The Effects of Time Stress on Businesses & Leadership – And How Business Coaching Can Help

07th Nov , 2016

Many business owners and CEOs share the frustration of working hard in their business to get good results, but often at the expense of a well-balanced time schedule. This produces time stress in the business and in leadership.

All too often, we hear and think that we are ‘time poor’. As business owners, CEOs or executives, we are keen to put in the hard yards to achieve superb business goals. This drive and dedication is a critical success factor and is admirable. However, it all too frequently comes with the high risk of burnout and at the expense of quality family or leisure time, all of which can impact how we feel and perform generally. The trick is to do it all in a balanced and practically sensible way, and a great way to learn how to do this is through business coaching.

 

Achieving a Balance

Trying to achieve a balance can bring to mind another common phrase: ‘More easily said than done’. This is because having the responsibility of running a business comes with enormous challenges, including inevitable deadlines, staffing issues, cash flow, and dealing with banks, financial institutions and other funders of the business. These challenges usually fall on key individuals, which can be daunting and cause stress.

The impacts of such stress can be adverse and affect your health, the business’s performance, your enthusiasm, and family and business relationships. It can also come with the risk of compounding bad decisions in business and family life.

Fortunately, there are ways to lessen the downsides:

• Engage a business mentor who can provide business coaching.
• Delegate where appropriate.
• Set realistic goals.
• Monitor progress against KPIs, milestones and other measurements.
• Consider more flexible yet structured working arrangements for yourself and employees. This is becoming increasingly important for workers who become more productive with flexible working timeframes.
• Readdress business plans with realistic short and long term goals so you can develop a strategy to get you there, with a timetable to ensure delivery.

 

Minimising Time Stress with Business Coaching

A well matched International Business Mentor will have hands-on experience in these areas and understand your competing stress areas. Our business mentors are experienced in business coaching and know the pitfalls and challenges business people must deal with. They can share their experiences, successes and mistakes with you to help you structure and manage your time limitations.

Business people often approach us to find them business mentors or business coaches for a variety of reasons. One of these reasons is time frustration, which is a common catalyst for initial contact.  Once the frustration with time management has been dealt with by your business mentor and yourself, then the wider areas to improve your business performance can be addressed. Good time management is the fundamental basis for good business practice, but so too is the focus on other important issues that need to be resolved. Lesser important issues can also be dealt with later with less urgency.

While time stress in business and leadership can be challenging, with the help of business coaching from your own International Business Mentor, you can improve your time management. This will enable you to refocus on improving performance through planning and strategy, which in turn impacts on better productivity and motivation – all of which should lead to better results and a better life-business balance.