Team Stress Management

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Leadership   Risk Management   Talent Management  

A current client I am working with is facing an aggressive deadline that has a large group of team members feeling significant pressure. They feel as though they have a huge amount of work to complete, without enough time to do the work—and in an environment where there are too many unknowns. They also feel isolated and unsupported by other work areas.

Anyone who has managed projects for any length of time has been faced with similar circumstances, and they can be hard situations to deal with. The work needs to get done but you need to be sensitive to the needs of the team members, and you have to protect (and ideally strengthen) the relationships between team members and between the team and manager.

The drivers of stress
To address this situation effectively, we first need to understand what is driving the stress. That may seem obvious—too much work in too little time, but that’s a dangerous assumption to make. For many groups, workload and timeframe alone are not going to create excessive amounts of stress for the team. If they understand what needs to be done and are able to see progress toward completion on a regular basis, then workload alone isn’t that stressful.

There may be a need for overtime or weekend work in order to meet the deadline, and those steps do involve some degree of stress; but there is a clear solution and path to get …

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