How to manage someone sensitive to stress

Manage someone sensitive to stress by making your expectations and priorities clear, reducing needless surprises and keeping your check-ins frequent and predictable. They may feel pressure sooner and more strongly than others, while being every bit as capable. The practices that help them, like clear priorities and honest updates, tend to make the whole team run better.

A useful way to think about it

Picture an early-warning system. Nadia is the first person on your team to notice that the schedule doesn't add up, or that the client's tone has changed. Often she's right. She also lies awake on Sunday nights, and an unexplained "Got a minute?" from you can throw off her afternoon.

Those two facts are connected. A lower score on emotional stability can come with a mind that keeps scanning for what might go wrong. As a manager, you don't want to switch this off, nor could you. You want to remove the false alarms, so that the real signals still get through.

As their manager, you aren't their therapist, and you don't need to guess at their inner life. You just need to design the work well.

Remove the false alarms

Give context with every meeting invitation. An unexplained calendar invite titled "Catch-up" can cost someone hours. "Catch-up: planning next quarter's roster, nothing urgent" costs you a few seconds.

Rank the priorities. When everything is flagged as urgent, a stress-sensitive person may try to do it all. "These are the top two, and the third can wait until next week" brings immediate relief.

Tell them bad news early. If restructure rumours are going around, say what you know and what you don't. "I don't have details yet. I'll tell you by Friday, even if the answer is still 'I don't know'." Then actually do it on Friday.

Keep your own mood legible. When you're short with someone because your own boss was harsh, say so. Otherwise, they could spend the night wondering what they did.

A regular rhythm

Weekly one-on-ones at the same time are worth protecting, especially for people who may be anxious about raising things. Three standing questions can give the chat a shape:

1. What's going well that I might not have noticed?
2. What's on your mind for next week?
3. Is there anything I can take away or clear up?

When you start to see signs that someone's struggling, such as more mistakes, late nights or less of their usual humour, you don't have to work out why. You can simply notice and ask:

"I've noticed you've been sending emails at midnight this week. I'm not worried about your work, which has been good. I'm asking about you. What's the load like at the moment? What could we shift?"

Keep any support your workplace offers in mind as well, such as an employee assistance program, and mention it as an ordinary option. Don't push it. Your role isn't to probe into their health or private life.

Handling high-pressure periods

The end of the financial year, a big launch and an audit are all going to be stressful. Hiding that doesn't help. Give them a realistic forecast and a plan for afterwards:

"The next three weeks are going to be heavy. Here's what I'm taking off your list to make space. After the 30th, I want you to take a proper long weekend. Let's put it in the calendar now."

And when things do go wrong, as they sometimes will, stay calm and pay attention to the fix. A manager who stays level after a mistake can teach them that mistakes can be survived, which might be worth more than any pep talk.

Don't underestimate them

Please don't quietly shield them from stretching work, or decide for them they can't handle a promotion. That can be the most damaging thing of all. Ask them what they want, and then support it. People who feel stress keenly are often highly prepared, conscientious and attentive to others. Many of them make excellent leaders, because they know what a thoughtless email feels like.

Keep reading

When you've got a problem to raise, read how to give feedback to someone sensitive to stress first. On the other side of the coin, you may have someone who's bursting with ideas, in which case see how to work with someone high in openness. And if they're weighing up change at home as well, how to date someone open to new experiences shows how novelty can sit alongside a need for steadiness.

Your team knows what helps them, if you make it easy to say. Get a Field Guide written for the people in your life.

How you handle pressure shapes how your team does too. See your own pattern with the Core Personality Expedition.