Pressure Moments – How Do You Do?

As a leader of your team – many eyes are on you from many different angles. You have your team, your manager, your support groups and even your customers. How YOU behavior is important. Decisions can be tough.  Everyone can do a pretty effective job of leading their team if there are no pressures. Working with your team can be difficult at times.  Some key contributors are out. The team is just not getting along as well as it should. Overloaded “to do” list can really make meeting your deadlines a bit tough. There are some many more pressures that can hit you that can make anything seem impossible. Your words and actions during these times are what is truly key to your success as a leader. Remember, everyone is watching.

How do you normally react doing those tough times?

• Maybe a little short with answers to questions?
• How about frustrated when things are not going right?
• Start micro-managing your team?
• Little slow with answers to tough decisions?
• Take a day off when a key deadline is due?

Hopefully you did not say yes to any of these behaviors. These were not made up examples, I have seen them throughout my working career. I can almost put a face and a name to each of them. As I have written in past blog posts, learning from ours examples (both failure and success) can be very helpful to you in the future. I have taken those bad examples above and changed up how I perform under extremely pressure.

What I typically do is:

• Insure that the pressures that I am under are not outwardly visible to my team. I try to maintain my positive and cheerful attitude everyday that I in the office.
• Sometimes this is extremely difficult, at the very least, I communicate to my team what is going on. Letting them know the pressures and how they can help, usually is a good thing.
• Come in a bit early and stay late if needed. I always like to get in early to help me with quiet time. Helps me focus on what is important. I want my team to understand that I am here, no matter what.
• Prioritizing and delegating workloads. Work assignments may need to be shifted in order to meet some extreme deadlines. Asking the team their input on how best to accomplish this has been helpful in the past. Sometimes, a team member may have a skill in something that they don’t especially care for doing, but when times are tough – they step up and get it done.
• Pressure situations need to bring out some creative solutions – more minds working on that creative solution the better.
• Most importantly – Be myself! At the end of the day, your character and being true to yourself is what matters. If I am not happy with myself for any reason – I am the only person that can fix it.

How best do you handle those pressure moments?