Written for The Executive Magazine by guest author Amanda Caldeira, Founder of Caldeira Consulting

Our last article explored the challenge that senior executives face with stress from their roles and the extreme pressure of high expectations to achieve success for their organisation.

What causes the most pressure for the executive team? The constant pressure to perform, the huge implications of failure and the impact of those crises that arise which were not clearly visible to the executive team before they become too late.

The impact of stressful situations

The physiological impact of chronic stress can be significant. Data shows that the number of people who pass away each year from heart disease and stroke due to long working hours alone is significant and was estimated in 2016 to be 745,000. *  Most senior executives will know someone in their network who has been severely affected by stress in both their physical and mental health.

But stressful situations have more than an output of personal discomfort, mental health implications and physical health issues. Stressful scenarios at this level of leadership often have an enormous impact on many others. Stressful issues not only harm the executive team but also cascade through the organisation as pressure grows. This harms performance and therefore impacts overall business outcomes.

With layers of management processes can become rigid and unyielding. Messages that are brought to the senior executive team can become unclear either due to a complex hierarchy or through fear of reporting unwelcome news and the repercussions that may have on other levels of management. True effectiveness of performance can be difficult to identify. Senior executives who take on the responsibility for the direction and performance of the entire organisation can find themselves dealing with an issue too late that could result in serious losses or even failure of the business.

What can executives do about this?

There are effectively two ways to manage stress. The first is to deal with the feelings that stress produces. Many opt for policies to introduce time management, work life balance and relieving practices such as yoga, mindfulness, and resilience training. These are all useful to support the resilience of an individual undergoing significant stress. But there is more that can be done before getting to that point. There is another approach that aims to remove or reduce the issues that cause stress. This other approach involves looking inside our own organisations and our own resources to identify the issues causing them and transform them to lessen their impacts. This is the problem approach.

The Problem Approach.

Using the problem approach is a method which aims to eliminate the factors that increase stress at work. It does it through identifying what is causing the problem in the first place, assessing the impact of the problem against the factors causing stress and revealing the underlying causes that exacerbate them.

Often, when thorough root cause analysis is completed, the issues causing stress are unexpected.

How does the problem approach work?

The process of understanding the issues causing a feeling of stress can be used to delve into the underlying causes that sit within an organisations own systems and processes. The problem can then be resolved or reduced. This is done by first reviewing the top-level issues that are causing stress for the executive team then looking at each factor that exacerbates it. These factors are change, control, demands, role, support, and relationships.

An example could be pressure to perform such as the introduction of a significant new product to market by a certain date to satisfy investors. This could cause many impacts on each of those factors resulting in the feeling of stress for board members. Once identified then the process of reviewing the underlying issues behind them reveals how they can be improved. This could involve the structure of roles and reporting, metrics and performance management and early warning of any upcoming crisis. By taking a pragmatic approach to the issues that result in highly stressful environments the organisation can address them, and the resulting output improves the stress that the C-suite deal with personally as well as improved performance for their organisation.