Are you Managing Stress or Creating Strategic Alignment? The 7 Keys to Aligned Action

Consider a few scenarios that I’ve encountered recently (disguised to protect confidentiality). These situations show how stress shows up as symptoms, but real solutions require dealing with root causes.

• A business owner is extremely angry and frustrated. One of her employees, a person with incredible technical talent, went over the line in dealing with a prospective customer.   Not only did the employee overstep his role, he did so in a rather aggressive manner.   Now the owner must spend hours in crisis mode to repair the customer relationship and deal with internal fallout.
• An entrepreneur is exhausted from the personal financial pressure of investing sweat equity (as in, no salary!) in a new venture.
• A sales executive is continually drained from internal battles with the CEO about how to manage key customer accounts and prospects.

Stress management techniques are certainly helpful in these situations  –  deep breathing, visualization, affirmations, exercise, meditation, music, or yoga. Learning and practicing stress management techniques that work for you is essential to dealing with the inevitable ups and downs of daily life.

Yet these techniques, by themselves, do not address the underlying root cause. Until the underlying root cause is addressed, the stressful situation is highly likely to continue.   When you are in a consistently stressful situation in your business, career, or life, the toll on your health and happiness is extremely unpleasant  –  at the very least.

Sustained stress in business, career, and life comes from being out of alignment. Alignment in your business is similar to alignment of your spine.

Humans have 33 vertebrae – 7 cervical, 12 thoracic, 5 lumbar, plus 5 fused in the sacral spine and 4 fused to form the tailbone. When your spine is out of proper alignment, you can experience pain in various parts of the body. Sometimes the pain is relatively minor, but sometimes it becomes debilitating.

When the pain becomes debilitating, you can’t get to the chiropractor soon enough. The chiropractor assesses your spinal alignment and often will make an adjustment – usually with a swift and precise application of force from their skilled hands to your body.

You also have a role to play, since your personal habits of posture, seating, and exercise contribute to your ongoing spinal health.

With your spine, you can take action for immediate resolution – and also develop healthier habits.   The same goes for your business. You must take action to bring your business into alignment and create the conditions for long term success.

The 7 Keys to Aligned Action

When your business is aligned, the right behavior occurs, and the business is successful and healthy. When your business is out of alignment, pain and stress occurs. Symptoms will include declining sales, upset customers, employee turnover, late projects, or poor morale. Your job as the leader of the organization is to learn to manage your stress so you can identify the root causes of misalignment. Then you must make root cause decisions and implement sustainable strategic solutions.

In my experience working with a variety of organizations, small and large, over the past 15 years, alignment problems can be identified in seven key areas:

1. Values. When a situation violates core values, it becomes a huge energy drain on all parties. When you recognize a values conflict, temporary stress management techniques merely mask the underlying problem.
2. Customer. When you are not really clear on who your customer is, you perpetuate stress  – because you are not focused on the right things. The only way around this is to decide who your customer is and who it is not.
3. Business Model/Strategy. When your business model is not viable, but you are pretending as if it is, you will experience tremendous stress. You will do things which are busy but not effective. You are in denial and wasting time, money, and energy working on the wrong things. You must clearly evaluate if your business model will ever work and what it will take to get there. If there is not a path to sustainable profitability, you must revamp your business model and strategy.
4. Process. When your processes are broken – sales, customer service, operations, etc. – you are stressed because are spending time fighting fires, dealing with delays, frustrations, etc. The process that worked before is not working now. The only way out here is to redesign your processes.
5. Organization Structure and Talent. You may be experiencing stress because you have the right people in the wrong structure or the right structure with the wrong people.
6. Incentives and Metrics. If you are measuring and rewarding the wrong things, you will get the wrong behavior. If you are not measuring the right things, you will not get the right behavior. If you are stressed out because you are not seeing the right behavior to get results, look at what you are measuring.
7. Individualized Roles, Goals, & Accountabilities. Negative and pervasive stress is caused by a feeling of lack of control or power over a situation. When people in your organization are unclear about what is expected of them, they will not perform and a stressful environment will develop. Getting alignment for every person on their roles, goals, and accountabilities is essential.

Nearly every performance problem or stressful situation in business can be traced to one or more of these root causes.   These seven factors are highly interrelated as they all must work together to create the business and results you want. To see how they are interrelated, let’s revisit the examples from above:

• The frustrated business owner must address an underlying values conflict, organizational design/talent, incentives/metrics, and individual roles.
• The entrepreneur must face the business model question – it is time to make a decision about whether the venture is ultimately viable. If not, it is time to move on to a new opportunity.
• In the case of the sales executive, there is clear disagreement about the customer, what sales process to use, and who is responsible for making these decisions. Unless these issues can be settled, the likely result is that the sales executive will leave the company.

Why do we so often address symptoms but avoid addressing the root cause?

Fear. We would rather tolerate the pain we are in now than deal with the situation. Dealing with these situations requires tough, candid conversations and change. Many people prefer to avoid these scenarios.

Your Job As Leader

As a business leader, your goal in managing stress is to effectively shift yourself into a positive state. From this positive state, you must identify the root causes of misalignment and then take action that is aligned with your true purpose and goals.

As the leader   – of your business, your career, and your life – you must equip yourself to deal with these situations. Alignment does not magically happen – it requires leadership – and that must come from you.

How about you? Are you simply managing stress – or are you creating alignment to build the business, career and life you want?