Why harnessing stress is the key to a high-growth career
Seeking stress is an early career superpower, but unmanaged stress becomes a huge liability when you start to lead teams
For most of my career, stress was like rocket fuel.
The more stress I felt, the harder I worked. And the harder I worked, the more I was able to achieve. When I felt stuck or saw myself slowing down, I would either put more on my plate or convince myself that I had to go above and beyond - raising the stakes (and my level of stress).
This worked really well for me. Until all of a sudden, it didn’t.
As I continued to take on more responsibility, large amounts of unmanaged stress started to have consequences: bad decision making, worse relationships with people around me, burnout, and more. Stress transformed from fuel to a liability.
I don’t think I’m alone in this journey. Almost all the high-performing, early-career people I know seek out stress and use it as a motivating force. But this attitude isn’t shared by most great managers and leaders. This leads me to believe that at some point, great leaders go through a transition where they change the way they approach stress.
But there’s very little written on this topic. Stress is either demonized as something to be avoided at all costs, or it’s lionized as the essential ingredient for accomplishing great things.
In this post, I’ll dig into all things stress: why it’s an early-career superpower, when it starts to have serious consequences, and how you can manage it as you get more senior.
Let’s dive in!
A practical definition of stress
Please note that much of what I cover below assumes a reasonably healthy work environment. Toxic or dangerous work environments generate their own unique stressors, which I won’t try to address in this post.
Stress is a major factor in all work environments.
No matter how well supported you are, there are things that will cause you to feel stress - like large responsibilities, tight deadlines, or important projects.
But there are many parts of work that aren’t stressful at all - like answering emails, reviewing data or writing code. Everyone has a suite of tasks that feel completely comfortable, even if they are important or take a long time.
So what causes stress?
I believe you experience stress when you are asked to take responsibilities that are beyond your capabilities. You can think about stress as an arms race between these two forces.
So why take on responsibility at all, if it causes stress?
Well responsibility comes with all sorts of rewards. Responsibility is what gives you more impact, fancier titles, larger roles, more money, more power, and more status. For these reasons, ambitious people seek out large amounts of responsibility.
Inevitably, this leads to people taking on more responsibility than they have capacity for - which produces stress.
Why stress is an early-career superpower
It’s nice to imagine growth in responsibility as a series of small incremental steps where we’re asked to take a little bit more responsibility, which is quickly matched by new capabilities. In fact, this is how most people try to structure their careers.
There’s nothing wrong with this - but this is not how rapid growth works.
Most people who grow really fast take on large chunks of new responsibility that are well ahead of their capabilities. Then, their capabilities are pushed to meet these responsibilities as fast as possible. In the meantime, they experience a lot of stress.
Stress isn’t just a side effect of this trajectory - it’s a part of what makes it possible. Stress is an incredibly strong motivator. It’s uncomfortable, but if you can harness that discomfort, it will push you to work super hard - making it possible to achieve things that are well beyond your baseline.
Early on in your career, this is the central feedback loop for rapid growth. You take on more responsibility, you get stressed, you work really hard, and you build new skills. Over time, hard work reduces stress because it expands your capabilities - bringing you closer to equilibrium.
Most ambitious people internalize this, and start to intentionally seek out stress because they know it will help them grow. They identify opportunities for big leaps in responsibility, then work super hard to catch up to it. In this way, unmanaged stress is the primary fuel for early career growth - and seeking out the most stress as you can handle without breaking is a career super power.
Unfortunately, stress is not a panacea. It comes with a lot of negative side effects. And at some point these negative side effects start to outweigh stress’ motivational benefits.
The consequences of stress
At a minimum, stress makes people a little bit more irritable and short-tempered.
But acute stress can lead to all sorts of problems. You can’t sleep, you have racing thoughts, you can’t focus, you feel anxious, you stop taking care of yourself. Over time, high levels of stress can lead to physical ailments - from cardiovascular problems to gut health to illness.
We can probably all agree that it’s not good to be at the high end of the stress spectrum for an extended period of time. And generally, we avoid this much stress at all costs.
But as I shared above, moderate amounts of stress can be very useful. As an early-career IC, the benefits of moderate stress often outweigh the costs. If you’re getting a lot more done, it’s okay if you’re a bit more irritable, constantly reviewing problems in your head, and unable to focus on anything but the source of stress. You’re not affecting that many people, and you’re primarily judged for your own output - so if stress makes you work harder, it’s great.
But as soon as other people start to rely on you for more than just your work, this dynamic changes. As a manager even small manifestations of stress start to have severe consequences, for a few reasons:
More people will be affected by your bad mood (since you typically have a larger social graph)
People look to you for guidance on how to react to a situation, so if you are visibly stressed and upset, others will mirror that behavior
People will bring their stress to you and ask you to help them. If you’re too absorbed in your own situation, you won’t be able to help
You’re spread across more tasks, so you can’t afford to fixate on a specific problem
More of your job becomes about making decisions vs. doing things, and stress affects your judgement
Unfortunately, managers still access career growth in the same was as ICs - by taking on responsibilities that are larger than their capabilities.
This means that if you want to grow quickly in your career as a manager, you have be in very stressful situations without externalizing your stress. And this requires you to adopt an entirely new mindset about stress.
Stress absorbers vs. stress emitters
Before we go deeper into the stress management toolkit, it’s worth putting a name to the skill we’re describing: stress absorption.
I picked up this terminology at Bain, where people would label managers as “stress absorbers” or “stress emitters”. You always wanted to work for a stress absorber.
If you bring a problem to a “stress absorber”, they immediately make you feel better. What felt like a huge deal doesn’t feel so big anymore. They help you take a breath, lower the temperature in the room, and dig into calmly solving the problem.
If you bring a problem to a “stress emitter”, they make it seem worse that it is. A minor issue is escalated, the volume is turned up. You walk away more worried about the problem than when you started.
The difference between these two things has nothing to do with the actual plan of action. I’ve worked for stress absorbers who pushed me super hard - but they never felt frantic or scattered. Even if we were staying up till 3am to fix something at the last minute, the worst they’d do is let out a loud sigh and put their head down. Then we’d keep working.
The underlying difference that I saw between these two groups of managers was their mindset about stress.
Stress absorbers saw responsibility as fuel. More responsibility pushed to the team will mean more good work, and stress is just a side effect of responsibility.
Stress emitters think of stress as fuel. Stress will push the team harder and get them to do more, which means it should be reinforced rather than controlled.
If we go back to the stress graph, you can imagine a stress absorber trying minimize the amount of stress in a given situation, by making people feel more capable or by minimizing the level of responsibility they’re taking on.
Stress emitters tend to make things seem more important than they are and implicitly question a team’s capabilities by stressing the need to over-prepare.
The stress emitter attitude can work for short periods of time in contexts where everyone is super ambitious and feeds off stress. But even in an environment like consulting, I always found stress absorbers to get better results. Plus, you drastically reduce fatigue and burnout.
Interestingly, the “high growth IC” mindset naturally transitions into the stress emitting mindset. Both of these personas view stress as fuel, so they seek to constantly maintain a state of stress. This is the trap that I found myself in during the last year.
At some point, you have to make a conscious choice to change your attitude around stress - but this isn’t enough. To actually become a stress absorber, you need to build a toolkit to manage your own stress, so you have the capacity to manage stress for others.
A framework for managing stress
As I’ve worked to make this transition myself and begin to manage my stress, I’ve come up with my own framework for stress management, which has 3 parts.
1. Your baseline capacity for stress
Everyone has some baseline capacity for stress, which is formed by your past experiences. Some people are seemingly born with superhuman stress tolerance, but most us learn it through experience.
If you’ve never skydived before, it’s probably going to freak you out - but it won’t if it’s your 100th jump. The same is true at work. My first client presentation terrified me, my 100th was just a Tuesday.
If you’re consistently taking on challenges, you will constantly expand your capacity to handle stress. It’s important to remind yourself of this during difficult periods, because you are growing just by pushing through. Over time, if you sustain your load, things will get better.
Unfortunately, this is a slow process, and not something you can rely on in a pinch. Which brings us to your stress management tools.
2. Your tools for managing stress
You’re going to encounter problems that exceed your baseline capacity for stress. When this happens, you need short-term ways to deal with this.
One tool is time. Just take time away from work or what you’re doing, and come back to it when you feel less stressed. This works, but it’s not something that you can manufacture (especially if you have a demanding job).
Another tool is cheap, short-term fixes. Watching a TV show, having a drink, eating comforting food - all of these things provide temporary alleviation of stress and can be good in moderation, but don’t do anything to fix the problem itself. And in excess, they lead to a lot of bad health outcomes.
The best indirect tool is healthy behaviors and habits. Exercise, long walks, meditation and breath exercises and both good for you and proven stress relievers, which make them something you can use consistently without leading to negative feedback loops.
Then, there are direct tools you can use to address the underlying source of stress. Are you stressed because you don’t know what to do? Maybe you should create a plan for the work you have to get done. Are you stressed because you’re worried about interpersonal drama? Maybe you should talk to someone about it.
I’m sure that none of this advice is new - and it’s not supposed to be. The important thing is focus on is developing a set of stress management tools that consistently work for you. If you don’t know what you works for you to alleviate stress, then you have a problem.
Even as you get good at this, you’ll probably have residual stress left over. Which brings us to part 3…
3. Avoid showing your stress to others
As you get more senior, stress becomes contagious. If you’re stressed out and showing it, your team will get stressed, which will make you more stressed… you know where I’m going.
Vulnerability in a leader is great, but there are times where people just need a calm voice no matter how you’re actually feeling. Complete disassociation is not a sign of a mature leader, but neither is showing your unfiltered emotions to everyone on your team.
There are a few skills you can practice here:
Being able to go back to a “default” state when you’re feeling upset under the surface
Identifying people that you can to confide in / complain to (often peers) to release a little bit of frustration, rather than talking to people that you will affect
Withdrawing a bit from your day-to-day to create space, whether by working from home for a day, blocking your calendar to give yourself some breathing room, or just going home early
Taken together, these three components determine how much stress you can “manage” in a work context. It doesn’t mean you’re not experiencing stress - it just means you’re isolating the blast radius of that stress to yourself (plus your trusted confidants and friends).
Anecdotally, being thoughtful about managing stress - and viewing it as a part of my job well - makes me feel better.
Why stress management is essential for maintaining rapid growth as a leader
As a manager, taking on responsibilities that are greater than your capabilities is the still fastest way to grow you career. And doing this inevitably creates stress.
Unfortunately, unmanaged stress is no longer an option. Stress makes you unpredictable, irritable, and reactive - none of which are conducive to building great teams.
This means that the limiter on your career growth changes. As an IC, the limit on how fast you can grow is how much stress you can handle without breaking. By handle, I mean that you can continue to be highly productive (even if stress makes you act like a jerk).
But as a manager, the limit on how fast you can grow is how much stress you can manage. If you’re managing your stress successfully, the people around you shouldn’t even know that you’re stressed.
If we grow back to the graph, managing stress effectively moves your equilibrium up - letting you continue to take on more responsibility than you’re capable of, which keeps you growing really quickly.
Closing thoughts
Stress is obviously a nuanced topic, and personal factors have a deep impact on how much stress you can handle at work.
Still, I think that an honest assessment of stress - both how it’s used as fuel and how it diminishes in value - is important as people navigate high-growth careers.
This framework would have been tremendously useful for me as I moved from IC to manager. Hopefully it’s useful to you too.
Please leave comments / suggestions / questions below!