Stress is present everywhere in our lives today. Stress in the workplace is the most dangerous and debilitating because it is often unquestioned or accepted as being “just part of the job.” But stress directly impacts our effectiveness and productivity and therefore our ability to do our job. Excessive stress or negative stress impacts our ability function normally. When we have high levels of negative stress we lose the ability to remain positive, optimistic and we lose the ability to see solutions to our problems. Our creativity shuts down. The first victims of negative stress are: creativity, innovation and a positive, optimistic outlook. And the second victims of negative stress are effectiveness, performance and productivity.

How can you transform negative stress into positive stress?

Well one simple idea is re-framing how we think and how we encourage those around us to think. Here is a simple and powerful series of questions that will create positive stress for you at work and for your team, colleagues and peers. The quality of answers you get depends on the quality of questions you ask and nothing redirects people’s thinking better than a well-phrased question.

5 Killer questions that create positive stress or ‘flow’ in the workplace.

1. What is already working? This question primes the creativity pump, builds energy and gets people involved. It shifts our focus to ‘possibility thinking’ by tapping into enthusiasm, creativity, energy, drive and collaboration leading to an increase our job satisfaction, performance and productivity.

2. What makes it work? This is the learning step. If we can understand why something succeeded then we can replicate it. It moves us beyond the “find the problem and fix it” thinking to a success-focused forward thinking mind-set by consistently repeating our successes.

3. What are we trying to accomplish? Here we seek to clarify and align our goals and objectives by re-framing, re-validating and re-stating what we want to achieve.

4. What would be the benefit of achieving that? Here we want to answer the question: why? Why bother doing this? Why is this important? What is the value to you personally? Provide a reason or a sense of meaning and you will get buy-in and commitment from your team, stakeholders, partners and your customers.

5. What can we do more or better? This question re-directs our thinking back to step 1 and re-engages the creativity pump to inspire and engage our thinking around the problem being solved. Creative thinkers get there more quickly because they continually seek solutions.

You are responsible for creating positive stress in your life by creating flow; energy and enthusiasm that will enable you to perform at high levels of productivity. Whether you are a single contributor or leader of a team, you are responsible for creating, building and maintaining the energy, enthusiasm of those you interact with in business.

based on ideas from the book Leadership Made Simple by Ed Oakley and Doug Krug, Enlightened Leadership Publications, 2006

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