John Fowler continues to explore the leadership skills of the dental nurse, with a look at stress

There are two aspects to this article on leadership and stress – firstly is the recognition and management of stress in your own life when you work in a leadership role and secondly is the recognition and management of stress in the staff within your team. The two are related. You cannot begin to manage the stress of staff in your team if you are not managing your own stress. One of the most important qualities of any leader is to create and project a calm confident authority of ethos and direction. Stress management of the team must therefore begin with you and how you manage it.

Managing your own stress

The factors that cause you stress will be different to those that cause me stress so the first step in managing stress is to recognise what specific factors create stress for you. Spend a couple of minutes reflecting and writing down the five top stress factors for you, including your home and work life. Common factors will be relationships, finance, volume of work, deadlines, changing boundaries, lack of clarity from senior management, not wanting to upset someone, worry about loved ones, emotional demands from others and lack of energy. The simple process of recognising and writing down significant stress factors in your life can be very helpful. Having recognised your stress factors, the next step is to reduce the degree of stress they cause you. For each of the five stressors you have identified, write down two actions you can take that will reduce the impact of that stressor on your life. For example, if finance is a stressor for you, then one action would be to identify all the essential costs you are required to pay, the second action might be to identify expenditures that could be reduced. These actions will be relevant for home life finances and also management budgets at work. The third step is to put these proposed actions into practice. Find a way of unwinding, relaxing or redirecting that pent-up energy.

Managing stress within your team

One of the qualities of any ‘good’ leader is the ability to create a team spirit in which unnecessary stress factors are minimised and unavoidable stress is channelled productively. Take some time to reflect on the team you lead – what causes them stress in the workplace? It can be a good team exercise to explore with them the five biggest causes of stress for them in the workplace. For each of those five areas identified, ask the team to identify two actions that can be taken to reduce the impact of those stressors. You now have 10 actions that you can begin to either partially or fully implement, which will help reduce the stress your team feels. Your job will be to facilitate those actions over appropriate time scales and then review the impact with your team in a month's time. That exercise should help you to identify and manage unnecessary stress within the team and it can be repeated every six months to identify new and additional stress factors. The second quality of a good leader is the ability to channel unavoidable stress positively. This is about taking the emotion and energy created by stress factors and using it positively and productively. This is difficult and separates out the people who can manage, but can't lead. Firstly, it's about leading by example, working hard and being positive. It is about enjoying the challenge and seeking solutions rather than problems. It is about genuine care for your staff as people not just workers. It is about acknowledging faults and also celebrating victories. It is the art of leadership as opposed to the science of management.

Building the team

Sometimes, the analogy of a battery is used when dealing with stress in our own lives or that of our team. If we continually use the energy in the battery to deal with stress, it will eventually run down. We therefore need to keep the battery charge when not in use. I've always found this analogy really useful particularly when I'm involved in helping teams to build and work together. A team that invests in building internal relationships during less stressful times will be able to draw on those reserves when deadlines are tight and resources limited.

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