Lesley Cooper on stress and pressure at work

Workplace pressure can be detrimental to growth, development and wellbeing. In this episode of What Matters, we discuss wellbeing at work, including the issues of fear-based cultures and psychological safety.

Lesley Cooper is a management consultant with nearly 30 years of experience in the design and delivery of employee wellbeing programmes. In 1997, she founded WorkingWell, an award-winning specialist consultancy.

Other issues we explore include:

• What employers can do to help people manage stress and pressure at work?
• The leadership skills that can help to mitigate a stressful environment.
• How to move to positive high energy emotions and strong performance.
• Self-awareness, resilience and self-regulation.
• The importance of building trust and creating a culture of openness.

Lesley is also the co-author with Vicky Smith of Brave New Leader: How to Transform Workplace Pressure into Sustainable Performance and Growth. Built around incremental, achievable steps, Brave New Leader covers the tools, mindset, and courage required to turn a damaging tide of pressure and fear into enhanced engagement contribution, fulfilment and wellbeing.

Nicola Hunt: Lesley Cooper is a management consultant with nearly 30 years of experience in the design and delivery of employee well-being management programmes. In 1997 she founded Working Well, an award-winning specialist consultancy that helps companies to manage workplace pressure in a way that facilitates growth and development. She's also the co-author with Vicki Smith of Brave New Leader, how to transform workplace pressure into sustainable performance and growth.

Lesley, welcome. Let's start with the question of fear. I guess we all have to face fear in one way, shape or form. What got you interested in the whole issue of fear?

Lesley Cooper: It's a great question actually. We have a lifetime interest in helping organisations manage well-being at work. When we first started working in the area, it wasn't even a term, it was something that was considered to be a little bit touchy-feely and a little bit American actually.

Truth is, isn't that something the Americans are interested in? Of course now well-being and performance are well understood to be bedfellows and as fear is a very strong emotion and emotions obviously feature quite highly in the management of psychosocial risk. It just became a natural thing to be interested in psychological safety basically, which is absence of fear in the workplace.

People feel safe enough around their leaders and their colleagues to not spend their whole time fearing negative consequences if things don't go right or if they have an alternative view. So it's very firmly embedded in a lifetime interest in helping employers manage stress in the workplace, pressure in the workplace and basically keeping people in a position where they're in the right cognitive space to be happy at work obviously, but also to perform at their best.

Nicola Hunt: I think it's really interesting that you were there at the outset in those days that you described as touchy-feely. Now when you look at HR, you'd have a hard time remembering the days when talking about something that was related to a mental issue or emotional or lifestyle well-being, it really was not discussed. So you've been there right from the beginning.

Lesley Cooper: Absolutely and it's been gratifying on one level to see the growth in interest in humans at work and how they interact with each other and how that impacts on their ability to stay well and perform. But in some respects, it's also been quite dispiriting that we actually have made a lot of progress but we're still not making progress in the areas that we should be fast enough. There's still a lot of focus on individuals fixing themselves rather than looking at what's going on in the workplace and seeing whether there are in fact things that we really should be addressing systemically so that our employees don't have to spend so much time and effort learning to be resilient.

There are three key planks in managing psychosocial health risk or well-being at work, however you want to look at it. Some of them are around primary intervention. Some of them addressing things at source.

Other things are around helping people to become resilient to things that aren't fixed and immovable. And then there's that kind of tertiary piece at the end of trying to help people feel better when they've been damaged. But the trouble is that we're increasingly, it seems, cleaning up fish only to throw them back in a dirty pond because there's some toxicity in the water in a lot of workplaces and that's where the fear bit comes in because they're not psychologically safe places to work in many cases and that really gives people quite a lot of challenges.

Nicola Hunt: Why do you think it is that in this day and age with so much awareness on the importance of health and well-being that some employers still have fear-driven cultures or leaders in the business who still believe that such an approach is justified?

Lesley Cooper: It's interesting that we have a lot of young leaders now or younger leaders, shall I say. And I think that you can see a real shift in the 25 years that we've been consulting in this area from traditional command and control roles where the boss is the boss and tells you what to do towards a more coaching style of leadership which is perhaps more appropriate for the world we live in now. But there is a hangover of the boss being the boss and a sense on both sides that as the boss you're supposed to have all the answers.

And for people who perhaps feel more comfortable with that style of leadership or have spent many of the years of their careers in that type of leadership are not really taking responsibility as much as they might for fixing their own problems and kind of blaming their employer for the way that they feel. We can't always change what happens to us but we do have total control over how we respond to it. But the problem is that we're habit-driven.

So the more under pressure we get the more inclined we are to keep doing what we normally do. And managers are also themselves, of course, particularly middle managers under enormous amounts of pressure. So they will perhaps default back to more traditional styles of leadership which are more about telling than asking because asking takes more time.

And this is the one thing that when you're under pressure you don't feel that you have. And under pressure it's the soft skills, taking the time to actually try and explore somebody else's perspective that makes that person feel safer which makes them feel more inclined to open up. And particularly now that we don't actually often work physically with each other those kinds of water cooler moments mean that we do become very task-focused more on the task than the person.

And none of that helps people feel psychologically safe.

Nicola Hunt: More generally, what have you seen in terms of the types of cultures that can sustain fear or indeed the type of leadership that can promote fear?

Lesley Cooper: Yeah, I mean, we're wired through our ancestry to be nervous of things that are unfamiliar. That's why we all dislike change so intensely. We know our threat response is always there and we have a radar for threat which means that we often see threats in things that perhaps aren't very threatening but they feel that way.

And that we ameliorate that a lot by feeling that we have a voice and that our input is valuable and that leaders and colleagues are open to us perhaps having a divergent view. These are the characteristics of a psychologically safe culture. People feel able to be themselves.

They don't have to wear a work mask. They don't put too much effort into so-called impression management. You know, you can just be yourself.

They're respectful and trusting of each other but there's no need to kind of pretend to be somebody else. And therefore, colleagues and leaders can be open with each other, can share concerns, share insights, put their hand up if they feel like they're struggling, say openly that I'm not sure why we're doing it that way. I think maybe we could consider doing it a different way.

All of those sorts of things. These create safety for people because they can be themselves. The obverse is therefore true that if you don't have a voice, if you don't feel you can do that, if you feel that speaking up will in some way engender negative personal consequences, then you don't speak up.

And actually that is not a great place to be. So the short answer to your question is very dominant leadership styles can create a situation where you live and work in an echo chamber, so-called nodding dog syndrome, keeps the peace, but is not necessarily the best environment for creativity or for good psychological wellbeing. By contrast, leadership styles that are more open, more asking than telling, genuinely curious about the perspectives of other people.

Nicola Hunt: These are the types of leadership styles that create better safety. Impression management, does that repress the true emotions?

Lesley Cooper: I would say 100%. Everybody practises it to some extent. That's how society gets along.

You know, you need to work out the interpersonal risk of any particular exchange. You know, what will happen if I say or do this? And consistently having to behave in a way that doesn't sit well with you, creates internal pressure for a person and is not conducive to them being the best version of themselves at work.

Nicola Hunt: Can you share some of the more typical symptoms, if you like, of stress when people are dealing with surviving and operating in these types of cultures?

Lesley Cooper: Yeah, sure. One of the things that happens to all of us when we sense a threat and our threats, of course, are less existential these days, but our primary brain that controls the stress response doesn't have the ability to differentiate between physical risks and psychological ones that is the same. And so, you know, whenever you don't feel safe at work or you feel that your value is being threatened or you know yourself when you feel that you've perhaps done a really super job for someone and perhaps the feedback that you get is like suggesting that you haven't bothered or that you didn't put enough effort into it or you made a stupid mistake or whatever.

Response to those emotional threats is physically the same. It's just that we don't always notice it. So stomach disturbances, you know, headaches, tension, muscle pain, all those things that are kind of associated with the physical stress response and less obvious, but they're just as insidious.

And particularly in very pressured environments where people are constantly feeling rushed and hurried, there is the adrenaline and cortisol response, which is sort of slowly dripping into your bloodstream, which was fine when we were evading predators and we would either be caught and killed, in which case not really a problem anymore, or you would simply retreat to your cave and recover slowly and adrenaline and cortisol would leave your bloodstream and you would restore yourself to a normal balance. But what happens now is we take another call or we go to another meeting or just caught in a constant loop of low-grade adrenalization and that's what can cause the health problems, physical health problems for people because of the impact that has on your immune system.

Nicola Hunt: It sounds to me as if you're saying that people need to be able to self-regulate. Is that right?

Lesley Cooper: I think self-awareness is a big part of it. When we do resilience work with people, we try to help them to check in regularly during the day. We have what we call the emotional energy quadrant, which is where you kind of show that emotions are high energy and low energy or positive and negative.

And a lot of people, because of the pressure and the busyness and the need to get it all done faster and do more and more with less and less, end up in what we call the top left quadrant, which is high energy, but it's negative. Anger, frustration, all those emotions that most people can relate to. And that's not the best place to be because that's the high adrenaline state.

And if you stay there for too long without intentionally recovering, recognising that that's what your cognitive landscape has become and make an intentional effort to break that cycle and do something else. And we talk about 10 in 90. And if every 90 minutes you should take 10 minutes just to break that linearity and go and do something else that puts you in what we would call the recovery zone, which is high positive, but low energy types of emotions.

And then from there, you can navigate usually back up to the high performance zone, which is high energy emotions, but positive. So where you feel engaged and optimistic and trust yourself and rate your ability and all those good, positive emotions that are consistent with high performance. So all of that starts with awareness.

How am I feeling? But the truth is that the more under pressure we get, the more likely we are to just keep doing more of the same and then be a little bit surprised that we finish up exhausted at the end of the day. So self-awareness and self-regulation is a big part of it.

Nicola Hunt: And from the employer perspective, can you describe a couple of ways in which employers can help people to be their true authentic selves?

Lesley Cooper: That's a great question. I mean, the easy answer and the one that's I suppose adopted by most managers with their hearts in the right place is to say my door is always open. You know, I'm here for you. Talk to me. Tell me if you're struggling. And that is important that they do that. But it doesn't necessarily always bring the benefits that people hope for, because if the organisation is or the people who work in that team or that organisation have for whatever reason, and we are very wired to remember negative experiences, unfortunately, anticipating that asking for help or saying you're struggling or something's gone wrong.

If they have any sense that that could produce negative personal consequences for themselves, they won't put their hand up and they won't ask for help and they won't say they're struggling. It's both a short game and a long game. You definitely have to be supportive as a leader and say the right words, but you also need to model that behaviour yourself.

And sometimes we hear that people want their employees to be open with them, but they're not open with their employees first, which doesn't give people permission to take a risk, actually, an interpersonal risk with a manager or a colleague and say, actually, have you got a minute? So it is the short term behaviour, but it's also about putting effort into creating the right culture for openness, because people possibly won't if they don't feel confident that there won't be negative personal consequences for doing so. And building that trust takes time, but it isn't just the manager's job.

It's team based activity. Everybody is accountable for their behaviour as much as the manager is accountable for his or her behaviour towards the employees.

Nicola Hunt: So for anyone wanting to dive deeper into this subject matter, you co-authored a book with Vicky Smith on how to transform workplace pressure into sustainable performance and growth. How can people get hold of a copy of the book?

Lesley Cooper: It's still available on Amazon. If anybody wants to get a copy from us directly, they're very welcome to contact us or they can contact you even, and perhaps you can pass their details on.

Nicola Hunt: And thank you very much for your time. It's been a fascinating conversation today.

Lesley Cooper: Thank you. Thank you very much for the invitation. It's been good to be here.