Do you ever feel that success requires – demands! – anxiety? Venture capitalist Andrew Wilkinson tweeted, “most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.”

Lots of us channel anxiety into productivity and overwork. It’s natural to apply coping mechanisms when things feel scary or out of control and so we may micromanage, assert our smarts, take up a lot of space in meetings, or simply drive towards inbox zero because that gives us a sense of control. These coping mechanisms are often rewarded. Take for example, the control obsessed leader who promotes an anxious team member. This team member is working night and day-- they’re working so hard because they're so anxious they can't let go. What message does their promotion send to everyone else?

Anxiety is contagious within systems; when the anxious leader gets rewarded, teams copy their leader’s anxious behaviors. Guess what happens then? Everyone becomes anxious! 

Last week on The Anxious Achiever, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy outlined his framework to create mentally healthy workplaces. In the quest to “save our souls” from drowning in stress and overwork, perhaps no organizational change is more necessary right now than reversing patterns that reward anxious behaviors.

The Secret to Success

But there is a simple solution to break the cycle of a workplace that rewards anxious behavior: Create interdependence! Interdependent teams rely on everyone’s contribution to thrive. People feel less anxious and more engaged when they can see how they contribute to a larger purpose, working together to create shared value. An interdependent group will be less anxious than a group that is controlled by one leader, or a leader and their acolytes.

My podcast guest Aaron Dignan is a work designer. His company The Ready helps clients disrupt systems that create and reward unhealthy behavior. The approach, he says, will also give people hours back into their schedule each week, and who doesn’t want that? We talk about three methods to build a healthier workplace and disrupt systemic anxiety at work:

Method 1: Redesign your meetings. Check-ins and icebreakers might seem “cringe” as my kids would say, but Dignan says they help disrupt negative patterns. “The meeting is a microcosm: if you show me a meeting in your organization, I'll tell you about your entire culture.” Make your check-ins and icebreakers count. “We know that one of the best predictors of team success is having more equal talk time. There are louder and quieter voices and a lot of those patterns get more accentuated over time. The check-in round interrupts the pattern and says, ‘we're all actually just gonna speak for about the same amount of time at the very beginning of the meeting.’ Just doing that one thing will change how much time people spend talking in the meeting. And it will change how they give a little deference to each other and it'll change how certain ideas bubble up. Not by a hundred percent, but by 5% or 10% or 20% the first time and then more in the future. And it basically primes the pump for more shared voice.” 

Secret hack 1: Trash the agendas. They foster land grabs for time and space. Insteads, invite everyone to show up with the issues they need to discuss and prioritize as a team. 

Method 2: Roundabouts instead of traffic lights: A lot of what we do at work is running around trying to control outcomes. It’s human to seek control. And in work, most of us want enough control to be able to influence the people around us and get what we want. But control is an illusion, and the work it takes to maintain the illusion of control makes everyone anxious. If you’re a leader, Dignan says it helps to shift your mindset from controlling people to get the outcome you want to designing a process that allows the team to achieve the desired outcome. 

“The person who controls the stoplight really feels that they have the kind of managerial control that we idolize in many cultures: I turn the light red, everybody stops; I turn it green, everybody goes. I'm in charge. If your goal is to control people, just get 'em to do what you want, then yes, that person has more control. But if your goal is to get a certain outcome in the world, like I want people to move through this intersection without having accidents with the maximum amount of throughput per hour, then the person that designed the roundabout has way more control. We all have to use our judgment in a roundabout. It runs on social coordination entirely. There's no arbiter of what happens except people just using their best guess, which is kind of chaotic at times and fun to watch, but fundamentally higher performance.”

Secret hack 2: Ditch the “boss” title: instead, think of yourself as a “designer”. The roundabout’s design is actually the kind of control that you want to have because influencing the system influences all the outcomes in a way that is much more empowering to the people in the system. 

Method 3: Focus on the actual work. Modern management takes us away from our tradecraft, clinical skills, or technical expertise and asks us to spend more time controlling people. Ask yourself: What if success meant honing your craft and governing as a peer with others, rather than climbing the ladder as a manager so you can tell others what to do? What would happen if you made more time to focus on your craft, not on your place in the hierarchy?  

Secret hack 3: “What did I actually enjoy about my job before I became the boss?” Could you spend less time making sure your team hits milestones and reclaim time to actually do the work you once loved to do? This change is hard and can cause some anxiety but will help you have more joy at work – and build a healthier workplace for your team.

Listen to my discussion with Aaron Dignan to dig deeper into workplace design and these three secret hacks to increase interdependence and reduce anxiety at work.