Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: If you want more time, money, freedom, and have a business that's not reliant on you, then you're in the right place. Each week, Mark Creedon, along with some of the very best business minds in the world, will take you through simple, practical steps you can take to create the business you always wanted. From his own practical experience, Mark will show you how to work less, make more, and get the business you always wanted, the one that you deserve.
Now, here's your host, one of Australia's most sought after business coaches, Mark Creedon.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Welcome to the latest edition of the Mastermind for Business podcast. I'm Mark Creedon, your host. I was having a chat with somebody the other day about how they can stop people losing their shit in the workplace, and that's what I want to talk about in today's episode. So if you or somebody around you is in the habit of kind of losing their shit, we're going to talk more about why that happens. But more importantly, we're going to talk to you about what you can do about it, how you can view things differently, and how you can really help the people around you who are struggling with stress. If you're seeing lots of stress, lots of drama in the workplace, then that's what we're going to talk about today. We'll get underway on that.
Just a second.
Recently spoke with an organizational psychologist who said to me that they've never seen kind of levels of stress as much as there is around the workplace right now. And it's across a whole range of industries. And so in today's episode, I want to talk not so much about stress management, but I want to talk a little bit more about how do you help as a business owner, as a leader in a business, how do you help people to deal with those levels of stress. And we're going to work through a bit of a three part plan for how we do that. Number one, I think, is to understand, let's talk about you. Let's say that you are the leader, you're the business owner, or you're the person leading the division or department in the business, and you're the one that's losing your shit. And that's actually how this conversation came about. I was working with a manager who said, look, a couple of people around me are really reacting poorly and behaving badly when things don't go right. And I found myself doing the same thing. So number one is to remember that leadership is about not so much leading from the front because we've spoken in other episodes about the difference between leading from in front, leading from behind in order to lift people up. But it is about leading by example, right? Fish rots from the head down. And so the first thing I think we need to think about is looking after you.
I know we've said this in other episodes, but, you know, when you're on a plane and they say in the unlikely event of an emergency, an oxygen mask will drop from the panel above, fit your own mask before assisting others. Now that's because if you pass out because of oxygen deprivation, you are of no use to anybody. In fact, you become a casualty, you add to the problem, so you become more a part of the problem than a part of the solution. So if you've got a high level of stress in your workplace, if you've got a high level of angst and potentially people reacting poorly, then the first thing I want you to do is have a look at you. What are you doing? What's the reaction that you're going through? And to start by looking after yourself. So number one in the three step process is look after you. Remember, fish rots from the head down. You've got to lead by example. So what are you doing? What are you doing to take care of yourself? What are you doing to seek help?
I want to tap into that seeking help thing because I think there's this, I mean, luckily it's changing, but there's this stigma right around mental health. And this thought that across the board, sometimes asking for help is more of a sign of a weakness than a sign of strength. And I want to debunk that myth as quickly as we possibly can. Those of you who have listened to this podcast now have read my book. You read the forward to my book. You know that I've certainly had my own struggles over the years. And the biggest thing that helped me ultimately saved my life. The biggest thing that helped me was actually seeking out and getting help, reaching out and saying, do you know what, I'm not coping. I'm not doing so well. I'm not coping. And I think I don't want to get into whether it's more men or more women or whatever it may be. I want to just talk about us as people and the importance of reaching out and asking for help. And I think it's one of the biggest issues that you have in business is that sometimes it's a question of, well, who do you reach out and ask? Because if your friends aren't in business, they don't really get the pressures you don't feel that you can talk to your team because then you're burdening them. And I find that an awful lot of business owners really are Robinson Caruso. They're really doing this thing on their own. They've got all of the weight of all of the entire business and the people that work in it for it and around it on their shoulders. If that's you, if you're listening to this podcast now and going, yeah, man, that's me, like, I just got everything on my shoulders. You need to find someone that you can talk to, whether it's a professional, whether it's a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a counselor, or whether it's actually something, which is something we do in our mastermind group, a mastermind of like minded people where you can very comfortably share what is going on for you and learn from the experience of those other people in the mastermind.
I'm not talking about a networking event here. This is not about getting more business. This is about getting some support, some help for you. So number one, look after you in that process. Who can you talk to? You need someone around you, whether it's a coach, whether it's a friend, a mentor, whatever it might. Was having a chat with a young guy from Hobart just recently and he was telling me that he had this mentor and how he got the mentor was he was having a coffee guy wheeled in a nice car and he sort of went, hey, you're doing pretty well. How can I get some advice from you? And can I tell you, in my experience and across my professional life, I've reached out to a whole bunch of people and asked them to give me some advice, some mentoring, some support. And it's amazing how ready people are to do that, but you've got to ask. So look for a support person, look for a support network, join a mastermind group, find a coach, find a mentor, find a friend, find someone who you feel really comfortable to be able to say, do you know what, I'm just struggling a bit at the moment and can you help me to actually get on top of things so that I can feel like I'm sort of back in control. So number one, in the three step process, look after you get some support for you and make sure that you are okay. Number two, it's okay, I think, to show some vulnerability. So whilst you may not want to share with your team that you are not coping, if you have been engaging in behavior, on reflection, you go, I probably shouldn't have done that. There's great value in acknowledging that I know that if I'm talking to my team, that there's great value in actually saying to them, guys, I want to start this off with apologizing because of something I haven't done, something I've let them down on something, a standard I haven't held myself to, something I haven't followed through on, something I promised that I didn't do.
Showing that you are vulnerable because at the end of the day, you are right. You're human.
It's perfectly normal. Perfectly normal to stuff something up, to forget to do something, to get it wrong, as much as it is perfectly normal to react the wrong way. So, number two, I think, is if it is you that's behaving poorly is to show that vulnerability.
Second part of that sort of second step is that if it's not you and it's the people around you, is to make sure that you're talking to those people about their behavior, not about them. So what I mean by that is, let's say you've got somebody in your team and they're kind of losing their shit, and they're just not reacting appropriately, then there is great value in you confronting that, but confronting it in a way which is not attacking them. And so what you've got to do is address the behavior. It's a bit like kids, right? They always say, I say to my kids, I always love you. I might just not really like the behavior that you're showing right now. And it's the same thing with your team, the team around you. You want to be able to say, listen, I really value you as a member of my team, but we need to work on this particular aspect. And there's a tool that I learned many, many years ago, and I teach it time and time again, called the three part imessage. And credit to Thomas Gordon, who ran the program that taught me this. But the three part imessage, and really, it is behavior effects and feelings. Right? Behavior effects and feelings. So what we do is, and we call it an imessage because we take out the word you. So if you are addressing behavior with someone who is not, they're reacting poorly, and you actually want to address that behavior, then using a three part imessage and three part imessage works like this. When certain behavior is exposed, behavior effect, it means this. It causes this and feelings, and I feel.
So if we put that into practical terms, let's say somebody's really reacting poorly, something, hey, you know what?
When there's a really bad reaction and negative reaction. It just brings down the entire feeling within the business and really drives poor culture. And I just feel like all the work that we've done on culture is then going out the door, as opposed to saying, you need to curb that behavior. You need to. Because once you start using you, and as I'm recording this, I'm pointing my finger, because once you start using you, it almost is this finger pointing, this chest jabbing thing. You.
I want you to just think about this for a minute. If somebody was coming to you to talk to you about your behavior and they started with this, you would, you would go into defense mode. You kind of get your back up and you go into defense mode automatically. And the problem with that is that once you go into defense mode, the communication kind of shuts down, because now you're defending yourself, you're defending the behavior. But we're not actually working on the root cause, which is step number three, that we'll get to shortly.
So step number two, if it's you, you need to acknowledge it. If it's somebody else, you need to confront it. But you can use that three part confrontative eye message, which is a way of saying to them, there's certain behavior going on, it has this negative impact, and it causes me to feel in a certain way because what you're then doing is, and we could talk about all the neuropsychology behind around feelings and why it is that they sort of drive a good part of our decision making without getting into the holding hands and hugging and singing kumbaya. But the reality is, like it or not, that a good percentage of our decisions are driven by feelings. And a good percentage of things that go into the workplace are feelings driven and feelings directed. So it's important that you actually understand the feelings behind what's going on using a three part imessage. Hey, behavior. When this behavior happens, not when you do this, but when this behavior happens, when there's an outlandish response or when there's a disproportionate response or when people lose their shit, this is the effect that it has on the business and the people around us, and this is how it makes me feel. You're going to get a greater level of cut through in the conversation as you try and address the behavior. Step number two, confront it, address it, but do it in a very clever way by using that process.
That leads us into step number three, because when you address the behavior, the next thing to do is to address the root cause.
If you don't address the root cause, then all you're heard. I think it's the shadow treasurer, Angus Taylor, saying, you know, you don't use a band aid for a bullet, right? If all you're doing is addressing.
Just addressing the symptom, in other words, the behavior, you keep losing your know, I've got to address that, and I'm going to go into. A little bit more into that in just a second. But all you're doing is addressing the symptom and not the root cause.
So it's a bit like going into a doctor and having a chest infection and the doctor giving you something to stop the cough, but never actually addressing the infection that you've got that's caused the cough. So you want to make sure that you are addressing the root cause and not the symptom. And sometimes that takes a bit of digging. So if we go back to step two and we say, well, step two is we're going to confront it. We're going to have this three part eye message. We're going to work out, acknowledge that it's going on, or be vulnerable, and accept that it's asking, guys, got to put my hand up. Behave really poorly about that, reacted inappropriately. Let's now pull apart and work out why is this going on? And one of the things that we're seeing a lot of at the moment with the clients that we work within our mastermind program is that this kind of reaction and losing your shit, whatever the technical term for that might be, comes about just as a result of overwhelm.
Too much work, too many things to do, not enough time. And so rather than sort of addressing the overwhelm of, okay, well, maybe we can get you some stress management, or maybe you've actually got to address what's the root cause? Do you have poor systems in place? Do you have too much work and not enough team? Do you have poor structure? Do they have really bad time management? So you've actually got to pull the problem apart. You have to deconstruct the problem that's causing the response, as opposed to just addressing the response, because then what you are doing is simply putting a bandaid on a bullet wound that's never got to work. You've actually got to get back to what the root cause is, understand the root cause, and address what's going on there. Let's do a quick recap on that three part process. That three step process. This is if you've got stuff going on in your business where people are just kind of super stressed, losing their sheet and not getting things sorted, then how do you go about dealing with it? And as I said, we are seeing so much of it that I think it's really important that we address it as best we possibly can. Number one is to make sure there's some support. So if it's you, you need to go get some support. Find somebody. If it's people in your team, let them know that you have support.
Use an employee program. An employee support program. Certainly within Metropol, we use the Drake program.
No affiliation with this podcast, no sponsorships, anything there. Just. That's what we do. We use the DraKe program to provide psychological support for our team, and we know they use it, and it works really well. I'm sure there's lots of suppliers out there that do a similar thing. So step number one is to make sure that there's some support, whether it's for you or the people around you. And by the way, be really careful that you don't take on everybody's burden. So one of the reasons why we put the DraKe program in is because I can't take on everybody's burden. Like, as the CEO of Metropolitan, I'm happy to listen to everybody's issues. I'm happy to have an open door policy. I'm happy to have people talk to me, but I can't work on solving everybody's problems. So we bring in professionals to help us. So make sure that you're bringing in professionals to help your team. Make sure you're getting some support. Whether it's professional support, a coach, a mastermind group, a friend, a colleague, whatever it might be for you. So make sure you are getting support. Step number two is to confront it. If it's you, then be vulnerable, acknowledge it, make an apology for it, and then tell your team you're going to work on it. If it's somebody else, you've got to confront it. Use the three part eye message. And then step number three is to make sure that you're not addressing the symptom. You're not putting a bullet on a band aid. You are actually addressing the root cause.
You've got to find a way to release this little pressure valve. And it was really interesting. I was reading some research recently. I can't remember where it came from. Might have been out of Harvard. Love reading the Harvard Business Review. But there's this research talked about, how do you help people in the workplace to cope with stress? And they did this experiment where they put a punching bag in a workplace, and the idea was that people who had a punching bag would mean that they could go out and get their frustrations out. They could go into the lunchroom and punch the crap out of the bag, and that'd remove all the frustration and they'd feel a lot better, as opposed to another group that simply had a quiet space, a relaxation space, somewhere where you could listen to, where you could meditate, or you could stretch on a yoga mat, or you could have a little quiet pod that you could quietly self reflect in. And the experiment was to see which of those two environments had the best outcomes in terms of dealing with stress in the workplace. And you might think that the problem with the second one, the quiet place, is it's just kind of not really dealing with the issue. It's just giving people, like, a band aid. In fact, the outcome was quite the opposite. So it showed that where there was, like, a punching bag in the workplace, all it did was just give people that immediate outlet. But it was just addressing the symptom. So it gets back to what we said in step three, right? It's just addressing the symptom. It's not actually addressing the cause. So you want to make sure that you address the cause, not the symptom. And in fact, putting the ability for people to find ways to be calm, to get calm support, is going to get a much better outcome for you than if you to put a punching bag into the office. I know across the metropolitan group, we have somebody come and do meditation with us once a month in each of the offices. We've had breathing classes, breath work. All of those sorts of things are really valuable. And I just encourage you to think about what can you do to reduce the level of stress. I was listening to a podcast the other day that was saying that the level of stress around the world in the work environment is the highest it's ever been, sort of in the last 20 years. And there was all this talk about how we were hoping that we'd come down and have sort of a honeymoon after Covid, and that, in fact, isn't what happened. It's been quite the opposite. So there's very high levels of stress.
You need to make sure that they're not impacting you, they're not impacting your business, and they're not impacting the people around you. The personal cost of that is just so high, and the cure for it or the treatment for it is so much longer and so much more costly and less cost effective than the prevention is saying.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Something like that. And I think that's very apt here. Three step process. Make sure that you follow that process. And the other thing I think is to make sure that you've got a really safe place so that it is okay for people to reach out. It's okay. One of the things we always talk to our clients about is making sure they've got an environment where their team know that it's perfectly okay. In fact, it is a sign of strength to ask for help to put your hand up rather than a sign of weakness. So it's a sign of strength, not a sign of weakness. Make sure that you encourage your team to do that. Hey, follow that three step process and let's hope that that helps you to reduce the amount of stress in your workplace. If you have got value out of what you've just heard, I'd really love you to do a couple of things for me. Please like the podcast, comment on it. Subscribe subscribing to this podcast the mastermind for Business podcast helps other people to find it and helps us on our mission to help more business owners and more managers of divisions departments within a business to get the freedom that they really deserve so they have less stress, less pressure, and still make good money from their business. So please like subscribe share with your friends tell your friends as the Richard Wiseman podcast says, and I really like it. If you loved the content of this podcast, please tell your friends. If you hated it, tell your friends anyway. Why should you be the only one that's miserable? This is Mark Creighton, Mastermind for Business podcast. Look forward to chatting to you in the next episode.
[00:22:11] Speaker A: Thanks for joining us on the Mastermind for Business podcast. If you're ready to have a business that you're not a slave to, check out metropolemastermind.com au or have a chat with Mark and the team at all the W's. See what's possible dot today.
