It's not just you. No one can focus on work at the moment.
AFP
- Financial market volatility is ratcheting up some workers' stress and making it hard to focus.
- One CEO uses humor to manage tension amid trade war and recession fears.
- Bosses can help by modeling calm behavior and checking up on workers, a leadership coach told BI.
As a CEO, Terry MacCauley often reaches for a joke when things get stressful in the office.
He's been doing that more lately, as fears of a trade war and possible recession have clients calling the marketing and advertising firm he started more than a decade ago near St. Louis.
"Just having a wonderful day at work, with the stock market tickers on in the background. No big deal," MacCauley wrote on April 4th on X as the Dow Jones Industrial Average skidded toward a loss of more than 2,200 points on the day.
The gallows humor was a tacit acknowledgment that keeping calm and carrying on is often hard, especially for those whose work involves a lot of screentime. Our computers — to say nothing of our phones — can pile up with news updates that tweak our fight-or-flight responses.
Weeks of whipsaws in financial markets and uncertainty about the economy is making it hard for some bosses and workers to keep both eyes on their work and not, say, on their 401(k). Yet finding a way to push ahead is key, even though it's often difficult.
"I am a new mom who is also working, so it has been very stressful and difficult to focus!" a woman who said she lives in Buffalo, New York, and gave her name as Erika, told Business Insider in a message. She declined to give her full name because she wanted to maintain privacy.
Erika is worried about tariffs hurting her employer's supply chain, though her primary concern, she said, is the big swings on Wall Street. Beyond that, Erika is fretful that the public libraries, like the one where she likes to take her daughter, will face funding cuts.
Taking a breath
MacCauley manages to forge ahead in a topsy-turvy news environment partly because the developments on tariffs have made his Chesterfield, Missouri, company, Big Time Advertising & Marketing, busier, he told BI.
MacCauley set up the firm, which caters to automotive dealerships, after years of selling cars himself.
He said clients had been calling to ask whether they should pause their marketing spending to help preserve cash because of tariff costs. The inquiries have given his 10-person team plenty to do.
MacCauley said he's tried to remind his team that it was too early to tell what the tariff impacts might be. He compared it to receiving a tornado warning and taking shelter — a not-uncommon occurrence in the Midwest.
"You go to your basement, and you don't know if you're going to come up and the house is going to be gone or it's all good," he said.
MacCauley's counsel to his team came before President Donald Trump said Wednesday he would institute a partial 90-day pause and leave tariffs, other than for China, at 10%.
In any case, finding peace — at work and beyond — isn't always easy when the news flow balloons from gardenhose to firehose.
Every 30 minutes
Matthew Hassett, founder and CEO of Loftie, which makes a lamp and digital clock designed to promote sound sleep, said frequent shifts in government policy have him sometimes checking news feeds every 30 minutes or so.
"I never consumed this much news content, and I'm an avid news reader," he told BI.
Loftie is based in New York City but manufactures its products in China because, Hassett said, the capacity to do so in the US doesn't exist.
He said he's in a Slack group for founders where participants share information, ask questions, and simply try to stay abreast of the day's developments.
"We're all just sharing information and asking questions and trying to keep up, but it also just is a huge waste of our time," Hassett said.
He tries to keep up with what's going on in part to shield his staff from having to worry about how the company will survive a tariff that, in the case of the lamp, he said amounts to 175%.
"I'm grateful to my team, who are actually managing to stay somewhat heads-down and work on the course that I've charted out," Hassett said.
Leaders can be a model
Finding a way to carve out peace in uncertain times is essential, Julie Donley, a leadership coach, told BI.
She said that when you're feeling anything at a high level, including stress, it's hard to think clearly. Lately, Donley has been hearing from some of the execs she coaches.
"They think out loud, and they get that off their chest," she said, adding that their shared goal is to have less "emotional reactivity" and calm down so they can make better decisions.
Donley, who is the author of the book "Leading at the Speed of People," said bosses need to model good behaviors and check on their teams when unsettling headlines could cause anxiety to spike.
"They may need to keep a pulse on whether someone really is freaking out," she said of leaders.
MacCauley, the ad exec, said he tries to create a culture at his company of not dwelling on what they can't control.
"We're just going to work hard and do what we do," he said.
Calming distractions can also help block the more worrisome ones. On a recent weekday, as markets tumbled, MacCauley had the TV in his office tuned to his beloved New York Yankees.
"That makes me happy, even though they're losing," he said.