The stress response can be contagious

Interesting, about 20 years ago my dad stopped consuming all news media. He said "It's all negative, it's killing us all and if anything important happens I'll find out anyway."

I've not been brave enough to totally "check out", but I do avoid sensationalized news and try to pay more attention to valuable information rather than "drama".

Meanwhile at work I always remind my team "Hey we are not curing cancer, relax, slow is fast, fast is slow."

I tell my teams my job is easy because as a manager I only have four things to do:

  1) Provide Air Cover (reduce stress)

  2) Provide resources

  3) Provide direction

  4) Get the F* out of the way

I find that #1 is harder than it sounds, but as this article points out stress is infectious and can really slow a team down. I've had more than one stressed out employee come into my office and explain how we're missing some deadline or whatever and I always say "Yup, ok we'll get through it, we're not curing cancer here." we both laugh and they walk out with a lighter step to their walk.

That said I believe in accountability and we try to pick these things up in retro's and figure out how to avoid them in the future.

I like to say "I like originality in mistakes, big massive mistakes are fine, just learn and try not to repeat them."

I've noticed this in office situations. A bunch of people having a conversation are suddenly more stressed out than they have any reason to be. Why? It's just that time of year when everyone's on a deadline.

I've always thought this was the case. I quit a job last year, and a large part of it was the 8:30 AM standups where our CTO would stress us out with customer woes and deadlines not entirely relevant to the current sprint. Instead of moving these issues through a process that resulted in better-defined deadlines and requirements, it just felt like we were perpetually behind, and it happened every single morning. Many technical leaders are stressed, but it makes everything worse when your anxieties leak in to your team every day.