April Connections Video: The secret to stress management success

Transformational project initiatives are so important for your company — but they can be stressful for your team members.

After all, your team is trying to juggle additional time-consuming responsibilities to get a project across the finish line, on top of their regular day jobs. That can add up to stress and strain.

Here at Syte Consulting, we are highly intentional about the way we manage stress internally when we’re working with clients and solution providers, and today I’d like to share some of our secrets with you.

Watch this video to find out why planning well and focusing on relationships are so important for managing stress levels during your company’s transformational initiatives.

Watch the video.

Hi, Erin Koss here, CEO at Syte Consulting Group. Today, I want to talk a little bit about how to manage stress during important project initiatives. Projects can take a long time and a lot of energy as our staff and employees spend extra time in addition to their day jobs, trying to get important transformational initiatives off the ground for our companies. I want to talk a little bit about how we manage stress when we’re working on those projects with our clients. I do want to mention an article that I wrote in March that talks about a project that we brought over the finish line.

It was an ERP implementation project near and dear to our hearts. It was some of the best work I have to say that we’ve ever done and did it in the middle of a pandemic. I think maybe that’s why it felt so meaningful and important to bring this one over the finish line. But it was an implementation that we did with a family-owned manufacturing company where we started really at the beginning of a pandemic and went live here at the beginning of February. In the article, I talked a lot about why it was successful and the things that we did to make it so together with the client and the solution provider. As I was thinking about those things, I realized that many of those same things are those which help manage the stress for the projects as they’re going on as well.

The end of March included planning, planning, and more planning. I talked about this a lot in the article where this is a critical success factor to the entire project. As you’re looking to cutover, you spend a lot of time planning for just a short period of time. But it can make all the difference. This important cutover period can take a lot of planning. I discuss how much project planning is so critical. The other piece is what we call the consistency of executing on the three C’s.

For us, the three C’s are a really critical core value for our organization and how we execute and work with our own clients. Those are connecting, communicating, and collaborating with one another. We find that it is such a critical thing in all places at work and at home, in our projects with clients and partners. It’s a really big deal for us and we find such a critical success factor to everything we do. But the thing that I noticed when I was thinking about managing stress on these projects is that when you consistently execute those three C’s. It means that you are being intentional to build relationships with the people on those teams.

When you do that and you’re being intentional, you’re listening more. You’re hearing more about when there’s pain points, pinch points, and stress that comes up in the project for people in a really real way on a day-to-day basis. You’re able to really pay attention and notice things right when you’ve got relationships in place that you’ve nurtured and built. The other piece is when you’ve got those relationships, People are going to be more likely to trust you and share with you important and hard things that are happening for them. As an example, during the project that I talked about a minute ago, we were together long enough that we have major life changes occurred during that project. We had a couple of people leave. We had a few deaths in the family. We had some big milestones that were also super positive and fun to celebrate. We had some situations where some challenges with kids at home during the pandemic that parents were managing. This created a whole level of stress that none of us had ever really experienced before. I noticed that having those core values and consistently executing to make sure that we were connecting, collaborating, and communicating really allowed us to hear what was going on and, in turn, be trusted with information as it came up. What that also allowed us to do in the context of also being a well-planned project was to pivot quickly and easily and not make the stress worse than it may have already been under the circumstances.

As you think about executing critical transformational projects for you and your organization, take a few minutes to think about how you can make sure that you’re investing in the planning that’s necessary. It does take a little extra time, but also making sure that you’re consistent in the way that you connect, collaborate, and communicate with your team, with your business partners, your clients, and your staff. I guarantee you’ll have a lot better success on the other side and your people will be happier for it. They’ll appreciate you more and appreciate the challenges to rise above what’s been placed in front of them.

I wish you the best of luck and if we can help you in any way at all, don’t hesitate to reach out. Have a great day!