I spend much of my time with executives and business leaders who face continual challenges. These challenges can come from a multitude of sources: customers, employees, shareholders, and/or the business environment. Any of these challenges will be guaranteed to take up precious critical time that takes the business leader away from focus on growing the business.
When slower economic times are upon us, challenges become even more complicated. Tough challenges often stir up a sense of being “out of control.” Then frustration, disappointment, or stress becomes the enemy. The pressure to produce profits becomes stronger. A leader may have to work harder and longer to meet the same goals. This leads to a reduction in personal time which takes the balance of work and home out of sync, creating even greater stress.
When I talk about managing through tough times with my clients, I share with them these ideas:
1. Plan your day and stay as close to the plan as possible. Interruptions will happen and so will challenges – plan that into your schedule, perhaps an hour or two a day for those occurrences. If they don’t happen, you have extra time to work on your pet project – or better yet, take off early and claim some personal time.
2. You may not be able to control the source of the challenge, such as the economy, the competition, or employees – but you can control your response. Before you react, take a breath. I find this to be very calming. If you don’t have to make an immediate response, sit back and evaluate the situation. If you must respond immediately, do so with a strong back up plan in place: respond immediately, just dousing the fire enough to calm things down. Then step back and examine the problem. Once you can get a different perspective without all the added urgency, you can handle any remaining issues, and explore the prevention of this from happening again.
3. Focus on what you can control – you being one of them. Let go, detach from what you can’t control. Stress can cause exhaustion and illness. Laughter is a wonderful antidote to fight stress. It has been known to strengthen the immune system while preventing and fighting disease. When you laugh, stress hormone levels decrease and the feel-good hormone, endorphin, increases. And laughing is something you can do at any time. So find ways to laugh!
4. Everything that happens to you will make you stronger. When you’re not stressed, it is the time to examine what you learned and what you want to change. Is it how your company will better retain employees? Or is it a newer way to develop business? Maybe it’s a plan of how you will operate when the next recession hits. Whatever it is, you’re now on the other side of it and have better clarity and insight to insure it doesn’t happen again.
