More Responsibility is Not Equivalent to Having More Stress

Dr. Jennifer Lerner: Having more responsibility is not equivalent to having more stress. There is a really important lesson in decoupling having a lot to do with having high stress. I run this course at Harvard, known as the Leadership Decision Making Program, and it draws people who are in leadership and managerial roles from around the world who want to learn how to harness the fields of behavioral science and decision science to improve their organizations. We used to measure their biological stress responses. We collected saliva samples because you can actually measure stress hormone secretion. You can measure cortisol from saliva. We connected them to devices to measure things like their cardiovascular responses, how much they were sweating, all kinds of different indicators. Even though these leaders and managers all had some biological stress responses, their levels were not as high as the average person or the average worker who is not a leader or manager. When these leaders and managers first learn that their stress levels are, on average lower than those of the people they supervise, they're surprised and part of it is that there's this whole culture of executive level stress that, when you have so much to do, that the more you ascend a leadership hierarchy, the more stress you're going to have. But it turns out having more responsibility is not equivalent to having more stress. It's really about whether you have control over how you manage those responsibilities, and how much certainty or predictability you have over those responsibilities. being a leader or a manager confers some buffering from the maladaptive effects of stress, where as if you were the person that no one can cover for you, or you don't have control over any aspect of your schedule, it introduces less sense of control and less predictability. One of the first things I recommend doing is starting out by measuring baseline stress levels of the employees in your organization.

You don't have to do what we did, which is collect their saliva samples or hook them up to a bunch of measures for sympathetic nervous system responding. Because it turns out that self-report scales–in particular a scale known as the Perceived Stress Scale, developed by Sheldon Cohen and colleagues–are very good predictors of underlying biological stress responses. A lot of people think, oh, self-report scale, probably not scientific, not accurate. But this is actually one that really works well. There are ways that individuals can get more decision authority, more control over how they do their jobs and when exactly they do certain tasks that when they have that increased experience of control and increased experience of predictability and a sense that they have some say in how to do their job better, it systematically has been shown to be associated with lower stress responses. Now, sometimes really tough things are going to need to happen within an organization.

Right now, we're living through a period of disruption, partly due to major economic changes, partly due to technological changes, and so there will need to be layoffs. There are ways that even with something that is clearly a bad thing for workers, that you can reduce the stressfulness by focusing on increasing individual employees' sense of control and predictability.So, for example, if you have to do something like layoffs, set it in a very particular time period. Once that date has passed, there won't be layoffs for the next at least six months, because otherwise workers have this heightened sense of unpredictability all the time where they're, you know, waking up in the morning thinking, "Is today going to be the day?" That kind of uncertainty translates into heightened biological stress responses. Moreover, it's crucial to make as crystal clear as possible what dimensions are going to determine who's laid off, so that they have some sense of individual control, of individual agency, of... "Is my skill set still going to be needed or in my location? Are we still going to be needed?" And they can begin to make some plans even when unfortunate things need to happen. and leaders always have ways to reduce the stress fulness of those unfortunate things. It may feel like, why bother doing that? You know, layoffs are just going to be bad. That's really not the case. There is very solid evidence showing that the more you increase sense of control, the more you increase predictability, the less biological wear and tear on individual human beings.