Beyond Efficiency and Checklists: The Human Side.

How can we maintain humanity in a world filled with guides and checklists?

The “steps” on how to be a perfect person.

On Social Media, we constantly see tools being offered to help leaders quickly get from point A to point B.
B represents the ideal state: better, faster, further, more efficient. The promise to get there quickly actually sounds tempting and it tricks our brain to want to go there.

Who doesn’t want to be a good, successful, inspiring leader, know it all – and of course, to be recognized for it.
They are talking about necessities you were not even aware you have.

In any case, what is clear: You always should be different and better. And get there efficiently.

I have nothing against efficiency in general. It’s essential to eliminate unnecessary distractions and stay focused.

The question is: What are the “distractions” we are trying to eliminate?

It often seems that we need to be efficient enough to escape life and experience itself:

⇨ “10 Steps to Achieve X.”
⇨ “5 Ways to Improve Y.”
⇨ “Do THIS and you’ll be better!”
⇨ “What you do wrong, and I’ll show you how to do it right!

There are plenty of rules to follow.
And a lot of patterns and images we should fit in.

But do we really need 6 steps if 5 are enough? And if you need 7, does that make you a failure? As it has to be efficient and afterwards presented perfectly to the world?

Artificial intelligence makes all of this even faster.

Perfect answers and analyses within seconds. They even put it into perfect words. I’m impressed by the eloquence and how smoothly some steps and ideas are expressed. And I believe that AI can be a huge help, if used correctly – and not against us. Trying to compete with something that is not beatable. And forgetting the part where WE are unbeatable.

What I notice is that many of these tools to “help you become a better person or leader” sound remarkably similar. Sometimes it’s easy to tell when it’s AI-generated. The soul is missing. It’s too perfect. Too smooth. And especially it creates a subtle anxiety of “Why am I not there yet? I should do better!”

What do I want to contribute?

I want to support leaders on their journey – when they feel stuck, when things get heavy with employees and the demands.

And yes, I also think: “How can I really help if they can get well-structured answers within seconds from an AI? And if thousands of coaches and consultants have already given them checklists and steps on how to be better?“
(And of course, I agree that many of these tips are very reasonable.)

But what I see is missing here is humanity. And presence.

The space to make mistakes. To worry. To doubt. To fail. That’s human. It’s natural. It comes from survival instincts, our socialization, and the way our brains work.

It’s natural that dynamics in teams can get distorted.
It’s natural that employees feel uncomfortable when projects shift every few weeks.
It’s natural to feel a sense of pressure before an important presentation.
And it’s natural that we want to do well and achieve. We just shouldn’t sacrifice our and our employees’ mental health in order to seem good and achieving.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to improve, set goals, and succeed.

But in the middle of all the checklists and “how-to’s” and the pressure to achieve in the least time possible, remember: You are human, and you are allowed to not be perfect all the time.

So what I want to offer leaders is presence.

I work with them and see them. And I understand their situation – from a human perspective.

From there, they can find clarity for THEIR next step. Whether or not that step follows a checklist, it doesn’t matter.

For companies, this approach means thoughtful leadership and better team dynamics.

When leaders are authentic and show humanity, it builds trust and safety. People feel like they can be themselves and actually work with their best knowledge and intention.
And teams that feel seen, understood and supported face challenges more effectively, as they won’t fall into resisting the pressure or the fear of failing.

Instead of the pressure to do perfect and solve any issue as “efficiently” as possible, they take a moment to understand what’s really going on and handle things as they come.
With their true capacity. Reacting mindfully – not pressured.

The ability to navigate challenges with presence, empathy, clarity and a focus on long-term growth, rather than “checklist-quick fixes”, creates a more resilient and motivated workforce.

With warm regards,
Magdalena

Why Stress Management is a Performance Topic

How does work pressure affect the decision quality, efficiency and productivity of employees?

What role does leadership stress management play in overall performance?

Key Insight:

In knowledge-intensive work, performance depends on clear thinking, collaboration, and smart decisions. Chronic stress undermines all three.

Research clearly shows: Ineffective stress management – especially by leaders – is not just a health risk but a major threat to organizational performance.

Stress on Individual & Team Level

Does pressure really improve productivity?

Short-term pressure may boost output. But on long-term, when high demands persist, focus fades, motivation sinks and quality drops.
Research shows that employees under long-term pressure in jobs with high demands and with low control face:

  • more absenteeism,
  • reduced work ability
  • reduced cognitive function
  • more mistakes
  • lower productivity

Working until late night during weeks. Constant message overload. Juggling multiple projects at once. Half of them listed on the top OKRs.
At first, adrenaline helps – but after a time, frustration grows, motivation drops, and energy fades due to less sleep and constant overthinking.

What seemed like “just this one important project” in the beginning, often reveals a deeper issue: it’s not just “that one exceptional project”, it’s the general structure and stress culture and the pressure rarely stops.

How does team stress affect collaboration and innovation?

Under chronic stress, teams show significantly more mistakes and less innovation.

  • less effective communication
  • struggle to resolve conflict
  • avoid risk because of fear

This ultimately leads to missed opportunities and reduced innovation.

Teams often work on various projects at a time. Individual team members have 80-20 assignments, splitting their time between different projects and teams. They jump between contexts, messages, calls, emails – and start to loose focus and efficiency. Forget things. Get irritated. In software teams daily stand-ups turn into rushed updates to just get over with. While innovation and productivity slowly decline.

In knowledge work – where creativity and complex thinking are essential – this creates a silent but powerful performance drain.

Impact of Leadership

How do leaders amplify or buffer stress?

Leaders have a direct impact on their employees and how they receive their workload. Depending on how they handle it this can multiply stress and dysfunction in their teams by:

  • Unrealistic demands
  • Poor communication
  • Low empathy for their situation

When leaders take on new projects for the team without adjusting priorities, when they focus more on appearing “busy” than on actual team capacity. When they overlook individual needs and abilities or get nervous about top-down demands and push them down unfiltered – they amplify pressure and strain within the team.

Research shows that supportive leadership on the other hand buffers stress and enhances good performance by setting realistic goals, pro-active capacity management, and by open dialogue.

Stress resilience clearly starts at the top – and leaders first need to know to manage their own pressure.

Organizational Level Impact

How does culture shape healthy performance?

Stress is not only about individual behavior – organizational structures and culture matter a lot:

  • Harmful environments include unclear roles, low autonomy, poor reward systems, or toxicity in employee relationships because of high competition.

Unclear ownership and responsibility in big initiatives. No alignment between departments and shift blame around – often it is labelled as “miscommunication”, though the root cause also can be structural.
These organizations are also less likely to succeed in a competitive market (Park, 2007).

  • Supportive environments foster flexibility, fairness, decision latitude, and psychological safety.

This can be clear and limited priorities. Or fostering psychological safety by actively collecting and work on their feedback.
Value rest times – during work and after work – without implicit pressure to overwork and send late night emails.

Leaders act as role models and be the first in setting healthy boundaries instead of glorifying non-stop availability.

Can stress prevention be a performance strategy?

Yes, because research clearly shows:

Organizations with health-oriented cultures perform better, and suffer lower costs of turnover and absenteeism, health care and litigation (Palmer et al., 2004 as cited in Park, 2007), as burnout risks decline and commitment grows.

Targeted prevention enhances employee satisfaction and mental health, and strengthens organizational intelligence.

This is not just about wellness apps.
High-performing organizations integrate stress management into their structure: realistic workloads, supportive leadership, flexible structures, and proactive communication.

Takeaway

Performance suffers where long-term stress is not well managed.
Organizations that treat stress as a strategic issue have a clear advantage with a more resilient and capable workforce.

Managing stress is not about lowering ambition,
it’s about enabling people to perform at their best and preserving capacity.

I recommend to view stress prevention not as a soft benefit, but as a hard performance lever:

  • for their leaders to self-manage stress and multiply to the teams
  • integrate it in the organizational structure and culture

With warm regards,

Magdalena

Literature Sources

Avr, M., & Srinivas Rao, B. (2024). A study of work stress and its impact on employees’ performance and job satisfaction. International Journal of Education and Science Research Review 10, 119–125. https://doi.org/10.47392/IRJAEM.2024.0324

Ganster, D. C., & Schaubroeck, J. (1991). Work stress and employee health. Journal of Management, 17(2), 235–271. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639101700202

Gilboa, S., Shirom, A., Fried, Y., & Cooper, C. (2008). A meta-analysis of work demand stressors and job performance: Examining main and moderating effects. Personnel Psychology, 61(2), 227–271. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2008.00113.x

Park, J. (2007). Work stress and job performance. Ottawa, Canada: Statistics Canada. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/pub/75-001-x/2007109/article/10320-eng.htm

Putu, I. A. M. D. (2020). Millennial generation in accepting mutations: Impact on work stress and employee performance. International Journal of Social Science and Humanities, 3(1), 87–94. https://doi.org/10.29332/ijssh.v3n1.268