Leadership Anxiety: 5 Warning Signs You Can’t Afford to Ignore

Introduction

 Many individuals aspire to lead events such as college festivals or teams at the workplace. However, assuming such esteemed positions often entails experiencing a blend of excitement and nervousness, referred to as leadership anxiety. This sensation resembles standing at the starting line of a race, burdened with the pressure to excel.

Leadership Anxiety

For many leaders, balancing the satisfaction, respect and pride of the position that they hold alongside supervising a team can evoke overwhelming anxiety. From fairly granting leaves to ensuring the team meets deadlines, making the right decisions, and being the go-to person for every problem, the responsibilities can seem endless. This can make one feel overwhelmed and on edge. Additionally, handling team grievances, assigning the right work to the right person, ensuring the growth of team members, and maintaining cohesion within the team pose significant challenges. Contrary to popular belief, research has shown that leaders’ mental health is not better than non-leaders (Cloutier & Barling, 2023). Therefore, assuming a leadership role can be notably stressful for many individuals.

Signs of Leadership Anxiety

Experiencing a certain degree of anxiety about representing a group and being accountable for the overall performance is common. However, when this anxiety starts to impact one’s performance and affects one’s daily life, it becomes concerning. Here are some signs that indicate someone is going through leadership anxiety:

• Micromanagement: Feeling the need to oversee every little detail and not trusting team members with their responsibilities. This could mean the person is struggling to delegate tasks and is overly controlling, which can hinder team productivity.
• Indecisiveness: Having trouble making decisions because of a lack of confidence and being influenced too much by what others think. This can lead to delays in progress and a lack of direction within the team.
• Self-doubt: Constantly questioning one’s abilities as a leader and dwelling on past decisions. This can lead to a lack of confidence in leading the team and can be demotivating for both the leader and their team members.
• Persistent anxiety: Feeling anxious and worried most of the time about meeting team goals and expectations. This constant state of worry can affect the leader’s ability to focus and make clear-headed decisions.
• People-pleasing: Trying too hard to please every team member, even if it means taking on extra tasks and overworking oneself. This can lead to burnout and resentment towards the team members.

Experiencing occasional signs of leadership anxiety is normal, but if they persist, it’s crucial to take action. It’s essential to address these issues proactively to ensure long-term well-being and effectiveness as a leader.

Effects of Leadership Anxiety

Leadership anxiety can greatly affect different areas. 

• Lowering Leader’s ability: Firstly, it may hinder the leader’s ability to guide the team effectively, leading to chaos and confusion. Consequently, this could lower the quality of the team’s work. Research shows that stress negatively impacts leadership behaviours (Harms et al., 2016). 
• Negative impact of team performance and well-being: Secondly, when experiencing anxiety, it’s common to want to control everything because uncertainty is hard to handle. However, this approach can overwhelm team members, leading to exhaustion and a decline in performance, as well as increased grievances. Another study found that leaders’ workplace anxiety impacts team performance through both thinking and feeling processes (Zhang et al., 2022).
• Stress to the team: Thirdly, a leader with high anxiety can spread this stress to the team, leading to a consistently tense atmosphere. 
• Negative Growth of the entire team: Additionally, leadership anxiety can negatively impact setting goals, staying motivated, maintaining productivity, and making sound decisions. In a nutshell, it’s safe to say that the growth of the entire team, including the leader, can face significant challenges. 

Tips to Manage Leadership Anxiety

While experiencing anxiety about being a leader can be debilitating, there are ways it can be addressed and improved. Let’s look at some of these:

1. Learning from mistakes and experiences: When starting a new role as a leader, it’s important to understand that learning comes from experiencing different situations. Making mistakes is normal and should be seen as opportunities to learn, not failures. Leading effectively comes with real-life practice.
2. Planning specific strategies for team management and conflict resolution: Reflect and figure out the areas you have to cater to exclusively as a leader like ensuring cohesiveness, setting protocols of work and conduct within the team, resolving conflicts, etc. Think and note down the ways and steps you could follow to execute these. This will make you feel a sense of preparedness to lead and help reduce anxiety. You can refer back to your notes whenever needed.
3. Boost your confidence in navigating challenges: Talk to fellow leaders and understand how they navigate challenges. While you do that always remember that everyone will have their unique set of concerns and their own ways of approaching it. The purpose is to remind and reassure yourself that you can do it.
4. Effective team management: Be organised and set clear goals. Delegate tasks and regularly check in with them. Encourage open communication so everyone can share their thoughts and concerns.
5. Balancing team needs: Understand that it’s your responsibility to balance the team’s needs while also meeting work goals and deadlines. You can’t please everyone, but you can strive to do your best.
6. Work life balance: Try to draw a boundary by addressing work related concerns only during work hours and not after. Keep non-work hours for family, leisure and relaxation.  This will recharge you for the next workday.

Conclusion

Being a leader requires responsibility, sincerity, integrity, empathy, and confidence. Some may naturally excel at leading, while others need to learn. However, having a growth mindset, being open to feedback, and believing in oneself can help improve leadership skills. No leader is perfect, but everyone can become better with a willingness to learn and grow.

References

Cloutier A.E., Barling J. (2023). Expectations of Leaders’ Mental Health. Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, 30(3), 276-279. 10.1177/15480518231178637.

Harms, P. D., Credé, M., Tynan, M., Leon, M., & Jeung, W. (2017). Leadership and stress: A meta-analytic review. The Leadership Quarterly, 28(1), 178-194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2016.10.006  Zhang S., Chen L., Zhang L., Stein A.M. (2022). The ripple effect: How leader workplace anxiety shapes follower job performance. Front Psychol, 13: 965365, 10.3389/fps.2022.965365

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