When the problem isn’t skills, it’s stress

I often get this brief,  

“We need to upskill our team.”

Of course the language varies, sometimes it’s “we need a development programme”, sometimes it’s “our managers need to be better at X.” It might even be a more raw and honest “something’s not working and we’re not sure what.”

The underlying belief is almost always the same. The team needs to learn something new, and once they’ve learned it, things will improve. Sometimes that’s absolutely spot on and the gap is absolutely about capability, but more often than I’d like to tell you, it isn’t.

Let’s dig a little deeper 

When I start working with a team, I don’t start with the skills gap, instead I start with what’s going on. We need to fully understand where we stand right now before we come up with any solution. Often, what’s going on is that people are knackered and they’re stretched. They’re carrying more than is sustainable and they’ve been doing it for long enough that it’s become the norm. Nobody’s flagging it because everyone around them is doing the same thing and they don’t want to cause any fuss.  They don’t want to be that guy/gal! 

When this is the reality the team doesn’t need a training programme, they need to not be exhausted.

Of course, that sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but it’s remarkable how often it gets missed. The symptoms absolutely look like a skills problem. I mean, someone’s not communicating well, they need some help with that. Communication training is the obvious solution. Another person isn’t managing their time? Let’s support them with some productivity coaching. Failing to prioritise?  Let’s teach them some prioritisation tools.  Someone’s disengaged? It’s a motivation issue, let’s provide training for that. 

Sometimes, these are the solutions, but sometimes the team is running on empty and everything suffers as a result.

You can’t develop a team that’s running on fumes

If your team is stressed, properly stressed, not just “bit busy this week” but sustained, grinding, can’t-switch-off stressed, then a development programme won’t land. People who are running on fumes don’t have the capacity to take on new things. You need people who are in a position to learn before you start trying to teach them.

I appreciate I am a bit blunt about this, but I’ve seen it enough times now to be that honest. If I come in and the team is burnt out, I will say so. Spending money on a programme that people don’t have the capacity to absorb isn’t development. It’s expensive wallpaper hiding the cracks beneath. It might look good on the surface but three weeks later the wallpaper starts peeling and the cracks show through again. The exhaustion, the pressure, the things driving the problem, none of it got touched. And I haven't done my job. Nobody is happy.

Before the skillset can change, the mindset needs to. That means understanding what’s going on underneath, not just making the surface look better.

Why generic stress interventions don’t work

When organisations do acknowledge stress as a factor, the response is often generic, because they want to reach as many of the team as possible. It comes from a well meaning place. They might have a resilience workshop or wellbeing day. Maybe they’ll send an all-staff email about mental health resources. 

I cannot stress this enough, the intention is good but the impact is limited. That’s because stress is personal. What’s grinding one person into the ground might barely register for the person sitting next to them. The triggers are different and the responses are different. That means the needs are different too.  I saw this live: I was working with a cohort of folks who spend their lives sacking people on other companies' behalf - talk about stress!  One of the team members was literally baffled by some of the experiences of their colleagues as that wasn’t their lived experience at all.  

A one-size-fits-all approach to resilience and stress will always miss most of the people it’s aimed at. Instead, what works is diagnosis. The key is understanding what’s driving the stress for each person, then building a response that addresses the cause, not just the symptoms.

So, what do I do about it?

I don’t separate stress from the wider team effectiveness work. For me it’s part of the same conversation. If I’m doing a Team Diagnostic, stress is part of what surfaces. If I’m running a Team Tune-Up, how people show up under pressure is central to the day. For the stress-specific work, I use my S.T.R.E.S.S.™ Framework, a diagnostic tool that helps people understand their own stress including how it shows up, what’s causing it, what’s underneath, and what they actually need to do about it. It’s personalised because it has to be.

Before you book the training

If your team’s performance has dipped, can I ask you to pause for a moment? Not to talk you out of the training you were thinking about booking but to ask is it actually a skills gap? Or could  something else be going on?

Getting it right matters, because the wrong diagnosis leads to the wrong intervention, and that’s time and money you won’t get back.

If you want to have that conversation, I’m here. Book a free chat. There's absolutely no commitment. It’s just a conversation about what might actually be going on.