Transformational leadership for reducing project deadline stress

Communication Style and Managing Conflict

One of the most important roles of a leader is to anticipate which situations will cause the most stress and disruption to their teams' progress on critically important projects. One of the biggest challenges to managing a team is keeping everyone focused on a deadline, despite the many distracts and other work that needs to be done. Using transformational leadership techniques, a team, department or company leader can reduce the stress caused by deadlines. A core component of transformational leadership is selectively relying on emotional intelligence (EI) while aligning the job roles of each person in a team with their core strengths (Purvanova, Bono, 2009). The following strategies can be used for helping a team alleviate stress caused by deadlines before any conflict arises.

Alleviating Stress Through Transformational Leadership

The most effective strategy to help teams alleviate stress is to first make sure roles are clearly defined and responsibilities understood by each team member. This alleviates conflicts related to roles, which transformational leaders excel at minimizing due to their levels of EI (Purvanova, Bono, 2009). With clarity of roles accomplished, the next task is to make sure every member of the team has very clear, achievable goals and understand the tasks needed to accomplish them. This focuses on making sure every team member not only understands what is expected of them, but also have the support they need from the leader to do their jobs. Transformational leaders excel at define roles, expectations and providing the support necessary to achieve them (Purvanova, Bono, 2009). Third, having daily status meetings on projects helps to increase communication across the entire team. This strategy alleviates stress, increases information sharing and creates a level of trust not possible if everyone stays isolated from each other. A fourth strategy that many leaders also use is regularly reevaluating the deadlines and seeing if they are still achievable given changes in resource availability and constraints throughout the organization. Across these four strategies the most effective leaders are always working to build and strengthen a bridge of trust with their teams, so they know their manager is behind them and supports them 100% (Purvanova, Bono, 2009). This aspect of leadership support alone can dissipate a significant amount of stress on its own.

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