The Hindu Business Line : Are Indian executives eustressed or dystressed?

The Indian executive has to develop greater emotional intelligence (self-awareness and self-management) and social intelligence (social awareness and social facility).

Ganesh Chella

This entrepreneur I know has taken upon himself the challenge of growing his business by 75 per cent this year. The market is growing and the opportunities are huge. However, he does not have enough people to execute his plans. Many of the systems in his organisation are cracking and infrastructure is crumbling. The new set of middle managers he has hired have not yet settled down. Yet, he has to somehow pull it off. Is this eustress or dystress?

This young engineer managed to join her dream company. She is thrilled about the great facilities, the start-up training, the care and concern, and good money. While everything is great she has no work to do: eustress or dystress?

This young couple I know has just moved to a European country after the husband was offered a job posting there. The opportunity looked great and the learning opportunity immense. However, both of them have parents who are aged and quite unwell. The wife will also have to abandon her career. They will also miss the family support system they have been used to for years: eustress or dystress?

For decades, Indian executives lamented the lack of opportunities. They were pained that their potential was not being fully realised and that their dreams and aspirations were unfulfilled. Now that there are opportunities galore, are our executives highly motivated, positively challenged and on the path of enjoyment? In other words, is there more eustress than dystress? Sadly, available statistics and anecdotal evidence suggests that today’s executives are a lot more dystressed and a lot less eustressed.

Hans Selye, a Canadian endocrinologist who is considered to be the first to demonstrate the existence of stress, clearly pointed out that all stress was not bad. He also made the distinction between eustress (‘eu’ meaning good) and dystress (‘dys’ meaning bad).

Eustress is defined as good stress or a manageable level of stress for a reasonable duration, which helps you to mobilise your resources and gets you going on tackling the tasks and problems in your life. This is the situation around the middle of the graph, and is accompanied by positive emotions such as enjoyment, satisfaction, excitement and even zest.

Dystress is defined as an overload of stress from a situation of under or over arousal (both ends of the graph) going on for too long, first producing unpleasant feelings and then physical damage and fatigue and ultimately even death.

Many believe that when executives experience dystress over a sustained period and have too little recovery time and effort, they end up with burnout. So, when I look at the lives and experiences of innumerable executives including the ones I have narrated above as a coach and a human resources practitioner, one question comes to my mind — what can the average executive do to experience eustress and not dystress even while leveraging all the wonderful opportunities that exist?

Sources of Dystress

I see the following factors contributing to executive dystress:

Most executives land in dystress because they get into work or business situations that are not suited to their own disposition and natural preference. Driven by a lack of self-awareness or desperation or peer or parental pressure, they make unwise choices. I find that being in a job or business situation that is not in harmony with one’s natural preference is a great source of dystress.

Another source of dystress is the lack of assertiveness. Culturally, Indians had a preference for being connected and flexible and a desire to fit in, occupy one’s proper place, promote others’ goals and adjust oneself to others.

Today’s global business culture seems to demand that we are able to respect ourselves, express ourselves and our uniqueness, promote our own goals, resolve conflicts and be assertive and find our rightful place in the organisation or business environment. The inability to make this cultural leap leads to significant dystress.

Yet another source of dystress is the inability of executives to deal with and manage authority.

While it is fair to expect leaders at every level to be good at people management, that may or may not happen.

What executives do not realise is their own role in learning to establish a healthy relationship with authority in their lives so that their eustress or dystress is not entirely caused by good or bad leaders.

What can executives do?

The business environment of the future will only get more complex than ever before. Executives will be asked to do too much with little resources, competence, support and infrastructure. They will also be challenged to do too much in too little time. They may also be placed in job situations that do not fully utilise their skills and potential. They will be constantly watched and measured in an over transparent and measurement-obsessed world. Not all organisations are likely to recognise the psychological consequences and costs of these demands on their people.

The only way out is for the Indian executive to develop greater emotional intelligence (self-awareness and self-management) and social intelligence (social awareness and social facility), which are terms coined by Daniel Goleman. Out of this dimension of intelligence will come the ability to be aware, to make choices and to lead a life of congruence. It is also important that the parents of the next generation of executives invest in nurturing this intelligence in their children. Selye asserts that the goal is certainly not to avoid stress but to find one’s optimum stress level and then use one’s adaptation energy at a rate and in a direction adjusted to the innate structure of one’s mind and body. This famous quote by Selye is worth remembering every single day: “Fight always for the highest attainable aim. But never put up resistance in vain.”

(The writer is the founder and CEO of totus consulting, a strategic HR Consulting firm. He is also the co-founder of the Executive & Business Coaching Foundation India Ltd. He can be reached at ganesh@totusconsulting.com)

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Are Indian executives eustressed or dystressed?