Founder says managers’ stress spreads to teams and hurts performance
A startup founder argues that leaders who voice their financial anxiety unsettle their teams, and that managing one’s own mindset is central to effective leadership.
Managers who openly share the pressure they feel can drag down the productivity of the people who work for them, according to a founder who says she learned that lesson early in her career. Writing in Fast Company, the founder argues that a leader’s mood functions as a kind of weather forecast for the whole team, and that managing one’s own emotional state is the starting point of good management.
The founder recalls that in her first business, in her 20s, she let the strain of financial uncertainty overwhelm her to the point of sabotaging the company. She describes that experience as a formative lesson that shaped her later ventures. Cash flow matters enormously, she writes, but so does a founder’s ability to hold on to the vision and purpose of the business while working through the numbers. Financial information in an early-stage company, she suggests, should come with a health warning: leaders need to understand their financial position without becoming consumed by it.
The piece draws a distinction between pressure and stress. Pressure, in her account, is positive, pushing people to give their best and rise to a challenge. Stress is an anticipatory feeling rooted in fear of something that may never happen. A leader’s job, she argues, is to give people purpose and direction so that they can apply healthy pressure to themselves in pursuit of company goals. When a leader communicates raw panic instead, team members may feel responsible for situations they have little power to change. By contrast, showing that the leader can handle pressure gives people a reason to believe in their own contribution.
She also notes that many leaders struggle with the pileup of negative news, such as an investor pulling out or a key customer switching to a competitor. Those leaders often do not want to pass their stress to their staff, yet holding everything in for long periods eventually takes a toll on them and on the team. The founder says she came to see the answer as a matter of internal discipline rather than leadership technique alone. She describes developing a new internal voice, built from qualities she admired in real people and in film and television characters, that could offer perspective and firmness without making difficult moments worse. That process, she says, began as an effort to become a less reactive parent and later shaped her leadership. She has written a book, It Starts With You, to share the approach.
Calm leadership, the founder stresses, does not mean keeping employees in the dark. Leaders should tell their teams what affects their work, what remains uncertain, and what steps are being taken in response. The key, she argues, is to create a gap between feeling and speaking, so that a manager can ask whether a message is useful information or simply an expression of fear. A leader who controls their own mind, she writes, is better placed to build a team in which people bring problems forward without fearing that they will tip the leader over the edge. Her closing question to managers is whether their team is focused on building through adversity or bracing for the next storm.
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