Leader's Well-Being

How to Combat Stress and Maintain Psychological Health

Employee well-being, psychological health, and work satisfaction are gaining prominence in the industry, emphasizing human aspects like never before. It comes with a reason - next to technological advancement, automation, and access to knowledge, our well-being directly influences our productivity.

Today, engineering leaders can choose from extensive materials demonstrating the significance of well-being, just to name a few of them:

• DORA research shows that aspects such as flexibility, job security, and a healthy organizational culture substantially enhance multiple aspects of company performance (operational, software delivery, and commercial success, among others).

• The same DORA reveals that nearly 50% of engineers often or always feel stressed in their jobs, with almost 30% experiencing burnout. Only a third of organizations have formal processes for managing stress.
  (More in sources: DORA website, My key insights from the latest DORA research)

• Recent research on Developer Experience led by creators of DX, DORA, and SPACE emphasizes three core productivity dimensions: Feedback Loops, Cognitive Load, and Flow State. The latter two are closely linked to engineers' well-being, recommending the elimination of unnecessary development hurdles. Research states that "developers who enjoy their work perform better and produce higher quality products."
  (More in source: A New Approach To Measuring Developer Productivity)

• In "What Predicts Software Developers' Productivity" by Google and ABB, at least half of the top ten productivity factors relate to enthusiasm, positivity, flexibility, and other human factors.
  (More in: Top Ten Factors of Developers' Productivity)

But What About a Leader's Stress and Wellbeing?

Here, you can find a PDF cheat sheet that sums up this article.

It's not hard to notice that most of the focus goes to individuals' well-being. As an engineering leader, your job is to take care of your team while, often, managing your stress on your own.

An effective leader today must focus on the company's success, align the team with its mission, implement corporate values, and enhance the overall well-being of the team. If you are successful with all of these, it means that you are the person who cares. And if you do, there are plenty of reasons to be stressed about:

• You have high responsibility, and your decision-making affects the entire team or the organization.

• You have to manage the interpersonal dynamics of a diverse team while keeping a positive work environment.

• There is constant performance pressure to meet your goals in a dynamic environment.

• You manage change, which usually faces a lot of resistance because "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" (read more).

• Your control and authority are still limited, even though everyone may think that as a manager, you can do everything and you have all of the answers.

• You cannot make everyone happy and will never reach 100% satisfaction within the team, which means you will always deal with complaints and negativity.

• Your journey is often lone - if your job is to make everyone happy and satisfied, it's hard to share your struggles with them
  (More here: Being a leader is a lonely journey)

My Challenges as an Engineering Leader in Startups

Here are some of my personal experiences that combined things from the above list:

• Budget constraints - growing engineers too quickly so you cannot match their skills with a salary anymore. Or fighting months for good hires when the market is on fire, and their skillset doesn't match your requirements anymore, while compensation expectations are beyond any limits you have.

• Firing people - the company was pivoting or fighting to survive. And you know weeks ahead of time that you need to say goodbye to folks who are great professionals and colleagues.

• Managing low performers in high demand - telling people they must improve and change their attitude, or showing them they are not as good as expected. All of that while the show goes on, and you must deliver.

• Managing high performers in low demand - you don't have exciting things to work on, but tons of tedious tasks that your strongest people must handle.

• Tradeoffs you hate - you must deliver something quickly and dirty that will stay with you as unaddressed tech debt for years. It’s not challenging or satisfying for anyone.

• Changes everyone hates - you must change the ways of working or expose the team's vulnerabilities so everyone feels insecure and blamed, while the only intention was to make things exponentially better in the long term.

These and many others brought me sleepless nights, self-doubts, and overthinking.

How to tell it to people,
How it'll perceived,
Why the hell is the reality so much different from all of the success stories in books?

If you're a caring leader, sharing success stories can be rewarding, but they often originate from challenging experiences.

Managing Stress as a Leader

Here are some mental models and techniques that have helped many leaders, including myself, manage stress more effectively:

1. Most Respectful Interpretation: Choose to interpret others' actions, words, and intentions in the most respectful and positive way possible. This approach fosters a harmonious workplace and personal calmness in facing work-related challenges. When your team argues with you on the solution, it’s not because they want to fight you but because they care about the desired effect. When your boss asks why things are crashing, they want to learn the root causes and possible ways of solving the problem, not blame you. Incorporating the MRI concept can lead to a more harmonious workplace, better team dynamics, and a personal sense of calmness. This doesn’t mean ignoring problems or accepting poor performance. It’s about starting from a place of respect and positivity.

2. One-way vs Two-way Door Decisions - Jeff Bezos’ concept assumes there are two types of decisions. The ones difficult to reverse and the ones that are not.
   Start with framing your decision. If it’s a two-way door, maybe it’s not worth deliberating over it. Jump in, learn quickly, and in the worst case - jump out.
   And if you face a one-way decision - try to decompose it first into a bunch of two-way ones.

3. Covey’s Circles of Influence and Concern - there are things you can control (circle of influence) and things you can’t (circle of concern). Focus your energy on what you can influence, and try to let go of worries outside of your control. This reduces feelings of helplessness and anxiety.
   Take budgeting as an example - your people ask you for a raise out of the cycle. Most likely, you cannot give it to them (circle of concern), but you can pass this request to HR/management and pass the response back (circle of influence). Always do your best, and don’t worry about things out of your control.

4. 80/20 Pareto Rule - This principle suggests that 80% of results come from 20% of efforts. Perfection can be a danger for a leader. Very rarely you can reach it without outstanding costs. Identify the most impactful tasks with the lowest possible cost - in most cases, good enough is enough.

5. Adopt a Growth Mindset - each challenging situation is an opportunity to learn and grow. When things go wrong, take a lesson from them so the mistake is not repeated again. When you get feedback, take if as a gift (they care about helping you be better), rather than objection. All malfunctions and incidents presented in your operational dashboards are facts and discussion starters, not blame.

6. Fight With the Culture of Busyness - the "effort justification" bias pushes us to work hard and be occupied 100% of the time. But what really matters is the outcome of our work, not the input or output.
   Rather than planning every hour of your time, focus on the most impactful initiatives (Pareto Rule). I tend to plan 50% of my weekly time, while the rest is freed for ad-hoc things, social integrations, and creative time when my mind just wanders

   

   .
   
   Some references:

   • Work Smart, Not Hard - Facing the Culture of Busyness

   • Leader's Week - how to maximize your weekly impact

   • How to plan your week as an engineering leader

7. Write a Journal - summarize your day, week, or month, even in the simplest bullet points. Reflect on your notes occasionally. You will be surprised how quickly you forget about good things while keeping the bad ones in your head endlessly. One of the sections in the In Leader's Week framework is self-assessment and the week's summary. You can use it as an inspiration.

   

   Leader’s Week framework has a self-assessment part.

8. Practice self-care and have a life outside your work. There is no work-life balance. The spillover theory says that our attitudes, emotions, skills, and behaviors in one domain flow into the other and vice versa. Your work-related stress will catch you also outside working hours. Make your life good enough so your passion, attitude, optimism, and love flow back and override this stress. I'm a father, OCR runner, passionate coder, and photographer. My life passions don't make me a worse employee - they often bring me a fresh perspective, prioritize my time, and keep me away from my Circle of Concerns.

End words

You cannot take the stress out of you completely. Acute stress, part of our body's "fight or flight" response, is crucial for survival. Short-term stress can enhance performance. It can heighten awareness and build psychological resilience.

However, it's important to differentiate between short-term and chronic stress. While short-term stress can have these potential benefits, chronic or long-term stress can be harmful. Keep that in mind as an engineering leader - while addressing the team's well-being, don't forget about yourself. I hope some of the practices I shared will help you with that.