Centric Consulting Senior Manager and podcast host John Kackley loves helping organizations in various industries solve their unique business challenges. Here, he shares tips for managing stress in three common workplace situations: starting a new role, context switching, and feeling stuck at work.
Do you like stress? Do you know anyone who does?
You can read many articles and bullet-point lists about how to manage your schedule, communicate better, and so on, but these tips are usually about time, not stress. The implication is that stress is simply a function of too little time rather than a metric all on its own.
The truth is that stress is about your situation and how you respond to it more than time — and work can be full of stressful situations. I’ll discuss three common workplace scenarios that can result in stress and share some practical tips on managing them.
1. Starting a New Role
Growing, dynamic companies regularly create new projects and new roles or significantly alter existing roles — a trend that is only accelerating with AI. The first day of a new project or a new role can be very exciting. Nerve-wracking, too. You’ll experience a lot of change very quickly, and you’ll naturally be eager to get off on the right foot.
What can you do to minimize stress while making the best impression you can?
As a mnemonic, remember the acronym OMEGA — you can think of it as beginning with the end in mind! OMEGA stands for:
- Onboarding
- Mission
- Expectations
- Goals
- Attitude
Let’s take a deeper look at each term.
Onboarding
In short, know when and where you have to show up, how you’re going to get there, and who you’re meeting to start your new role. Showing up is not only a big part of success but having details worked out can reduce your stress.
Then, make sure you have what you need. Your new role may have an onboarding checklist to follow, but if not, keep asking for the right tools and resources. Typically, persistence is crucial. After all, your new supervisors are dealing with a lot of change, too!
Mission and Vision
Even while you’re in the weeds of onboarding, take some time to look at the stars.
What does success in this role mean to you?
Put another way, why do you want to do a good job? Remember to ask “why” five times: You want to do well because you take pride in your work. Why? You want a raise or a bonus, or you want your team to be rewarded or your company to grow. Why? And so on.
By knowing what drives you and your team, you can refocus on your goals when discouraged or stressed.
Expectations
Your first week in a new role is also the time to confirm that you understand what’s expected of you. What’s your role? What tasks are you expected to perform? What metrics do you need to meet? What objectives are you expected to achieve? How do you need to communicate?
Additionally, you should put these expectations into a larger context. Do you understand the “why”? In which areas might you extend yourself, take initiative, and in which areas should you stick to the role description?
Goals
While mission defines the passion that will keep you going, and expectations set the parameters, goals set the course.
How will you define personal success in your new role? What do you want to get out of the experience?
Keep the scope of your goals very wide, ranging from overall achievement to specific skills and experiences. Some goals may fall in a sequence — you must define intermediate goals before you can pursue the bigger goals.
Also, goals are usually most powerful when they’re shared. It doesn’t do much good to want to build a new skill, not tell anyone about it, and then seethe about the fact you never get a chance to develop it.
As a manager, I also like to encourage people to tell me what level of success would constitute a parade-worthy, knock-it-out-of-the-ballpark success. Not only does it help me coach and motivate them, I think it helps them visualize what it will take to achieve it.
Attitude
More than anything else, your attitude is what people will see and react to in your first week. Are you excited? Afraid? Overconfident?
Your attitude is personal, and it has a lot to do with your circumstances, but you have the power to shape it. Thinking about your mission and goals will help you shape your attitude constructively.
It can be tempting to hit the ground running. For most clients and employers, that looks great. Besides the positive optics, there’s also the personal reinforcement. Any uncertainty you may feel in a new situation can be mitigated by the sheer energy you put in.
However, I’d suggest adding a little patience. While you want to show energy, demonstrate a can-do spirit, and show off your skills, you also need to listen and learn. Your co-workers and stakeholders will likely have some experience with what you’re diving into and possibly some sound advice. Going too fast without absorbing their input is likely to look arrogant, and that’s a first impression it’s hard to recover from.
Now, let’s take a look at another major stressor in the workplace – context switching.
2. Context Switching
Context switching is the mental agility to go from one situation (meeting, discussion, task, and so on) to another. Learning to context switch quickly can be key to professional success.
An often-quoted factoid about interruptions in your work is that it takes 15 minutes to get back into the right space for the original task.
Guess what? In your day-to-day work, you might need to make that change in 15 seconds. Talk about stress!
Consider this scenario: You have ten meetings scheduled for your day, possibly with no breaks. Many of the meetings may be with the same core group of people (your team, for example), but other people may join as well. When you end one meeting and start the next, you are context switching, and you must do it in the time it takes to walk from one conference room to another (or log in to your next Teams call).
In those 15 seconds, you have to:
- Join an entirely different problem space. It may be a different meeting, a different project, or maybe just a different topic within the same project.
- Adjust to playing a different role. You could be the facilitator in one meeting, contributor in the next, and audience member in the third.
- Adjust your communication with people from different teams or roles. You were joking with your team on one call, but the CIO is chairing your next one.
- Reset your emotions. That last meeting was frustrating, but if you carry that over, the next meeting won’t be very constructive.
- Park the tasks or crises. Any to-dos that came out of the last call are going to have to wait, unless they’re worth cancelling the next meeting for.
All those rapid changes risk making your next activity less constructive, and they can all reflect poorly on you if you don’t manage them well.
So, how the heck do you make these adjustments in 15 seconds?
- Prepare. Be ready to play your role in the next meeting by making written notes of what you need to get out of it and what you need to share with others.
- Use your tools. Agendas, action lists, or other facilitation mechanisms provide structure and drive the roles and tone.
- Compartmentalize. Issues in a particular area? Give them their space and time, but put them away for later, and don’t let them carry over to your next meeting. Respect the folks on your next call by focusing on the right topic at the right time.
- Take a breath. Maybe make that 15 seconds into 45 to get a coffee, look out the window, or perform your box breathing exercises.
- Ask for help. In some areas, you’re expected to have answers, but in other areas, you aren’t. Engage others to do their part and avoid the risk of feeling on the hook for everything.
- Reschedule or reprioritize when you need to. If your next meeting or task really isn’t going to go well, make a change.
The final work stressor to cover is feeling stuck.
3. Feeling Stuck
You’re stuck at work. Not stuck there all night by a deadline or paralyzed traffic, but stuck because everything you can possibly do, you’ve done. Every question you’ve asked, you’re waiting for the answer. Every meeting you need to have, you’ve scheduled. You can’t do anything, and you don’t know how to move things forward.
Or, maybe you believe that if you’re getting everything done, you haven’t taken on enough work. You’re used to having a million things on your plate. Emails show up faster than you can answer them, the phone won’t stop ringing, and you’ve got three reports due in the morning. You always have a list of things to do, but you can never get to them.
In either situation, you feel stuck — and that can be stressful! What do you do? Here are a few suggestions for getting unstuck:
- Do some self-assessment. What are you doing well? What could you do better? Are you focused on the right priorities? Are you stuck doing what’s urgent, not what’s important?
- Look at the processes you’re part of. Is there a better way to run things? Does the process stall or fail somewhere? Can you do away with the process altogether?
- Review your role and how reality matches up to it. How are you spending your time? Are you spending your time on mechanical processes at the expense of delivering real value? If you were your boss, would you change anything?
- Reach out to the people you work with. How do you collaborate with others on your team, elsewhere in your company, or with vendors, partners, or customers? Could you be doing this better? Instead of fifty emails a day, how about a half-hour call every morning? Or instead of a dozen phone calls, maybe a shared document?
- Think ahead. What’s your definition of done? How will you recognize when a task is complete? If you’ve set a standard for when a task is fundamentally complete, how will you know if it’s good enough?
- Communicate. Do people know what you’re expecting from them? Do you understand what people are expecting from you?
The connecting theme is to study what you’re doing and figure out how to do it in a better, more satisfying way. Remember that task completion doesn’t necessarily equal success, and the number of emails sent doesn’t quantify achievement.
In short, look for how to get yourself off the hamster wheel. And remember, you can’t wait for that magic day when your schedule clears and you can find ways to improve things.
Control Your Stress Before It Controls You
Work can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be stressful. You can reduce stress by changing how you prepare for — and respond to — different work situations. Think about other common situations, at work or at home, that regularly stress you out. The tips above can apply to many situations, and it’s always a good idea to stay mindful of your goals, values, strengths, and weaknesses.
Control your stress before it controls you!