us still meet uh about every month or so but when we were in this group we were introduced to the concepts in this book Three Vital

Questions:

Transforming Workplace Drama by David Emerald written in 2019 and what reminded me about this idea of avoid negative language was the distinction in this book between a problem orientation and an outcome orientation and hang with me for a second i want to highlight the difference between negative language and saying something in a different way when you frame something as a problem that usually leads to anxiety and when people are anxious their actions are reactive which leads to a problem right and you're getting in this cycle you're kind of stuck in this loop when you have an outcome orientation you're stating what's in front of us as something we want to achieve as an outcome usually when we have an outcome orientation that leads to some kind of passion some kind of inspiration with the folks who are involved and that leads to a baby step of progress towards that outcome and that starts building momentum in that direction for the positive so I wanted to highlight that from this book because it reminded me of this where if we avoid the negative language and we frame things in terms of outcomes we are more likely to get good results from those who are following us so the number one trap or the first trap avoid negative language uh let's see number two here i think I've got it okay number two is erratic actions erratic actions now why is this an issue again pretty self-explanatory if you are consistent and predictable people know what to expect it's one less thing for them to have to worry about oh great which side of the bed did my boss wake up today is he or she going to be excited or disappointed even though I think we've done a good job right it adds stress to uh a situation that doesn't need it added to it when you come with erratic actions and you can dive into this more deeply in the article if you go ahead and click and uh and read it number three emotional volatility and three four and five to me is where the meat of this discussion happens at least from my point of view so number three is kind of related to erratic actions but emotional volatility and it says here that leaders should do their best to uh bring their best poker face bring their best poker face and I thought this was interesting because it is talking about hiding your emotions or hiding how you feel and it made me wonder if that was slightly inauthentic uh there's a difference between just being completely unfiltered raw and transparent apologies for the sniffles by the way just getting over a cold um there's a difference between being entirely transparent and raw uh and and and then being honest right and so I I will say this one struck me a little odd but wear your poker face is what it suggests and it said for folks who struggle struggle with this uh they suggest mindfulness and I took a class um back in May it was an outdoor class uh at a place near me actually it's where my wife works the Gardens of Spring Creek in the city of Fort Collins Colorado it was a very cool class it was called forest bathing and it was essentially about the benefits of nature and how to be mindful in nature and having those experiences with other people it was really cool but something that the facilitator said to open up this course was um how how when you you walk into a room and you have emotions right those are contagious one way or the other and I it's of course true we all know that and that's what perhaps is the point of this be aware that if you are emotionally volatile be aware that how you end up showing up in any given situation is contagious and is going to affect your team and if you think you're more likely to come up with a negative reaction based on your mood circumstances whatever's going on maybe that's a place to think about the poker face take a deep breath step into the situation do your best to just stay flat while you read what's going on number four way to uh unintentionally stress your team out would be excessive pessimism and this is very similar to the emotional volatility and the poker face the suggestion in this article is even if you feel excessively pessimistic don't project it i find the way that this list kind of turned to be really fascinating the author bear in mind the context we're talking about May of 2020 okay the author is saying even if you feel pessimistic hide it because you don't need your team to feel that and I find this one again really interesting to think about you should think about this yourselves is that what you would prefer to do and I think that's just something that we all have to think about how honest and transparent do we all want to be with our teams in any given moment based on what the situation might be and the fifth item here which is where the dissonance really comes to a head for me the fifth item on this list of how to uh avoid or um one way that you unintentionally stress your team out is by ignoring people's emotions so what is interesting here is they suggest that usually this happens when leaders are hyperfocused on their own emotions this is the one excuse me this is the one where my head explodes a little bit all we're talking about in this list is ways to regulate our emotions and then number five is pay attention to other emotions which usually happens when you're paying too much attention to your own emotions right so I think the list is good to think about maybe picking one thing off here that speaks to you but when I kind of put it all together it kind of makes me kind of doesn't land very well in my brain and I'll tell you one thing that's really good in this article about this fifth section it says check on how people are doing as opposed to just focusing on what they're doing my uh co-founder with the business I've got uh Sonia Bertech who was a guest on this show a few episodes ago you know she said something in a session we were doing last week for an organization she said something don't let the first time people hear from you this week be when you want something from them i think that's a great a great guiding principle i like that you go "Well I thought of you but only when I needed something from you." And similarly on this list one way to help tap into people's emotions is to ask them how are they doing not just what are they doing so I think that's fantastic and I'll take that as the number one takeaway for me personally from this write up at at HBR now what's the dissonance of this i already called out one we need to watch out for being emotionally volatile we need to watch out for being excessively pessimistic but we can't just focus on our own emotions we need to focus on everyone else's emotions sounds very difficult right especially in the heat of the moment and whatever might be transpiring at work so I think it's important to acknowledge that the the the um the combination of those three items on this list I think is extremely difficult to reconcile and really figure out but hey here's to aspiring to becoming better leaders right the last part I want to add to this conversation is I love as I just said I love the suggestion of focusing on how people are doing rather than what they are doing but it brings me to an article that I read recently and of course somehow on my other computer that I'm looking at all my stuff i'm not logged in anymore on this article so give me a second here i am now logged in to my Wall Street Journal account this is an article under the lifestyle and workplace section may 11th 2025 author is Chip Cutter and the title is quote"Everybody's replaceable the new ways bosses talk about workers." And this is what I think is getting hard in this environment 92% of HR leaders say that their people centric initiatives are under attack this article in the Wall Street Journal from May 11th says "Everybody's replaceable the new ways bosses talk about workers." Yet for me the most important takeaway from this list of the five ways you might accidentally stress your employees out is to ask how they're doing before you ask what they're doing so we've got tension right now folks right the leverage is in the on the side of businesses but it's sad that we even need to talk about leverage because what we're really trying to talk about right if we really zoom out how can managers help execute the brilliant strategies of organizations by caring for the people who are doing the work bringing them along and leveraging their creativity and at the end of that road seeing great results that make the world better that's why we work that's one of the three most meaningful things is in people's lives is their work and so when I saw this article May 11th in the Wall Street Journal with the key points that companies are demanding more from their employees amid the economic uncertainty and a shift in power dynamics CEOs are taking a tough stance expecting more work less complaints and advances in AI are influencing this tone with some leaders warning staff staff to adapt or lose their jobs it's not my business to tell someone how to run a company right i don't I've never run a large company i don't know but it is a bummer to read about some of the trends at least being covered on this level about how people are looking at the employees in an organization the people who do the work in an organization so I ask you managers directors VPs those of you out there who hold these roles who have people who follow you try to think about these five traps try to think about which one you're more likely to uh to fall into and remember that if you're under pressure for great results Yep the short-term first order benefit of working hard is getting great results but what about the second order results right what about what happens in two quarters or in two years when employees are being treated a certain way or the tone towards the workforce is a certain way things come back around eventually right scales shift left and right and we want to just do what's what's a good by all of us right we want to do right and we want to have fulfilling places to work and we want to get great results and if you want great results treat your employees like humans bring them along help them understand why we're doing it and let them buy in because then they'll be motivated right all right folks so talked about how bosses unintentionally stress employees out that list of five things remember how managers have a significant mental health impact over their employees and we've got some of these shifting workplace dynamics that have been evolving in the last several months and I do believe that through the managers we can invigorate the workforce we can bring the individuals along help them see the vision understand why the work is important and treat fairly until next time everybody take care[Music]