Why Emotional Well-Being Is Becoming a Core Leadership Competency

We all know how airplanes handle moments of acute stress. When the you-know-what hits the fan, you are instructed to secure your own oxygen mask first. There is a very simple reason for this. You cannot help the people around you if you are slumped over in your seat from oxygen depletion.

In professional situations, there is a similar logic at work. If you are not taking care of yourself, you probably cannot lead effectively either. Emotional awareness and emotional management are important skills for executives.

You should be able to recognize when and how stress is affecting you and the people on your team. You should also be prepared to take a proactive approach to handling it.

In this article, we take a look at why emotional well-being is important in professional settings and what you can do to develop it more thoroughly.

What Stress Does to Professionals

It is easy to deprioritize stress management because, day in and day out, it often does not seem to have a major impact on your overall experience. You might notice that you feel grumpy, worried, or unfocused, but in terms of what you are able to accomplish, not much appears to change.

Until it does. Stress has a way of accumulating and hitting you at exactly the wrong moment. You may feel reasonably fine for a long time, then suddenly feel almost unable to function on a given day.

Stress can impact your physical health, erode your ability to perform at a high level, and increase your odds of burnout or turnover. This is true for you, and it is also true for everyone on your team.

The signs of stress are often difficult to detect because they present as subtle or gradual in many situations. In other cases, you are aware of the stress, but you justify it. It is a busy time at work. Things are not going quite right. You will feel better when they improve.

Then when you expect things to be better, a new problem appears. The stress continues, and now you have a fresh justification for feeling the way you do. Some people live their entire professional lives this way, knowing they are stressed but not taking action, expecting relief to come at an increasingly later date.

This is not good for you, and it is not good for the people you work with. If you cannot manage your own stress, you cannot effectively support others. More to the point, you are simply not as effective as a leader.

Identifying The Root Cause

In the next sections, we will look at what can be done to reduce workplace stress. The first step is identifying the cause.

Everything else described in this article is largely designed to treat the symptoms of stress. It is equally important to understand what is causing it in the first place.

In not every case will there be an action you can take to fully eliminate the problem. Some jobs are inherently stressful. For example, if a healthcare worker feels stressed by the weight and responsibility of their role, there may be little that can be done to remove that pressure entirely.

That said, you can always examine why you or your employees are experiencing stress and make an effort to reduce it where possible. Could deadlines be adjusted for quality-of-life considerations? Would adding more people to the team help? Could individual responsibility be redistributed?

Even small adjustments like these can have a meaningful impact on how people experience their work.

Securing Additional Resources

Many businesses will provide mental health resources for their employees. This is not always possible. It is a great way to help support people in their journey toward better health and wellness.

This can include everything from mindfulness activities to sessions with counselors or therapists. At the very least, you can advocate for better mental health resources within the basic insurance coverage plan.

Taking a proactive approach to stress and stress management and better mental health at work is great, but without a clinically supported foundation, it’s often basically just a PR move.

It’s also worth exploring ways to add flexibility into the routine. People often perform better when they feel they have more autonomy over their work.

Work-from-home opportunities are limited. Time off, four-day work weeks, and so on are, in certain fields, great ways to increase job satisfaction, reduce stress, and improve retention.

Though they seem like expensive or inefficient strategies to many people who have never tried them, they’re also surprisingly effective at driving positive results. People can do more working less when they feel good about their job and the expectations that are being placed on them.

Improving Routines

While you can’t mandate an improved routine for your employees, you can handle the way you live. More sleep, better eating, and exercise are all true self-care behaviors. They give your bodies the physical tools needed to lower stress and live better. If you’re not changing your behavior, no amount of breathing techniques will provide you with the stress relief that you need.

Finding Moments of Peace at Work

Seeking moments of peace, tranquility, and calmness can also go a long way toward managing stress symptoms. For example, if you can eat lunch outside, take a short walk during the day, or even manage a few minutes per hour of deep, strategic breathing, it will all go a long way toward reducing your experience with stress.

Conclusion

More than anything else, take mental health seriously. At the end of the day, recognizing that stress management and general mental health and wellness are important is a first and deeply impactful step. Everything else flows through this.

If you are still in denial, saying that stress is a normal part of the job or that it’s a trade-off you’re willing to make for financial security and career fulfillment, you won’t get better. That’s not necessarily to say that those decisions are wrong. They are, in the end, a component of a lifestyle that certain people prefer.

Some jobs are genuinely stressful at their core, and though modification can help, nothing can completely reduce the weight of their burden. If you are interested in a job of that kind, that’s okay. You can still be proactive with your management techniques and slowly but steadily develop a strong mental health foundation.

For everyone else, there are options—ways to live a happy, low-stress life and still succeed professionally. Seeing a counselor, changing habits, and developing a strong foundation are all highly impactful ways to live a more satisfying and less stressful professional life.