Signs of Anxiety in the Workplace - or How a Product Manager’s Job Is About Coping with Your Own and Your Colleagues’ Stress
I recently read Kathleen Smith’s book Everything Isn’t Terrible and found myself thinking that by her definition there truly is a lot of anxiety in working life. Perhaps even more than I previously realized. The workplace is complicated, an emotional system made up of colleagues. People act and react in certain patterns, trying to cope with stress. Some of those amplify their own and others’ stress through their behavior; others know how to mitigate it.
Smith describes four patterns of how anxiety shows up in our everyday work, including in work environments. Surprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly), overwork is one of the anxiety symptoms—especially considering how often it's glorified in work culture. To be honest, I used to glorify it myself—until I burned out.
1. Anxiety as Procrastination or Distancing
One sign of anxiety at work can be distancing—physically or emotionally. For example, when a difficult technical problem needs solving, a scenario may arise where people pass responsibility around like a hot potato and nobody wants to take accountability. Instead of solving it immediately, the problem is avoided or someone takes on a helper role rather than a responsible one. Meanwhile the development team is confused, not knowing which way to move forward.
Another sign of distancing is when a colleague no longer wants to come into the office at all.
2. Anxiety as Conflictual Behavior
This one is pretty logical. We’ve probably all experienced that the more intense the situation and the longer it lasts, the shorter one’s fuse becomes. Anxiety may show up in the form of constant arguing or dissatisfaction toward colleagues. Under work pressure it’s easy to spot others’ mistakes and start looking for someone to blame—especially if a project is late or the quality doesn’t meet expectations. It’s particularly slippery in software development, where iterativeness means deadlines sometimes slip.
For people outside the product or tech teams in a company, this is hard to understand—especially if there are other pressures elsewhere in the company. Instead of focusing on finding a solution, a lot of time is spent figuring out who made the wrong decision or whose work was weaker than expected. That only deepens anxiety.
3. Anxiety as Overworking or Underworking
And now my favorite — overworking. This is kind of the sport of product managers. As anxiety grows, there’s the feeling you need to control everything to ensure things go right. This can lead some team members to take on too much (overworking), while others give up their tasks or withdraw (underworking).
For example, a product manager might feel the need to review code, interfere in marketing plans, or even handle customer communication, because there’s the sense that otherwise things would simply not work. As a result, key individuals are overloaded and the overall team efficiency decreases.
Overworking is especially common among product managers who feel that all the responsibility sits on their shoulders and that they need to monitor every little detail themselves. This can lead to burnout—and at the same time encourages other team members to take less responsibility, expecting the product manager to fix every problem.
4. Anxiety as Triangulation
Triangulation forms when two people are in conflict, and they involve a third party in order to relieve anxiety. In product management, this could mean that a team member doesn’t talk directly to the product manager about their concern, but instead brings in someone outside the team. For example, a developer might go to another manager or colleague to criticize a decision made by the product manager, excluding them from the conversation. Worse if that colleague or manager picks a side.
Although talking to someone else about the problem might initially seem like a solution, it usually creates even more confusion and growing anxiety within the team.
Forming triangles diffuses responsibility for resolving the issue and can lead to communication problems, where different parties have different versions of what’s going on.
Solution — Take Time to Adopt a “Cosmonaut View”
In addition to usual recommendations—such as creating an environment where team members can discuss worries directly, keeping communication open, dealing with problems as they arise, and defining clear roles to help the team find balance—Smith offers one simple technique: take a cosmonaut view, i.e. step back and look at the situation from a wider perspective.
For instance, as a product manager you are constantly surrounded by problems — some feature isn’t working as it should, the design needs revisions, the marketing team expects faster responses. All these seem critical and require rapid intervention. In the middle of all this, it’s easy to fall into a situation where you’re desperately trying to control everything at once. Eventually you become overloaded and notice the project is dragging because small tasks and helping others have taken up all your time.
In such a situation Smith recommends using the cosmonaut view. Instead of reacting immediately to every little issue, consciously step back and look at the bigger picture. Think about what the ultimate goal of the project is, and whether you are truly the most appropriate person to handle each task. It can happen that many things don’t require your direct involvement and the team is capable of handling them independently.
Regularly evaluating the bigger picture and maintaining the cosmonaut view helps keep anxiety under control and ensures that the focus stays on the right course—on the long-term success and direction of the product.