Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Stress notes:

I read an interesting article about stress on the BBC website today. It discussed the common causes of stress in peoples lives and listed effective ways of dealing with them. Most of it was the usual info on the subject.

What I found interesting though, was amoungst the causes of work-related stress were:

Having too little to do at work
Having work that is not challenging enough
Being in the wrong job

and there was also, of course, stressors that I have touched on in this blog before:

Feeling undervalued
Lack of consultation and communication
Lack of control over the way work is done

And the bigger the organization, the more those last 3 stressors come into play.

Why is this so interesting to me? Well conventional management theory when it touches on how to motivate your staff and keep them HEALTHY and PRODUCTIVE doesn't generally cover any of those six stressors. It doesn't even come NEAR the first three - but the first three stressors are ones that you can expect to apply to the smartest and most talented (and most creative) people on your team. Those are the very people that a high performing company would love to attract, and keep - and those are often the people that leave their organization.

Again, the larger the organization. the more difficult these stressors are to address, but I do not think that it is an impossible task.

The most important weapon we have, I think, is what Rosa Say would call Malama:

"To Malama, is to take care of.
A manager is a steward of assets and a caretaker of people.
Malama calls upon us to serve, to honor, and to protect.
Acts of caring drive us to high performance levels in our work with others.
We give and become unselfish. We accept responsibility unconditionally.
Malama is warm, and Malama is personal.
It comes from heart, and it comes from soul.
When we Malama, we are better."

1 Comments:

Blogger jhodson said...

THank you Rosa!

Now, if only we could get managers to tune in :).

Note to all managers: Read Rosa's book!!!

12:01 PM  

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