02/21/2024

How Leaders Miscommunicate When Tensions are High

Employees demand more despite the stress their leaders are feeling

"I know our industry is going through it. To reassure my teams that they’ll be okay, I’ve been deliberately and visibly celebrating their successes," Eric, the head of a 300+ person department at a technology company, told me last year. "But it’s not working."

While Eric’s organization had no plans to do layoffs, several key competitors had recently made sizable cuts. Eric wanted to help his people feel less anxious as stress-inducing headlines continued to dominate the news. He was particularly concerned about the results of a recent employee engagement survey, which indicated that his teams were far less comfortable asking questions or admitting mistakes than they had been in the past.

After looking at the survey results, reviewing the success stories he was sharing and speaking with a few of his reports, it became clear that Eric’s efforts were inadvertently making people even more uneasy. "The sudden emphasis on accomplishment makes me nervous that we're shifting to an extremely high-performance culture in which you'll get cut if you make a single mistake," one employee told me. Another said, "Some days I feel like I’m the only one whose project isn’t going perfectly."

Please select this link to read the complete article from Harvard Business Review.