While trying to address your team’s stress, you often forget to address your own. As a manager, you handle pressure from every direction: stakeholders’ expectations, fluctuating team performance, and responsibilities that keep growing every day. It’s easy to think that you always have to stay strong and calm for everyone around you.
But taking care of your well-being is not selfish. When you are stressed, it affects how you think, how patiently you respond, and the decisions you make. And stress is contagious. If you feel frustrated or overwhelmed, your team will sense it too, and their energy can drop.
On the other hand, when you protect your mental health, you become a more confident and supportive leader. You think more clearly, communicate better, and can guide your team through challenges without burning yourself out.
In this article, I will share seven practical ways to look after your own stress while leading others.
7 Strategies for managers to manage stress while leading others
Caring for yourself isn’t a luxury. It’s a leadership responsibility. When you stay relaxed, your team performs better, too. Below are seven practical strategies you can start using right away to reduce stress and continue leading your team with confidence.
1. Recognise the signs early
When you ignore the early warning signs of stress, minor issues escalate into larger problems. That ‘irritability’ you quietly bruised off might seep into how you communicate with your team. The ‘sleep problems’ you accept as normal have hampered your decision-making ability. The tension ‘headaches’, they are your body’s last attempt to get your attention before burnout forces you to stop completely.
Managers who often fail to recognize stress early often find themselves:
- Making reactive decisions, they later regret
- Snapping at team members who don’t deserve it
- Losing the strategic perspective their role requires
- Modeling unhealthy work habits, their team will copy
- Facing serious health consequences that force time away from work
Remember, the cost isn’t just personal; it’s organizational. Your stress becomes your team’s stress. Your burnout creates a vacuum in leadership precisely when your team needs you most.
2. Set clear boundaries
The “always available” mindset leads straight to stress and burnout. And before they do, they create a team culture where no one feels safe disconnecting either. Setting boundaries isn’t about being less committed, it’s about being sustainable. Responding to emails at 11 pm, you’re not demonstrating dedication; you are teaching your team that they should too.
When you skip lunch to be available for ‘quick questions,’ you are signaling that rest is optional.
Here’s what effective boundaries look like in practice:
- Define your core working hours and communicate them clearly to your team
- Turn off notifications outside those hours (yes, actually off)
- Block time in your calendar for focused work – and protect it as fiercely
- Establish response time expectations: not everything needs an immediate answer
- Take your full lunch break away from your desk
- Use your vacation days without constantly checking in
Your boundaries give your team permission to set their own. That’s not selfish leadership – that’s sustainable leadership.
3. Practice mindfulness habits
Mindfulness isn’t about achieving mental clarity; it’s about creating mental space when your calendar has none. Mindful recovery habits help reduce stress by calming your nervous system and improving focus. They give your mind a chance to reset and release tension so that you can handle challenges with more patience and clarity.
Some of the best mindfulness activities managers can try include:
- Two-minute desk reset: Close your eyes, take five deep breaths (in for four counts, out for six), and consciously release tension from your shoulders. Do this before high-stakes meetings or when you notice frustration building.
- Walking meetings: Take one-on-ones outside when possible. The movement clears your head and often leads to better conversations than sitting across a desk.
- Transition rituals: Create a consistent five-minute buffer between work and home. Sit in your car, take a short walk, or simply pause at your door. This signals your nervous system that you’re shifting modes.
- Mindful mornings: Start your day with ten minutes that belong only to you – stretching, breathing exercises, or simply sitting with coffee before opening your inbox. Protect this time as non-negotiable.
4. Delegate & distribute responsibility
When you hold onto tasks your team could handle, you’re not protecting standards – you’re limiting your team’s growth and guaranteeing your own burnout. Delegating tasks strategically helps reduce workload, ultimately leading to lower stress levels. Shift from “doing it all” to delegating to your team, so you reduce overload and focus on strategic leadership.
How to delegate effectively:
- Match tasks to strengths. Pay attention to who excels at what, then assign accordingly.
- Distinguish between urgent and important- If a task doesn’t require your specific expertise or authority, it shouldn’t be on your plate.
- Let go of perfection. Work done 80% your way by someone else is better than work done 100% your way that keeps you working until 9 PM.
5. Ask for help when needed
Leadership can be isolating. You’re expected to have answers, stay composed, and handle pressure – which makes admitting you’re struggling feel like a professional risk. The most effective leaders don’t go it alone. They build deliberate support systems that help them process challenges, gain perspective, and stay grounded when the pressure mounts.
Create multiple layers of support:
- Build a circle of trusted coworkers with whom you can share your challenges and wins
- Find a coach or mentor who can guide you and help you grow as a leader
- If you’re feeling mentally or emotionally exhausted, talking to a therapist can help you feel better and stay healthy
Remember, creating a safe space at work—where people can speak honestly without fear of judgment—starts with you. When you normalize openness, your team learns that seeking help is a strength, not a weakness.
6. Separate urgent from important
Every ping, every request, every ‘quick question’ feels urgent in the moment. But urgency and importance aren’t the same thing—and confusing them is a fast track to burnout. When you treat everything as critical, you train your team to escalate unnecessarily and train yourself to operate in perpetual crisis mode. Your nervous system can’t distinguish between a genuine emergency and someone’s poor planning. The result? You’re constantly in fight-or-flight, reacting instead of leading.
Break the urgency:
- Use the Eisenhower matrix. Sort tasks into four categories — urgent, not urgent, important, and not important, so you know what to do now and what to delay
- Set clear priorities. Each day, choose your top 3 important tasks and handle them before anything else
- Pause before reacting. When something feels urgent, take a moment and ask, “Does this really need my attention right now?”
7. Reflect, reframe & reset regularly
Stress management isn’t a one-time fix – it’s an ongoing practice that requires regular recalibration. What worked last quarter might not work now. The boundaries that protected you during a stable period might need reinforcing during organizational change.
Effective leaders build reflection into their routine, not as navel-gazing, but as strategic maintenance.
Create a reflection practice:
- Weekly check-ins. Set aside 15 minutes every Friday to ask yourself: What drained me this week? What energized me? What warning signs am I noticing? Where do I need to adjust?
- Monthly stress audits. Review which strategies you’re actually using versus which you’ve abandoned. Are you still taking lunch breaks? Still protecting boundaries? Awareness of slippage helps you course-correct before small compromises become big problems.
- After major stressors- Following a difficult project, conflict, or high-pressure period, debrief with yourself: What did I handle well? What cost me more energy than it should have? What would I do differently next time?
Conclusion
Managing stress isn’t about eliminating pressure from your role – that’s neither possible nor the goal. It’s about building the capacity to handle what leadership demands without depleting yourself in the process.
The strategies discussed in this article are the foundation that determines whether you lead effectively for years or burn out spectacularly in months. Your team doesn’t need a martyr who works through exhaustion to prove dedication. They need a leader who models sustainability, makes clear-headed decisions, and shows up consistently with energy and focus.
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