In Depth

Stressed to Kill

Stress is a torture chamber that can't always be avoided. Tortured most are executives with high accountability but low authority. Sound like anyone you know?

By Christopher Koch

Page 5

The control-related stress conditions CSOs face are shared by another C-level player: the CIO. Joe Gagliardi is the CIO at Unisa, a distributor of women's shoes and accessories. When a custom manufacturing resource planning project he was overseeing at Unisa had its funding withdrawn earlier this year, Gagliardi not only lost control over his project but also over the expectations of users. "I had a bunch of half-developed applications and a bunch of half-trained developers, and I tried to deliver what I could, but it wasn't working out," he says. Disappointed departments began criticizing. So Gagliardi changed everyone's expectations, including his own. "I said we're going to stop the project and go into maintenance mode on the legacy applications until times improve," he says. "Now when my developers manage to deliver something new, it's a pleasant surprise for everybody, and they're happy to get it."

Gagliardi says that since engineering this attitude adjustment, his stress level has gone way down. Psychologically, he achieved the control over his environment that he needed to turn off his primal sense of anxietyand his physiological fight-or-flight response.Stress in IsolationIt's much harder for CSOs to escape the isolation that cavemen learned to dislike so much. CSOs who show the signs of stress send it rippling through their staffs like a rock thrown into a pond. Worse, those who confide in their employees about the stress they feel risk having it used against them. "You need for your staff to know that you're human; you don't need your staff to know that you're weak," says the University of Texas's Quick.

Joining a networking group can help relieve the loneliness, as can a deep discussion with your spouse. But neither of these palliatives can change a CSO's reaction to stress or offer ways to relieve it.

Indeed, CSOs who feel isolated tend to alienate those around them who could offer support. "No one understands what I'm going through, so there's no use in talking about it" is a refrain that Lee Smithson, a psychologist and executive coach for consultancy RHR International, hears a lot from executives she works with.

For one of Smithson's clients, who requested anonymity, stress on the job and stress at home marched in lockstep. "He was constantly having to bargain with his wife for time, and he canceled two vacations with her and their children," Smithson says. "His wife had become hardened to the whole situation." When his company merged with another, he told his wife that he wanted to apply for a higher paying but more demanding position at the new company. "She hit the roof," says Smithson. The man's wife wasn't the only unhappy one. The new company told him that unless he revamped his approach to work and the way he handled stress, he wouldn't get the job. "He was functioning as the consummate problem-solver," says Smithson. But his obsession with controlling his stress by doing everything himself had alienated him from his employees, who wished he would delegate more often, and from his superiors, who could never track him down for important meetings. And when he did attend, he was so distracted that he usually sat in silence.