Outside your control

I had two incidents happen in the last 24hours which left me feeling very uncomfortable.  The first was an update of this blog software which somehow scrambled the formatting and ruin the page.  Next day, I got a couple of letters from the Revenue about about some technical problem, which throws me into their system, and on to the ‘mercy’ of their common sense.  In both cases I have to rely on others expertise to sort me out.  It is not a comfortable feeling to be powerless and completely reliant on others.

The thing is that in companies it is those with the least power who suffer from the most stress for exactly these reasons.  The more you can involve people, and give them some kind of choice, the less stressed they will be.

Managing communications is also key as you don’t want people to feel that you are keeping secrets from them, but nor do you want to alarm them by speaking about things too soon, when everything is vague and up-in-the-air.  It is a very delicate balancing act, and one key is to be as honest as you can, and treat others with respect.  This helps reduce stress and resistance later on.

“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.”   Viktor E. Frankl

Tags: Change, control, stress

This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 17:43 and is filed under Business Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.