Leading a new firm is both exciting and challenging. You get to forge new paths and break new ground for your business from day one. You also get to build a team that buys into your vision and gets behind your mission statement.
However, leading a startup can be extremely stressful, too. You’ll learn plenty of lessons the hard way and will have to figure things out on the fly.
Reducing your stress and supporting your well-being is crucial if you want to thrive over the long term. Tackling anxiety before it takes hold can help you keep a clear head and improve your productivity when you need it most.
Stress
Excess stress will derail your plans and sap your productivity. Leading a business when under burdensome stress is bad for your health. It is associated with heart pain, insomnia, high blood pressure, headaches, and a host of other ailments. Stress can contribute to many life-threatening health problems, like cardiovascular disease, so it’s something everyone — including startup leaders — should take steps to address.
If you experience sustained periods of high stress, it’s worth speaking to a therapist. A mental health professional can give you tools to address your stress and will be able to identify faulty thought patterns that are disrupting your ability to rest and relax away from work.
Failing to address stress can lead to burnout. This is a serious issue, as burnout detracts from your passion for business and undermines your long-term vision. You can avoid burnout by making lifestyle changes like:
- Improving your diet to include more lean proteins, greens, and “good” unsaturated fats;
- Exercising at least once a day, every day, to improve your focus;
- Taking semi-regular vacations to recharge your batteries and refresh your perspective.
These lifestyle changes help address the source of your stress and minimize your risk of burnout. Taking a step away from your business can help you identify areas for improvement when you return, too. This is key if you want to survive as a business leader in the long term.
Automation
Starting a business is a time-intensive process. You need to file reams of paperwork and will spend hundreds of hours looking for new employees to bring on board. However, as your business grows, you may find that you spend most of your days completing mundane, repetitive tasks like invoicing and responding to FAQs.
Minimize your stress and rediscover your passion for business by automating simple tasks. For example, take advantage of AI in HR. Doing so will automate many of the most stressful parts of running a business:
- Recruiting: No more will you have to write job postings, review every application, or conduct skill assessments.
- Metric Monitoring: It can monitor absenteeism, turnover rate, and retention to keep you informed about your ever-growing team.
- Screening: AI can let you steer the ship without fretting about the crew. AI can perform continuous criminal history checks, track clock-in times, and more.
Automation can improve workplace safety, too. This is key, as stress can cause accidents at work. Employees are more prone to making mistakes when they’re feeling the heat and may take unnecessary risks if they’re worried about profitability and productivity. Heightened stress can undermine your decision-making, too, which is a serious issue if you work in a field that requires sound judgments at all times.
As your firm grows, you may want to invest in a risk management program that can prevent catastrophic losses, automate the claims process, and identify potential oversights before accidents occur.
Time Management
When you’re stressed, you’re more likely to jump from one project to the other without any clear sense of direction. This is a serious issue for a startup business leader as you need to manage your time effectively if you want to maximize your productivity.
Improve your time management and start working on workflows. They dictate the hustle and bustle of your company, and it’s time to streamline them to keep everyone focused and on track. It’s a lot easier to focus on your work when everyone else is focused on theirs. Plus, when you’ve improved your time management, you will have more time to focus on higher-level, more meaningful tasks. There’s a significant link between efficient workflows and employee well-being, and that can work for you, too.
If you’re still struggling to schedule your day correctly, consider reevaluating your tech stack. You shouldn’t have to spend hours every week fiddling with difficult-to-use programs or lose time transferring files between apps. Instead, find apps that integrate and support the productivity of your entire team.
Remember to set aside some time for reflection, too. This is crucial if you’re new to business leadership and are used to following directions rather than setting instructions. Reflection can be a powerful time management tool as it helps you spot inefficiencies, address employee concerns, and brainstorm more effective operating procedures.
Professional Relationships
As a leader of a startup business, you want to be seen in a positive light by your employees. However, conflict is sure to arise if you and your team are stressed. Addressing conflict and resolving issues before you tailspin into an argument is key if you want to thrive in the business world.
Build better relationships and reduce your stress by setting reasonable goals with your team. Goal setting ensures that everyone understands their role and helps you make reasonable assessments of your staff’s performance. It is important to note, however, that goals should shift when external factors undermine your employee’s ability to complete the tasks you assign to them.
You can further enhance your professional relationships by setting short, medium, and long-term goals for your team. Ideally, these goals should be agreed upon collaboratively, as this increases buy-in and motivation. Remember to reward staff who hit their goals early and recognize those who work hard to achieve the pre-agreed targets you set.
Conclusion
Running a startup business is inherently stressful. However, you can manage your stress and help your firm thrive by directly addressing the source of your worries. Start by automating tasks that derail your productivity and undermine your passion for business. Use the time you save to develop better professional relationships with your new team. Remember to set aside some time for yourself, too, as seeing a mental health professional can give you tools to protect your well-being.
