WHEN WORRY COMES TO WORK
A Seven-Part Leadership Series
What Leaders Can Actually Do About Workplace Anxiety
After all the theory and research, executive leaders eventually arrive at the practical question.
What do we actually do?
When I first wrote about leadership and workplace anxiety, I approached that question from the perspective of someone trying to understand how Leader-Member Exchange might reduce some of the stressors experienced by employees with GAD or workplace-related anxiety.
Years later, I would frame the answer somewhat differently.
Leaders do not need to become therapists.
We need to become better leaders.
That begins with clarity.
People should know what is expected of them, how their work connects to organizational priorities, what decisions they can make, what decisions belong elsewhere, and where they can go when expectations conflict.
Clarity will not remove anxiety.
It can reduce the unnecessary anxiety created by vague leadership.
This is especially important when someone begins a new position, changes roles, returns to work after an absence, or takes on significantly different responsibilities.
My original paper recommended pairing employees with a peer mentor during these transitions.
I still think there is considerable value in that idea.
A good mentor can help someone understand how work actually gets done, not only how the organizational chart says it gets done.
They can answer the questions a new employee may be reluctant to take directly to their supervisor.
They can provide context.
They can normalize the learning process.
They can help someone recognize that uncertainty during transition does not necessarily mean they are failing.
The relationship should not create dependency. As confidence increases, the mentor can become a more occasional source of perspective and encouragement.
Leader education matters too.
My original recommendation was that supervisors receive training in understanding anxiety and workplace-related stress.
I would make one important adjustment to that now.
The purpose of training should not be to teach managers to diagnose mental health conditions.
It should help leaders recognize when an employee may need support, understand organizational accommodation processes, know what resources are available, and become more capable of having an appropriate conversation.
There is a considerable difference between saying, “I think you have an anxiety disorder,” and saying, “I have noticed that things seem particularly difficult right now. How are you doing, and is there something about the work environment that we should discuss?”
One crosses into diagnosis.
The other opens a conversation.
Organizations also benefit from giving employees a better language for discussing workplace stress.
Training around stress, coping, communication, conflict, emotional awareness, and available resources can help normalize conversations that people otherwise avoid until circumstances become much more difficult.
Again, this is not treatment.
It is basic organizational literacy about the reality that humans experience pressure differently.
Another recommendation from my original paper was the creation of what Northouse (2022), drawing from adaptive leadership, describes as a holding environment.
The term can sound more complicated than the practice.
People need places where difficult issues can be discussed without immediately escalating the threat around them.
A holding environment might be a well-led team meeting.
A private conversation with a supervisor.
A facilitated discussion.
A peer support relationship.
A coaching conversation.
A structured debrief following a difficult incident.
The form matters less than the function.
Can people name what is happening?
Can they talk about what is difficult?
Can competing interpretations be heard?
Can the problem be examined without the person immediately becoming the problem?
Can people work toward a response together?
Sometimes people do not need leadership to have the answer. They need leadership to make it possible to talk about the problem.
There are also limits to what any leadership approach can accomplish.
That was important in my original research and remains important now.
Leader-Member Exchange alone is not sufficient to address the needs of an employee experiencing Generalized Anxiety Disorder [GAD] or another anxiety disorder.
Professional assessment and treatment may be necessary.
Workplace accommodations may be required.
Individual circumstances differ.
Severity differs.
People respond differently to the same workplace environment.
The original research also required several assumptions.
I did not find studies directly testing whether the four components associated with GAD operate identically within workplace-related anxiety.
I did not find research establishing that reductions in ordinary workplace stress would have exactly the same effect for employees diagnosed with GAD.
Nor did I find evidence that high LMX relationships would support every individual experiencing GAD or workplace-related anxiety with equal effectiveness.
Those limitations matter.
Good leadership requires being careful about what we claim to know.
The research does give us strong reasons to pay attention to relationship quality, communication, trust, social support, self-efficacy, perceived control, workplace integration, and access to resources.
That gives executives plenty to work on.
Perhaps the starting point is simpler than another organizational initiative.
Talk with people.
Clarify expectations.
Listen before interpreting.
Make it safe to raise concerns.
Do not create uncertainty you could easily remove.
Give people reasonable influence over the work for which they are responsible.
Provide access to resources.
Address incivility.
Build relationships before a crisis requires them.
Know where leadership ends and professional care begins.
Then keep paying attention.
Looking back on the leadership experiences that originally prompted this research, I can see conversations I would handle differently today.
That may be one of the gifts of reflection.
We cannot go back and lead yesterday again.
We can allow what we learned yesterday to change how we lead today.
Final Reflection
What might change in your leadership if you became less concerned with correcting anxious behaviour and more curious about the conditions surrounding it?
References
Bernerth, J. B., & Hirschfeld, R. R. (2016). The subjective well-being of group leaders as explained by the quality of leader-member exchange. The Leadership Quarterly, 27(4), 697–710. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2016.04.003
Graen, G. B., & Uhl-Bien, M. (1995). Relationship-based approach to leadership: Development of leader-member exchange (LMX) theory of leadership over 25 years: Applying a multi-level multi-domain perspective. The Leadership Quarterly, 6(2), 219–247.
McCarthy, J. M., Trougakos, J. P., & Cheng, B. H. (2016). Are anxious workers less productive workers? It depends on the quality of social exchange. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(2), 279–291.
Northouse, P. G. (2022). Leadership: Theory and practice (9th ed.). SAGE Publications.
Rousseau, V., Aubé, C., Chiocchio, F., Boudrias, J.-S., & Morin, E. M. (2008). Social interactions at work and psychological health: The role of leader-member exchange and work group integration. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38(7), 1755–1777.
Walumbwa, F. O., Cropanzano, R., & Goldman, B. M. (2011). How leader-member exchange influences effective work behaviors: Social exchange and internal-external efficacy perspectives. Personnel Psychology, 64(3), 739–770.