Stress Training

March 2023 Leadership Conference in Phoenix, AZ

Wigge: In my earlier adventure television career, I only thought about working in leadership a little. I was facing my travel challenges one after another, focusing on achieving those problematic goals, like traveling the entire world without any money (PBS, Tonight Show) and bartering an apple for bigger and better things (Honolulu Star-Advertiser) to get a house in Hawaii. But after I bartered an apple for bigger and better, a TV journalist asked me for the first time what I had learned about leadership. 

I started reflecting on the qualities I used to turn the bitten apple into a real house. Leadership and stress management were important aspects because I had managed to achieve a challenging goal. This goal required immense stress management due to the high pressure on me for over a year. I also led a team of ten people supporting me, including a camera crew, researchers, editors, a PR person, and more. 

Most of these people respected how I was doing my team building and team leading. Later on, I realized that I had also improved my communication, listening, assisting, and decisiveness skills. So leadership became a topic when I started as a success coach in 2013. I developed my stress training services for managers because, in my leadership role for the international media, I experienced incredible pressure and experienced stress burnout in 2013. I can understand all leaders who feel pressure.

Wigge: There are different reasons why leadership and stress management have gained importance in corporate America. One aspect of the corporate world is the rising pace due to constant change. Looking back 20 or even 200 years ago, we realize corporations, employees, and managers were under continuous pressure to embrace change. If we look at the industrial revolution, we see workers in the 19th century who constantly had to adopt massive changes; it’s the same during the 20th century. 

But the early 21st century is different. Change comes even faster. Corporations in a globalized world develop new and improved products in a far shorter timeframe than they used to. Digitization has sped up communication processes immensely, which results in higher demands for managers and employees. The workforce experiences higher stress levels due to the rapidly rising change processes companies are experiencing—these change processes used to happen within decades, which recently turned into years or shorter timeframes. I often hear clients telling me that leaders and managers are under heavy pressure to offer their workforce a secure feeling of being well-led. I advise most leaders to take ‘stress training for managers.’

I recently gave a keynote for an association with an angle on the self-leading workforce. One CEO told me their organization is BIG on agile leadership, and they’re proud to go down this route in the association industry. But their workforce started showing severe stress symptoms due to the missing hierarchies’ responsibilities. Here is the actual impact a success coach can have on the force, executives, firm owners, and leaders. How do we embrace specific and essential changes like agile leadership without leaving employees and managers with stress symptoms? There are great solutions to combine long-term change management with different leadership models and create a satisfied workforce simultaneously.

Wigge: From what I see, leadership will change due to the enormous digitized developments. How will our society and corporate life look in 2030? Future assumptions usually need to be corrected more quickly. But teams work more digitized than ever before. Managers will lead from abroad. Communication via video chat might be the norm in a decade. 

I have already worked as a success coach for many clients who told me their leadership might meet their workforce once a year in person. This reality should be on the rise and will require new leadership skills, empathy, and a new model of motivation to give employees the validation and team spirit they usually want. Stress training for managers will become a consistent entity to help leaders constantly embrace change.

I recently developed a stress management leadership course that contains these future aspects. Many managers do want a coach to support them in terms of manager stress training for a while. I’m happy to provide that and improve their resilience, change management, organization style, setting boundaries, belief systems, and more.