Chapter 1

Stress in the Workplace

He who has a why can endure almost any how.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

The message on the bumper sticker was stark and jarring, the unadorned voice of the Victim: “On my way to work. Please kill me.”

Wondering about the person who would put such a statement on her vehicle, a car she presumably drives to work, I crept up at the next light to have a look. She looked stressed: tousled hair, heavily furrowed brows, down-turned mouth. “At least she has a job,” I thought as I drove off.

I’ve been hearing a lot of negative statements about work these days. For instance, one man said to me recently, “In every other house on my street is a person out of work. In each of the other houses is someone going crazy trying to do the work of those who have been laid off.” While this might be the exaggeration of a defeatist, work life has become increasingly unstable and the defeatists seem to be multiplying.

“‘Change-Of-The-Month Club,’ I call it,” another said to me. Asked to elaborate, he said, “I can’t wait to see what horrors are in store for us next month. Last month they gave me a ‘promotion’ to a job I didn’t want. Now they’ve asked me to fire my old associates.” Change like this, I thought—or even the threat of it—can challenge the emotional wellbeing of the most resilient person.

In each of these cases, I wondered what these people might say if they actually lost the job they apparently hate. It’s not that I think they should be grateful for a stressful job or value an employer who treats them poorly, but if you think having stress at work is hard, try having the stress of no work.

Some Personal Credentials

I know what it’s like to lose a job. I’ve been there. It hurts. And makes you mad. And causes intense anxiety.

But losing a job can also be one of the most liberating experiences you could ever have. I know this from personal experience, too, and from my career-counseling colleagues who tell me this is the response of at least a third of those they coach after job loss.

I will never put a bumper sticker like that woman’s on my car no matter how bad any future employment might be. True, workplaces can be unfair, humiliating, and worse. But no one is holding a gun to anyone’s head to stay employed.

I am writing this in the spring of 2009, six months after the “Great Collapse” of the housing and financial markets of August 2008. Figure 1 is a rather bleak chart showing the results of the current economic problems on the growth of the World Gross Domestic Product. The WGDP, as you probably know, is the sum total of goods and services produced all over the world. As a financial executive friend of mine put it, you don’t really want to see the growth of the World GDP take a nosedive like this. By the time you read this, perhaps the crisis has corrected. But even if it has, your workplace is probably still in turmoil and the leaders are trying to make it more competitive in the new, do-more-with-less economy.

High Stress in America

Let’s peer into the lives of ordinary working Americans to see how workplace change is affecting them and how they’re going about managing that stress. That woman with the “Please kill me” bumper sticker, it seems, has a lot of company.

Let’s do this for two reasons: in comparing your experience to others, you might find yourself comforted by the fact that, if you are challenged by workplace and economic conditions, you aren’t alone; and by examining the stress management habits of others, we can learn both what works and what doesn’t.

As our “spy glass” into the stress managing habits of Americans, we will use data from the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America study. This annual study (which you can read for yourself online) measures sources of stress, behaviors used to manage stress, and the impact of stress on the lives of Americans. Over 4,000 adults participated in the 2008 study in all parts of the country.

According to this study, half of Americans reported that their stress level increased over the past year, with 30 percent rating their stress level as “extreme.” This continued a trend reported in 2007  when half of Americans reported that their stress had increased over the previous five years.

Stress clearly is taking a toll on people and, according to the APA, is causing or contributing to health problems, poor relationships, and lost productivity at work.

What’s causing all this stress? Three things: money, the economy, and work. For over 80 percent of us, these are the chief concerns. Americans report that work is a stressor (67 percent) and that health problems in the family (67 percent) and housing costs (62 percent) are also troubling them. Job stability is a problem for over half of Americans (56 percent).

Who is struggling most: men or women? It appears that women are.

Women, for example, report that they are more stressed about money (83 percent for women, 78 percent for men), the economy (84 percent vs. 74 percent), housing costs (66 percent vs. 58 percent), and health problems affecting their families (70 percent vs. 63 percent). Women also report more symptoms of a physical and emotional nature than men do and they cope with it differently than men do. We’ll come back to this below.

Let me say that again in case, like me, you get a little glazed over with a lot of statistics:

More than half of Americans say they are frequently troubled these days by feelings of irritability, fatigue, insomnia, and depression due to work and workplace issues!

So how are we coping with all that stress? Well, for one thing, despite knowing we should do so, less than half of us are exercising to alleviate stress. This figure (at 47 percent) is down over the past year. We’re more stressed now and we’re doing less to take care of ourselves. In case you are one of the few people in the United States who has not heard this, exercise, merely taking a daily walk, can be tremendously beneficial in managing stress.

When asked what they do to cope with stress, many people mentioned the following: smoking, gambling, shopping, and drinking. Obviously, these are faulty mechanisms, at best, for dealing with stress. More disturbing yet was the percentage of people who actually believe that these behaviors are really beneficial in managing stress: 40 percent of people who smoke, for example, think so and 41 percent of the people who gamble think so.

Thankfully, the percentages of people who employ these practices in managing stress are relatively low. But of the 14 most commonly mentioned stress managing practices used by the study group, seven—including the questionable practices mentioned above, are offered as preferred techniques. I’ve darkened the most questionable techniques (see Fig. 2).

Stress managing practice

Percent of respondents

Listen to music

52%

Exercise or walk

47%

Read

44%

Spend time with friends or family

41%

Watch TV or movies for more than two hours a day

41%

Napping

38%

Play video games, surf the Internet

37%

Pray

37%

Eat

34%

Spend time on a hobby

30%

Go to church or religious services

21%

Drink alcohol

18%

Shop

18%

Smoke

16%

All of those in the tinted rows, above, are either forms of escape or self-soothing techniques. None will really help you cope well with stress. But back to male-female differences. Figure 3 shows some other comparisons.

Dimension

Percent of respondents

Women

Men

Eating to manage stress

39%

29%

Drinking to manage stress

15%

22%

Doing enough to manage stress (said yes)

50%

39%

Experience headaches

56%

36%

Feel depressed or sad

56%

39%

Feel as though could cry

55%

23%

Finally, perhaps the most disturbing finding of all is that while Americans are clearly troubled by workplace and economic issues, and while a majority of Americans are willing to share their troubles with their spouses as a means of dealing with stress, nearly half of Americans say they would be uncomfortable asking someone they know for help in managing stress. Almost six in 10 would be very reluctant to reach out for professional advice to manage the problems stress is creating in their lives. As you will read later, doing so is good stress management. It’s not a sign of weakness to reach out for help; it’s a sign of strength.

Most Employees are Disengaged

Now, let’s get in the car with the woman who’s traveling to work with that “Please kill me” sticker on her bumper. What might we find at her workplace? We know she’s not the only one who’s struggling these days.

For an answer, we might look to the results of a study of employee engagement conducted in the fall of 2008 by the

. It describes four disturbing trends:

1.At the very time our economy needs high levels of productivity, employee performance is declining dramatically. According to this report, the number of employees offering their employers high levels of discretionary effort has decreased by 53percent since 2005. Discretionary effort is the energy an employee might put forth in helping a coworker solve a problem, the extra hours devoted to helping a client, or the decision to polish an important presentation one more time.

2.Senior leader effort has declined dramatically. Disengagement is showing up at all levels: in 2008 only 13 percent of senior executives reported that they put forth high levels of discretionary effort compared to 29 percent in the second half of 2006.

3.Disengaged employees are digging in. Disengaged employees, who are less productive than engaged employees, are significantly less likely to quit in now than in years past.

4.The most talented and valuable employees want to leave. According to this report 25 percent of a company’s most valued talent intends to quit in the next 12 months.

To me, these statistics reveal that many employees are living in a state of quiet desperation: they’re disaffected by work, but they aren’t saying anything about it. And many of their leaders, at least metaphorically, are sitting in the parking lot with their motors running, just waiting for the recession to end.

Three Choices

As an organizational consultant for many years, I have had the opportunity to observe literally thousands of employees as they’ve been forced to cope with sweeping organizational change. During that time, I have worked with over 100 organizations that were in transition. I have advised executives as they’ve made widespread changes in organizational structure, business processes, and reward systems. I have helped them break the news of these changes to employees and I have helped the employees in those organizations deal with the psychological impact of their decisions.

As part of that work, I have discovered that there are three fundamental ways of responding to change of any sort, whether on- or off-the-job. These choices are usually made unconsciously and have radically different consequences. Over the course of my career, I have conducted hundreds of workshops designed to help employees stay productive during change. In each of those seminars, I have articulated those three choices.

One of the three choices—to play the Victim—is ineffective in managing the stress of organizational change. Another—the Survivor mode—is more effective but it, too, leaves a lot to be desired. The remaining response works exceptionally well. I call it the Navigator mode. To adopt this approach means not only are you more likely to enjoy greater workplace satisfaction but also increased satisfaction with your life in general. In every workplace a percentage of people employ this response and make the best of change. They continue to grow and develop despite the difficulties surrounding them. You will learn about those employees here and I will encourage you to emulate them  partly because they suffer less from the stress of change than their coworkers.

You will learn through this book that during change being a Victim, a Survivor, or a Navigator is up to you. You will learn that being a negative and reactive Victim carries with it potentially severe negative repercussions. You will learn that while most people respond to change by making the Survivor’s choice, opting for it will eventually leave you unfulfilled, stressed-out, and possibly depressed. Finally, you will learn that if you really want to be the master of your own fate and make the best of workplace change, you’ll have to create your own North Star and function like what I call a Navigator.

In the typical organization, change begins when senior executives decide change is necessary. They’re like battlefield generals. The generals see a need for change and then tell others—usually middle managers—to carry out the orders. I think of middle-level managers as “strategy lieutenants.” They salute the generals smartly and do their best to implement the change their superiors have said is necessary. Finally, there is everyone else, the vast bulk of employees whom I call the “cannon fodder” of change because they’re farthest from the decision-making and often have to pay the highest personal toll when change unfolds.

I have written this book to offer all three groups a constructive path. If you live at the bottom of your organization, you need to function as a Navigator because it’s the best way to take care of yourself. But you also want and need your leaders to function as Navigators because when leaders function like Victims or Survivors they create a lot of misery for people below them.

Some readers of this book may be in transition, i.e., between jobs. If you are in the midst of a career search, you need the counsel in this book at least as much as other readers who are currently employed because successful job transition will require you to manage stress exceptionally well.

How the Book is Organized

Chapter Two, “Perception and Reality,” tells you how your perceptions about yourself and your world can determine your fate and how they lead to the three responses to change.

Chapters Three through Five describe those choices in detail. Chapter Six offers tips, guidelines, and practical suggestions to enable you to get yourself in Navigator mode during change. Finally, Chapter Seven has exercises, checklists, and worksheets to help you determine who you are at work right now, how workplace change is affecting you, and how you can make the best of your situation.

Since this book is written for employees undergoing organizational change, the examples given will focus primarily on work life, but the ideas and guidelines offered here generally apply regardless of the kind of change you are facing. I wish you the best as you go through the adventure of change, whatever it may be.

On page 101 is a simple questionnaire. It will give you some feedback about the extent to which your current outlook parallels that of the Victim, Survivor, or Navigator. You can fill it out now or wait until you’ve read the entire book to take it. Whether you dive in now or later please be clear: this questionnaire is not a diagnostic “test.” It is not intended to slap a label on you or anyone else. You will learn by reading this book that no one is purely a Victim, only a Survivor, or exclusively a Navigator. The value of the instrument will be in using your scores to deepen your understanding about the Victim, Survivor, and Navigator ways of thinking and using the insights you gain to fashion a constructive response to your own situation.

Finally, consider visiting my website. It contains a rich array of resources devoted to helping you understand and stay in Navigator mode. The site offers short essays describing remarkable people who function as Navigators, excerpts from other books I’ve written, and an art gallery. Finally, on this site are guided meditation podcasts that will help you relax, meditate, and focus on your goals in a powerful way.

Happy reading and stay on course!