The Work Still Has to Get Done: Leading People Through Stress and Hard Times

Life doesn’t stop when the workday starts.

Whether you own a business with six employees, manage a team of 20, or support hundreds of employees through HR, sooner or later someone you work with is going to go through something hard.

Sometimes you’ll know about it. A parent dies. A marriage ends. A child is struggling. Someone becomes a caregiver. There is a serious illness or financial crisis.

Other times, you won’t have any idea what is happening.

You’ll just see that something has changed.

A great employee starts missing things. Someone becomes short-tempered or unusually defensive. A person who was engaged begins withdrawing. Two employees who normally work well together suddenly can’t seem to get through a conversation without conflict.

And sometimes it isn’t one employee at all. Your whole team may be dealing with uncertainty, rapid change, staffing shortages, a difficult customer environment, or just the cumulative stress of trying to keep up.

This is where leading people gets complicated.

Because the work still has to get done.

Customers still need to be taken care of. Deadlines still matter. Coworkers shouldn’t continually have to absorb someone else’s workload. Performance expectations don’t disappear because someone is having a difficult time.

But neither does the person.

So how do we hold both?

How do we lead with some understanding of what stress, adversity, and sometimes trauma can do to people without turning managers into therapists?

How do we show compassion without avoiding accountability?

And how do we build workplaces where people can get through hard seasons and still do good work?

Stress can change how we show up

When people are under a lot of stress, especially for a long period of time, it can affect how they focus, communicate, make decisions, respond to feedback, and handle pressure.

That doesn’t mean every difficult behavior or performance issue is because of stress or trauma. Sometimes a performance problem is simply a performance problem.

And it definitely doesn’t mean managers should try to figure out what happened to someone or diagnose what they are experiencing. That is not our job.

But there is value in understanding that behavior has context, even when we don’t know what that context is.

That awareness can change how we approach someone.

We can ask questions before making assumptions. We can address a performance issue without stripping the humanity out of the conversation. We can be clear about expectations while recognizing that the person sitting across from us may be dealing with something we know nothing about.

Two things you can try now

You don’t need a new program, policy, or training to start thinking differently about these situations.

First, separate what you know from what you are assuming.

Before a difficult conversation, ask yourself:

What have I actually observed? What am I assuming about why it is happening?

There is a big difference between:

“She doesn’t care anymore.”

and

“She missed two deadlines this month, which is unusual for her.”

The first is an interpretation. The second is something you can actually have a conversation about.

You can still hold someone accountable for the missed deadlines. You just don’t have to decide why they happened before you ask.

Second, check yourself before you start the conversation.

Take 30 seconds and ask yourself:

What am I feeling? What am I assuming? What is my intention? What outcome do I want?

That small pause can make a big difference, especially when you are frustrated.

If your intention is to prove a point, catch someone doing something wrong, or finally tell them how frustrated you are, the conversation will probably sound very different than if your intention is to understand what changed, address the impact, and get clear about what needs to happen next.

Neither of these practices lowers the standard.

They help us get to the real conversation faster.

Compassion and accountability can exist at the same time

This is one of the things I think we sometimes get wrong in the workplace.

We act as though we have to choose.

Either we are compassionate and give someone a pass, or we hold them accountable and risk coming across as uncaring.

I don’t think those are our only options.

You can say, “I know you’re going through a difficult time, and I want to support you,” and still have a conversation about missed deadlines.

You can listen without becoming someone’s therapist.

You can offer flexibility where it makes sense without creating completely different standards for everyone.

You can care about the person and still care about the impact their behavior is having on the rest of the team.

That is where good leadership gets harder. It is also where it matters most.

So where does trauma-informed leadership fit?

The word trauma can make this conversation feel much more clinical than it needs to be.

A trauma-informed workplace is not one where managers are expected to identify trauma, counsel employees, or excuse inappropriate behavior because someone may have been through something difficult.

For me, the practical workplace application is much simpler:

How do we lead people well when we don’t know everything they may be carrying?

That means being clear about expectations. Creating as much predictability as we reasonably can. Giving feedback in a way people can actually hear. Listening before jumping to conclusions. Setting appropriate boundaries. Knowing when something is outside our role as a manager. And connecting people with the right resources when they need support we cannot provide.

None of that requires knowing someone’s personal history.

And frankly, those are good leadership practices whether someone has experienced trauma or not.

Resilience isn’t only about the employee

We also need to be careful about how we talk about resilience at work.

It is easy to tell employees to manage stress, practice self-care, set boundaries, and become more resilient.

But organizations have a role in this too.

Are expectations clear? Do people know where they stand? Can someone raise a concern without immediately regretting it? Do managers know how to have difficult conversations? Are we creating unnecessary chaos through poor communication, constantly changing priorities, or unclear decisions?

Sometimes the answer is helping an employee build resilience.

Sometimes the answer is fixing the environment that keeps requiring so much resilience in the first place.

Probably, it is often a little of both.

That broader view matters because resilience is not simply an individual trait. The Compassion Resilience resources describe it as something that develops through the interaction between a person and their environment over time. They also emphasize skills like managing expectations, setting boundaries, building strong working relationships, and creating organizational conditions that support people doing difficult work. 

Let’s keep the conversation going

This tension between humanity and accountability is exactly what I’ll be exploring in a free virtual session on Wednesday, October 21, from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.

When Life Shows Up at Work: Building Resilience, Accountability & High Performance Through the Hard Stuff

We’ll talk about how stress, adversity, and trauma can show up at work, what a trauma-informed approach actually looks like in the workplace, and what it does not look like.

But this won’t be an hour of theory.

We’re going to talk about the situations leaders actually face.

What do you say when someone who has always performed well suddenly isn’t? How do you respond to difficult behavior without assuming you know what is behind it? Where is the line between compassion and accountability? How do you support someone without becoming their therapist? And what can the organization itself do to create the conditions for people to be resilient and perform well?

The session is for business owners, executives, managers, supervisors, HR professionals, and anyone responsible for leading people.

It’s free, but registration is required.

Register for When Life Shows Up at Work