The CEO’s Role as Stress Manager

In a recent interview I was conducting as part of the Great CEOs Podcast, one of my guests brought up an interesting topic. He mentioned that he saw an integral part of his role as CEO was to manage the stress of the organization. Huh?

The key, this CEO told me, was to find that Goldilocks zone where you have just the right amount of stress in the organization–not too much or too little. He believed that stress was a performance enhancer and he was right.

Many people think all stress is bad, and when we redline on stress, performance can decay. There can be times when an excessive stress level inside an organization becomes toxic. People might be working super long hours to trying to close an acquisition, say, or to find new sales opportunities in the middle of a global pandemic. The risk here is that people can burn out–and performance which is where the CEO can step in and try to ease the stress level down a notch or two.

Now, you might think he’s alluding to providing stress balls, soothing music, and meditation rooms. And maybe those can be options depending on your culture. What he really means is that a good leader will recognize when stress is uncomfortably high and find ways to assure the organization that everything is going to be okay. They might even award a few mental health days to employees who might be particularly struggling. Think of it like keeping an engine form overheating by adding a bit of coolant to help maximize its performance.

But there’s another side to stress–a positive one.

Consider a story the famed historian Arnold Toynbee once shared about an insight he learned from research he conducted along the docks in London. Over time, Toynbee watched dozens of fishermen work and documented how they went about their business. What he noticed that one fisherman consistently sold his Codfish at higher prices than others. Why? Because more of his fish were alive when he sold them to merchants–which meant they could be shipped further inland before going bad. This was in the days before refrigeration, so getting a few more good days from the fish was incredibly valuable.

Curious, Toynbee asked this fisherman what his secret was. Turns out that he did everything else the same as everyone else in terms of how he caught the Cod and how he stored them in a barrel after he caught them. His secret, it turned out, was that he put a Catfish, the natural predator to the Cod, into the barrel along with his catch. That meant that the Cod needed to constantly swim around to stay alive even after they had been caught. In other words, adding stress to their environment kept them alive longer.  The Catfish literally chased the Cod back to the dock.

Now I’m not advocating dropping man-eating tigers or scorpions into your workplace to keep everyone on edge. But I think we all know cultures that function more like country clubs which a complete lack any stress or conflict. Everything is just chill–and their results reflect that same attitude.

This can be situations where adding some stress as a leader can actually increase performance. Maybe it’s creating a stretch goal with a tight deadline or developing new metrics to track that will encourage the team to ramp up their performance.