Cumulative stress is a factor that all humans are exposed to despite their positions in professional environments, relationships, academia, or, simply put, life. Without healthy coping mechanisms and strategies to mitigate these stressors, leaders will likely fail to reach maximum potential in leadership capabilities and personal growth and development. Unmitigated stress can take a toll on one’s ability to make strategic decisions. It can further hinder the situation by placing the leader at risk of developing physical and mental ailments, affecting the overall mission and tasks placed upon themselves and the team.
Preventing Cognitive Decline
Numerous research studies have demonstrated that unmanaged stress poses a considerable threat to the cognitive abilities crucial for a leader’s proficient navigation of real-time challenges. Moreover, attention and concentration, critical for effective leadership, are susceptible to the debilitating effects of stress. High stress levels may lead to heightened arousal and distractibility, contributing to difficulties focusing on essential tasks and making leaders more susceptible to external distractions. The decision-making prowess of leaders can also be significantly compromised under the weight of chronic stress. Stress-induced alterations in neural pathways can lead to impulsive decision-making, risk aversion, mood disorders, and challenges in considering diverse perspectives or alternative solutions. As a leader, it is critical to maintain a relentless pursuit of perspective. This helps leaders make informed decisions and further understand the why behind the challenge or task. Lastly, leaders with unmitigated stress can develop difficulties with simple problem-solving skills as stress imposes cognitive rigidity, thus limiting the capacity to think creatively and utilize innovation and adaptation, a mindset vital to a leader’s abilities to navigate change.
Preventing Relational Discord
The first law of combat is cover and move. Of the four laws, cover and move is ranked first in the hierarchal structure for a specific reason: it is the foundation of all things that lead to mission success. Relationships and teamwork are irreplaceable assets to any leader looking to push their team to the next level. Leaders who can effectively mitigate chronic stress have greater chances of making diplomatic decisions, thus fostering a cohesive environment. The primary objective of a leader utilizing the cover and move law of combat should be to find a way to prioritize others over themselves. Too often, natural tendencies take over, and the selfish undertones of human self-preservation trump the invaluable assets of teamwork and sacrifice. Prioritizing the collective over individual interests becomes the primary objective when a leader can detach from their stressors and take a genuine interest in the team winning. Unalleviated stress contributes to difficulties for leaders attempting to detach from their personal hardships and focus on the team as the cover and move principle requires.
Preventing Burnout
Stress management is a pivotal piece needed for leading teams and individuals away from the precipice of burnout. Leaders are often responsible for traversing multifaceted challenges and high-pressure situations. Leaders must skillfully manage stress to maintain clarity, alignment, and their team’s unceasing performance. Mitigating stress safeguards a leader’s well-being and sets a decisive paragon for the team. Leaders focusing on stress management often create a more sustainable and healthy work culture where teammates feel empowered and valued. Emotional exhaustion, diminished professional proficiency, and declining team input can diminish a leader’s effectiveness, thus compromising the overall team dynamic. Implementation of stress management utilizes the mindset for victory of strategic thinking, thus instilling a process to secure long-term success.
Implementation
Strategic thinking requires individuals to operate from a detached perspective. The concept of detachment is the key element needed for the proper execution of the third law of combat: Prioritize and Execute. This law will allow you to separate potential stressors into categories such as now, next, and later. Frequently, leaders will become emotionally attached to problems, solutions, goals, and tasks, which leads them down a path of feeling overwhelmed and can render them incapable of identifying the highest point of impact or single points of failure for the team and overall mission. The inability to identify immediately actionable items can cause leaders to oversaturate their workload beyond their effective scope of execution. One must assess emotional attachment to these issues and get themselves to a point at which they seek out only the items that have critical failure points such as safety, time constraints, or other team and or mission debilitating risk factors. If items do not meet these standards, they get downgraded from the “right now” category to the “next” category. This process continues as items eventually fall into the “later” category. If a leader discovers that they simply have too many “right now” items, then the law of combat number four, Decentralized Command, has likely been violated. In this situation one has failed to properly empower the team at all levels. When Decentralized Command is implemented properly, the team has been given adequate information about “the why” using communication that is aligned with the second law of combat, Simple. Communication that is simple, clear, and concise allows the immediately actionable items to be mitigated by our teammates and subordinates on their own. This allows some, if not all, of these items to be removed from the overwhelming workload one might be experiencing, and it allows them to be dispersed amongst the team as they should be. Empowerment of the team through Decentralized Command is another strategic method to mitigate micromanagement, misalignment, and self-execution of tasks, leading to becoming overwhelmed and ultimately leading to burnout and unnecessary cumulative stress.
Conclusion
In conclusion, stress management is a vital piece in the complex environment of leadership. Cumulative stress, obtained from all aspects of life, can degrade decision-making abilities and other cognitive functions crucial for a leader to perform proficiently. Unmitigated stress has the potential to place unnecessary stressors on relationships, both professional and personal, as well as contribute to a multitude of other debilitating team factors. To effectively mitigate stress, one must reduce unnecessary internal and external challenges whenever possible. The laws of combat are the tools that allow leaders at any level to manage both personal and team stress, which strengthens the alignment and longevity of the team.
