There's no getting around it: The c-level staff of any company, large or small, is likely to experience high levels of job stress at times. Whether a CEO has been active for five months or five years, they will need to have some sort of strategy for handling intense situations and calming down after a particularly draining workday. What are some of the things executives around the world do to calm themselves down?
Writing for Harvard Business Review, James Bailey recently listed some of the activities he discovered after an international survey in which he asked 127 executives from nearly 20 different countries to describe the techniques they used to keep stress and anxiety low.
He said there were four types of activities that executives tended to prefer after being put through a tough day: health, removal, intellectual and introspective activities. The most common type of relaxation, "health" behavior, refers to basic self-care like sleeping or exercising.
"Removal" means some sort of entertainment that physically takes the person away from their workplace, intellectual activities are puzzles or some sort of stimulation, and "introspection" implies meditation or some other quiet kind of response to stress.
Sometimes, the activity that sets off a CEO's stress level is relatively minor. CNBC recently reported on an incident where the head of Cliffs Natural Resources, Lourenco Goncalves, reportedly reacted poorly to a question during an earnings call.
The source says Goncalves refused to respond to a question and then abruptly moved on to the next one, apparently creating some notable stress as a result. The article doesn't mention how he responded to the situation, but it's best for CEOs to be discreet, so their emotions don't get out of control.
No matter what causes a CEO to feel anxious, discovering effective ways to relieve stress will benefit the company's performance.
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