I’ve struggled with anxiety for most of my life. Recently, I was placed in my first real leadership position at work. For awhile, my leadership position caused my anxiety to get worse. But with time and practice, I was able to overcome my anxiety.
My Leadership Story
For most of my life, I’ve managed to successfully dodge nearly every leadership position that came my way.
When I was in boy scouts, I was pushed to run for Senior Patrol Leader by many of the other scouts. Senior Patrol Leader is the highest elected leadership position for a boy scout in a boy scout troop. I didn’t want to be the guy in charge if/when things went wrong, so I chose not to run. One of the other scouts won uncontested.
In college, I joined a volunteer organization called Circle K, the college equivalent of Kiwanis. Throughout my first semester, the faculty and other students took a liking to me and encouraged me to run for “New Member Board Member”, an elected position for a new Circle K member who demonstrated leadership ability and a desire to have a positive impact through volunteer work. I ran for the position and won. The faculty sponsor talked to me about running for president the next semester. I didn’t like the pressure or the expectations, so I dropped out of the club and never went back again.
I have a history of keeping myself out of leadership positions even when everybody wants me to be the leader. I get caught up in the pressure of messing up, showing weaknesses, or not knowing the right answers. The pressure builds and builds until it erupts or I remove myself from the situation. After going through this cycle many times, I decided I just wasn’t cut out to be a leader and stopped trying.
That is, until recently.
As a result of an abrupt business decision by my employer around six months ago, I went from spending over three years working on projects by myself to becoming the team lead for a new team. Suddenly I wasn’t just responsible for only my work, but for the overall output of five others on my team. Talk about a job change.
Let’s Talk About Anxiety
According to Dictionary.com, anxiety is “distress or uneasiness of mind caused by fear of danger or misfortune.”
In my experience, that definition is pretty accurate. A fear of something bad happening in the future causes discomfort in the present moment.
I won’t go into much depth on anxiety because everybody experiences it differently and to varying degrees. There is healthy anxiety, such as getting a little nervous before giving a speech or going skydiving. On the other hand, there is severe anxiety that causes panic attacks, feelings of impending doom, breathing trouble, and other symptoms with significant impacts on day-to-day life.
I won’t get into the details, but I spent many years of my life dealing with moderate to severe anxiety. I’m no stranger to the discomfort of trying to hide panic attacks from others or being unable to sleep because I am worrying about something that probably won’t even happen.
In the years since then, I’ve made significant progress to overcome my anxiety in all situations. The rest of this article discusses the steps I took to overcome my anxiety while holding a leadership position.
Leadership and Anxiety
For somebody dealing with anxiety, holding a leadership position can be a daunting task. Not only are they expected to meet their objectives, but they’re also responsible for the rest of their team hitting each of their objectives.
Leadership roles also come with more impactful decisions because their decisions directly affect others. Good decisions can have incredibly positive effects, and bad decisions can be disastrous. Even more, these decisions are publicly visible to many people so it’s often difficult to change a decision once it’s been made.
All of these qualities of leadership can cause leaders to feel extra internal and external pressure to succeed. With a healthy state of mind, this pressure can lead to growth and accomplishing even more than expected. But for those of us who deal with anxiety, the extra pressure can turn into a vicious cycle that ends poorly for everybody. I know this because I’ve been in this situation.
During college, I volunteered to help with an academic project for one of my professors. When the summer came and most of the team left for summer internships, I accepted an offer to take over as the project manager. It quickly became obvious that I didn’t have the soft skills necessary to do the job effectively.
I had a lot of anxiety at the time, so my mind immediately started running “what if?” scenarios. Unfortunately for me, I would only think through the worst-case scenarios. I felt like it was only a matter of time until the project failed and everybody realized I was a bad leader and bad project manager.
Overcoming anxiety in a leadership position can feel like an insurmountable task, but it is possible. With a few effective strategies and some time, any leader can overcome the anxiety they’re facing.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that every strategy to overcome anxiety requires mental conditioning to change the thought patterns that exist. The goal is to reduce the fear underneath the anxiety by controlling the exposure to that fear and gradually increasing the exposure over time until the fear is generally manageable.
Strategy #1 - Acknowledge Specific Fears
Strategy #1 is all about gaining clarity. Before taking steps to overcome anxiety, it must be clear what’s causing the anxiety in the first place.
Spend some time thinking about what the fear underneath the anxiety is. What are the worrisome thoughts that keep coming to mind? What future scenarios cause the most stress?
Write these fears, thoughts, and scenarios down. If possible, share them with a close friend or trusted coworker. Sometimes the simple act of writing down a fear on paper is enough to release some of the tension.
To go a step further, I’d recommend looking into Tim Ferris’s Fear-Setting Exercise for a helpful exercise in defining and clarifying fear.
After acknowledging and writing down the fears, start to think rationally about how to overcome those fears. If possible, I’d recommend discussing these fears with a supervisor or mentor and creating an actionable plan for slowly increasing exposure to those fears. This action plan ties into the second strategy.
Strategy #2 - Maintain an Appropriate Anxiety Ratio
When establishing an action plan, shoot to create repeatable tasks that usually don’t cause anxiety (but occasionally do). I usually aim for a task that causes anxiety only 10-20% of the time, so my “success” rate sits around 80-90%. In this case, “success” means that the fear/anxiety was manageable.
If the task never causes anxiety, then the task needs to become harder to generate sufficient exposure to the underlying fear. If the task causes anxiety too frequently, then the task needs to become easier to prevent the anxiety from becoming overwhelming.
Everybody has a different ratio that feels right for them, but the ratio must have both success and failure.
With each success, confidence grows and the fear becomes a little less scary. With each failure, we develop stronger coping mechanisms and we see that the anxiety won’t hurt us.
Over time, the task will become easier and produce less anxiety. This means we’ll need to periodically review our action plan to make sure the tasks are at an appropriate difficulty. If they’ve gotten too easy, we should make them a little more difficult so we progressively increase our exposure to the fear over time.
Strategy #3 - Emphasize Growth Over Absolute Results
The next strategy is all about maintaining the right mindset while overcoming anxiety. I’d even argue that this is the best mindset for almost any leadership position.
Leaders are responsible for delivering results, and it’s all too easy for us to spend all of our time and effort on delivering those results. The results mindset can trigger anxiety when the results will be delivered late or over budget.
A much better solution is to focus on growing and improving. Every leader, no matter how great, has lots of room to improve and become better. Because leaders have an outsized impact on their teams, a leader who takes himself to the next level will likely bring his team to the next level alongside him.
When dealing with anxiety as a leader, it’s much easier to focus on the team’s improvement than the team’s results. A team can be successful even when they aren’t delivering results, and vice versa.
For example, consider the team I started leading six months ago. We were a brand new team of new hires, working on a brand new product, with a technology stack we were unfamiliar with. It simply wasn’t feasible for us to deliver results quickly at first, but it was feasible to improve and learn new things every day.
If we all had a results mindset during that time, we all would’ve thought we were about to be fired.
Instead, we focused on improving every day. We would all learn something new every day. We taught each other what we learned so we didn’t duplicate the effort. We got feedback from other teams. We set aside time for reflecting on how the previous weeks went.
All of these practices helped us keep improving, even while our overall output was low. And by focusing on the improvement we were making, we were able to avoid most of the anxiety that could’ve come from being on a team with all the challenges we had to overcome.
Having a team culture that prioritizes growth also opens the door to establishing lots of opportunities for feedback. I won’t get into the details here, but I plan to write another blog post about how to establish a culture of feedback to maximize individual and team improvement.
Strategy #4 - Focus on the Success of Individual Team Members
The fourth and final strategy describes how to prioritize tasks to create a more effective team. The priority of a leader should always be to develop their team by making the individual team members more effective at their respective jobs.
If each member of the team is self-sufficient and effective at their job, then the leader’s job becomes much easier. A highly functional team is like a guided missile; give it a target and it will take care of the rest.
The best way to keep a self-sufficient and talented team is to ensure the team members are continuously growing and developing, and the best way to keep the team members growing is through learning to coach effectively.
If I was to give one “big idea” to describe the process of coaching, it’s that most individuals learn and develop new skills when they solve problems on their own.
Michael Bungay Stanier, the author of The Coaching Habit, argues that we should all say less and ask more. We miss out on valuable growth opportunities for the members of our team when we give them the answers. My personal leadership experience seems to fully support this idea.
The more we say, the less we develop the members of our teams. The less we develop the members of our teams, the less our teams can accomplish. The less our teams can accomplish… You get the idea.
The best way to prevent anxiety about leadership is to have an effective team.
Putting it all Together - An Example
Let’s say Cassie is a senior software engineer and has been asked to lead a weekly training program for the other developers on her team. She’s never led a training program like this before and it causes quite a bit of anxiety.
After some introspection, she realizes that she’s scared of being perceived as incompetent (Strategy #1). She feels like other software engineers will ask her questions that she can’t answer and it will make her look bad in front of the whole team.
She discusses this with her supervisor and they come up with an action plan together. Cassie will give the training to one team member first so that she gets used to answering difficult questions without the whole team watching (Strategy #2).
A week later, Cassie starts giving the training to the whole team. She’s still pretty nervous about training the whole team, but the practice training sessions have given her enough confidence to give the team training a shot.
She does the training for a couple of weeks and realizes that she’s still getting a lot of questions that she struggles to answer. Her anxiety starts coming back and she starts losing confidence, which is a sign that she’s putting herself in too many situations that trigger her fear of appearing incompetent.
She adjusts the training schedule to include “office hours” to answer the most difficult questions from the previous training session. This allows her to prepare for the difficult questions so she feels more confident when answering them.
As time goes on, Cassie notices more team members asking her for help with specific problems they’ve come across. Cassie uses these as coaching opportunities instead of simply giving the answers, and she notices that her team can solve more complex challenges with less of her help. She has helped the team become more effective over time by developing individual team members (Strategies #3 and #4).
Conclusion
No matter who is dealing with it, anxiety can be a major challenge to overcome. These challenges are even more significant for somebody who finds themselves in a position of leadership.
The pressure is higher in a leadership environment and even “small” decisions can have significant impacts on the members of the team.
But all is not lost. There are strategies that any one of us can immediately implement to help manage the anxiety that may come from a position of leadership.
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