I’d been counselling his whole department about the stress of the recent office move. But now it was his turn for one-to-one stress counselling.
First, he’d just had to break the news to one of his oldest friends that he was to be redundant – which is known to be one of the most stressful and emotionally draining tasks that a manager ever has to do in their career With a little help from me (mostly minimal interventions, encouraging him to talk this through), he was actually coping better than expected. Then came a relatively minor impact, which just managed to push him over the edge. The Annual Report was wanted in ten days.
Through gritted teeth, he kept repeating “I can’t get it put back. And there’s no-one else I can give it to.”
We’d been through the various time management routines, like limiting your availability and ‘walking the talk’. But there was also the psychological attitude to report-writing – generally regarded as a tedious chore, demanding but unrewarding, a form of drudgery.
I tried to get him to view it differently.
The Annual Report is a big opportunity to influence the image of the company and to amplify key points. And the better-planned and better-written it is, the more people are going to read the whole of it, and absorb the various messages.
It is in fact your corporate dialogue with the world at large – worth polishing-up into a small masterpiece. You make friends with the reader by achieving accuracy and style. And the reader responds by forming a better image of your organization.
And don’t forget – within the company, the quality of the report also impacts on the image of the writer!
Learn how pressure hardens into stress – with ‘Show Stress Who’s Boss’ – just one of the Carole Spiers presentations that have decisively changed attitudes and mindsets.
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