Stress narrows your ability to think

Most teams are not struggling because they lack strategy, skill or effort. They are struggling because of stress. The region of the brain responsible for everything that makes a great team member is also the first region stress shuts down.

The prefrontal cortex is the most sophisticated part of the human brain. It is the command centre for pretty much everything that is important to lead a successful life and work at your best. It’s responsible for clear thinking, emotional control, problem solving, good communication, sound decision making. The list goes on. But unfortunately for the modern worker, we evolved in a way that makes this region the most susceptible to stress. So when life, work, too much alcohol and caffeine or whatever else puts your physiology under pressure, well then that part of your brain goes offline. Yep, say goodbye to the evolved, clear-headed, high-performing you. And say hello to the reactive, can’t think-straight, procrastinating and hard-to-be-around version of you that can barely get through the day, let alone lead a team through one.

Stress targets your thinking centre first. Why? Because thinking is slow. You don’t need to think to survive a threat. You need to act. But you’re not in the wilderness fighting for your life, you’re at work trying to solve problems and create a positive and productive culture.

Your brain has a control system that keeps your impulses in check and your thinking clear. Think of it like a circuit breaker. Stress trips the switch. Even a moderate amount of it. Once that happens, your impulses take over, you react rather than respond and you struggle to think clearly.

This is not a dramatic or rare event. It may be happening to you and the people in your team, to varying degrees, daily. When stress activates the nervous system, the brain floods with cortisol and adrenaline. The amygdala, which is the brain’s threat-detection centre, becomes hyperactive. It starts seeing problems everywhere, interpreting neutral events as threats and treating every challenge as a crisis. At the same time, the prefrontal cortex begins to lose its influence. The capillaries in the front of the brain constrict and send more blood to the back of your brain, your hind brain (the primitive part). So now your evolved, forward-thinking centre is offline, and your unevolved, reactive centre is online and now you’re operating more like our relative, the chimpanzee, and acting less like a grounded and thoughtful human being.

This may be the reality for you and your team on a regular basis. If you’re frustrated with the culture, the performance or the progress, it’s likely not a lack of skill or eff ort. Instead, your brain is running a program designed to protect you from physical danger, in an environment that requires something far more nuanced.

Stress in individuals compounds in teams. One person operating in a stressed, below-the-line state can be managed. A team of people operating in this state simultaneously creates a culture negativity.

Below-the-line cultures are characterised by blame, negativity, reactivity and a fixed focus on what is not working. It is the meeting where the same problems get discussed every week without ever moving toward a solution. It is the leader who is technically present but emotionally absent. It is the team member who used to be engaged and enthusiastic and has quietly become someone who does the minimum and goes home. It is the conversation that should have been productive but somehow became defensive.

The standard response to stress in most organisations is to treat the symptoms. Flexible working arrangements. Fruit bowls and yoga classes. An EAP program that nobody uses. A leadership off site that produces a great strategy document and very little sustained change.

Stress is not primarily a workload problem or a culture problem. It is a physiological one. And until you address the underlying state of the nervous system, everything else is a temporary fix applied to a permanent condition.

The most effective intervention is not a structural change to how people work. It is a change to how people are inside when they show up to work.

This is what Griffith Consulting calls the inside game of leadership and the unseen culture. The culture you can see is always a reflection of the one you cannot. And the one you cannot see lives inside every person on your team.

Real change in a team does not come from a single seminar or a one-off strategy session. It comes from a sequenced, comprehensive approach that works on the person first, the team second and the organisation third. Because you cannot build a high-performance culture and a sustainable organisation out of people who are in a constant state of reactivity, fatigue, negativity and blame.

That is where Griffith Consulting starts and we do it over six to nine months. Because people and cultures do not change overnight.

Lasting change requires new thinking, new attitudes and new behaviours, and individuals need time to work on their physical, mental and emotional state. The team needs to be guided to align on its vision and values, identify the gaps, and close them. This only happens through repetition, consistent practice and enough time for a responsive, accountable, positive-minded and solution-focused way of operating to become the new normal for every leader and team member. Once the two cultures, the seen and the unseen, are aligned, only then will you experience the culture you want for your team and organisation.