It's not enough to pass the pressure you feel on to your team. The effort that managers make to understand and support their staff emotionally will determine how productive their teams will be during the stressful times ahead.

No one needs to be told just how tough things are at this point in South Africa’s history. Economic pressures, a rising interest rate and political uncertainty have left even the most resilient and optimistic people feeling slightly shaken, financially strapped and emotionally stressed. And while your employees might not talk to you specifically about it, make no mistake - they are feeling the pressure.

How managers step up to the plate at this time and help their staff to cope with uncertainty and stress could play a pivotal role in their company’s ability to ride out this difficult time successfully. Their emotional intelligence in dealing with their people will prove critical in helping staff to develop the kind of resilience that will allow them to remain positive, happy and productive. Our experience in dealing with managers and staff in the courses that we run has consistently revealed that when people feel that their boss recognises the stress they are under – either at work or in their personal lives – and provides emotional support, they are able to continue to work well in spite of the negative things that may be happening in their lives.

But before managers can understand their team members, they need to be able to understand themselves. This is not glib ‘pop psychology’ speak – it’s a fact of human nature. During difficult times, leaders have to understand and recognise their own reactions to stress. Do they lash out, go into attack mode, become uncommunicative or adopt a defensive attitude? Lack of insight into such reactions leaves little scope for the possibility of such behaviour being changed. And when you’re reacting in a considered and rational way from a position of strength and insight, you will start to feel far more in control than you do when you react in an irrational way.

A habit of reflecting on and grappling with your own reactions also paves the way for contextualising other people’s behaviour in the same way. When you understand that you respond in a particular way because certain situations trigger you to do so, you come to appreciate that your way of behaving is not necessarily the ‘normal’ or the only way. Such understanding paves the way for you to start to treat employees as individuals, which is extremely important during times of stress. Some people strive under stressful conditions, manage to step up to the plate and are galvanised into action, but for others, stress and uncertainty produce nothing more than the kind of blind terror and overwhelming anxiety that induces paralysis and an inability to do anything productive. If you don’t know which one of these personality types you’re dealing with, your attempts to improve productivity will be at best a shot in the dark.

Understanding and managing your own reaction will help to develop another key competency required of managers during trying times: the ability to absorb the pressure that is being placed on them from above, instead of simply passing it on to the staff below. Kicking the person below you because someone above is kicking you not only increases pressure and decreases productivity, but it also creates for an overall chaotic, panicked and uncontained working environment. The world may be chaotic outside, but if you can create a sense of peace and order at work, employees will come to see their jobs as a haven from the pressure of the world and in time, the sense of calm may even seep through to their personal lives.

If all this seems unattainable, don’t be disheartened. Building emotional intelligence takes time and constant, conscious effort. Many of the managers who attend our ‘Persuasive Conversations’ course come back for ‘The Next Conversation’ because they recognise this to be the case. But the starting point lies with the intention. While emotional intelligence might be a life’s work, the desire to understand people better and help them cope with stress means you’re never very far off from the right path.

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