Turning Workplace Strain Into Stronger Team Dynamics and Collaboration
A 36-year-old mid-level manager from Delhi NCR sought workplace adjustment counseling after noticing that work had started feeling harder than it used to.
Rachmanas Counseling 
Presenting (Counseling) Problem
A 36-year-old mid-level manager from Delhi NCR sought workplace adjustment counseling after noticing that work had started feeling harder than it used to.
He had around 15 years of experience in the private sector and had built a reputation for being dependable.
Colleagues usually knew they could rely on him when a project was running late or something needed to be fixed. That reputation had once felt rewarding. Over time, however, it had also become a burden.
A recent restructuring brought him into a larger team. His new manager had a different way of working, and many tasks now depended on colleagues from other functions.
The client felt that people were not taking enough ownership. He also felt that his manager did not fully recognise how much he was carrying.
His communication changed. He became sharper in meetings, pointed out mistakes more openly and often took over tasks rather than waiting for others to complete them. Colleagues gradually stopped approaching him informally.
By the time he considered workplace adjustment counseling, he was spending evenings replaying office conversations in his head. His wife noticed that he talked about work more often and was less mentally present with their two young children.
The workload mattered. But it was not the whole story.
Assessment & Formulation
The counselor began with a Personal Information Questionnaire, followed by detailed conversations about the client’s work history, current team, relationships with colleagues and manager, and his experience outside work.
Specific workplace situations were mapped to understand what happened before and after moments of frustration.
A pattern appeared fairly quickly.
A colleague missed a deadline. The client thought, “If I don’t step in, this will come back to me.” He took over the task. He felt irritated, but also relieved that the work was now under control. Later, the same thing happened again.
The short-term solution was creating a longer-term problem.
His habit of taking responsibility reduced immediate risk, but it also reduced opportunities for colleagues to take ownership. His irritation then made him less approachable. Their distance reinforced his belief that he could not rely on them.
This was an important part of the formulation. He was dealing with real workplace difficulties, but his interpretation of those difficulties was adding another layer of strain.
The work drew mainly from CBT, person-centred counseling and solution-focused work. CBT provided a way to examine the link between situations, thoughts, emotions and actions.
Research supports CBT-based approaches for several forms of work-related stress and psychological difficulty. (PubMed)
The person-centred element was equally important. Rogers emphasised empathic understanding and acceptance as important conditions within the counseling relationship (Rogers, 1957). (PubMed)
The aim was not to convince the client that his colleagues were better than he thought. It was to help him look at the situation with fewer assumptions and more room for choice.
Intervention
1. Understanding the Stress Cycle
The first part of workplace adjustment counseling focused on identifying the moments when workplace frustration began to build.
Rather than discussing “stress” as one large problem, the counselor and client broke it into specific events.
A typical sequence looked like this:
Colleague misses deadline → client assumes he will have to fix it → irritation rises → client takes over → colleague becomes less involved → client feels even more responsible.
Seeing the cycle on paper changed something.
The client initially described his behaviour as simply being responsible. He began to see that responsibility and over-responsibility were not always the same thing.
Work-related stress can arise from both workplace conditions and the way work interacts with life outside the office.
Research has long recognised this interaction between work demands, individual responses and the home-work interface (Michie, 2002). (PubMed)
2. Cognitive Restructuring
The next stage involved examining the thoughts that appeared during difficult workplace situations.
Some were reasonable:
“This deadline matters.”
Others were assumptions:
“If I don’t handle this myself, the whole thing will fail.”
The counselor did not ask him to replace every negative thought with a positive one. Instead, they examined evidence.
What had actually happened when he allowed a colleague to handle a task?
Had every delay become his responsibility?
Was his manager really dismissing his contribution, or had some of that conclusion come from a few frustrating interactions?
This distinction helped reduce the tendency to treat assumptions as facts.
3. Person-Centred Counseling
The client had spent much of his professional life being the dependable one. He was comfortable discussing performance, deadlines and responsibilities. Talking about disappointment was harder.
The counselor gave him space to discuss the less comfortable part of the experience: he wanted recognition.
That did not make him needy or unreasonable. Recognition mattered to him because competence had become an important part of how he saw himself.
The counseling relationship provided a place where he did not have to prove that he was right.
He could examine both his own behaviour and the behaviour of others without turning the conversation into a defence of his professional identity.
Rogers’ work placed particular emphasis on empathic understanding and the client’s own experience rather than imposing an interpretation from outside (Rogers, 1957). (PubMed)
That principle shaped the pace of the work.
4. Solution-Focused Work
Once the immediate patterns were clearer, the counselor shifted some attention towards what the client wanted instead.
One question proved useful:
“Suppose work became easier to navigate without everything around you changing. What would you notice first?”
His answer was practical.
He wanted colleagues to approach him more easily. He wanted meetings to feel less tense. He wanted to leave work without mentally carrying three unfinished conversations home.
These became concrete goals.
Solution-focused work places attention on preferred outcomes, existing strengths and small changes rather than keeping the conversation fixed on the problem.
Research on SFBT has found support for its use across a range of psychosocial concerns, although the strength of evidence varies by setting and outcome (Gingerich & Eisengart, 2000; Vermeulen-Oskam et al., 2024). (PubMed)
5. Practising Different Communication
The client then began experimenting with how he raised concerns.
Instead of saying:
“This keeps happening because nobody takes ownership.”
he practised being more specific:
“We missed this deadline. Can we agree who owns the next step and when it will be completed?”
The difference was not about becoming softer.
It was about making the message harder to interpret as a personal criticism.
Role-play was used for situations involving missed deadlines, disagreement with his manager and conversations about workload.
The counselor also helped him practise asking for clarification before assuming that a colleague was being careless.
This was a small but important part of workplace adjustment counseling. Communication was treated as a behaviour that could be observed and practised, rather than as a fixed personality trait.
6. Boundaries and Delegation
The client also needed to learn to leave some work with other people.
This was uncomfortable at first.
He was asked to distinguish between:
“This needs my attention.”
and
“I am uncomfortable because this is not being done my way.”
That distinction helped him delegate more deliberately.
He began setting clearer expectations, agreeing on deadlines and allowing colleagues to complete their part without repeatedly checking.
The purpose was not to become indifferent to quality. It was to stop using personal effort as the default solution to every team problem.
7. Creating Distance Between Work and Home
The final part of the work addressed rumination.
The client began using a simple end-of-work routine. Before closing his laptop, he noted unfinished matters that genuinely needed attention the next day. This gave his mind a place to put them.
He also became more aware of conversations at home that were really extensions of office frustration.
The aim was not to create a perfect wall between work and family. That is rarely realistic. It was to notice when the office had followed him home.
Progress & Outcome
Over ten sessions across three months, the changes were gradual.
The client became less likely to assume that a colleague’s mistake meant he would eventually have to rescue the situation.
He delegated more often and became more comfortable allowing others to own their responsibilities.
His communication also changed. He still raised concerns when work was not being handled well, but he was less likely to express those concerns through irritation or sarcasm.
Colleagues began approaching him more readily. Meetings became less tense. His manager noticed that he was more willing to discuss problems without immediately framing them as failures of the team.
There was also a change outside the office.
His wife reported that he talked less about workplace conflicts after returning home. He was more available during dinner and family time.
He still had difficult days, but the difficult day was less likely to occupy the entire evening.
The client described one change particularly well: “I still notice the things that annoy me. I just don’t feel that I have to fix all of them.”
That was a useful measure of progress.
Workplace adjustment counseling had not changed his organisation, his manager or every colleague. It had changed the range of responses available to him.
Ethical & Professional Considerations
The case has been anonymised, and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy. Counseling remained focused on the client’s experiences and choices rather than taking sides in workplace disputes.
No communication with the employer or colleagues was undertaken as part of the counseling. Confidentiality and respect for the client’s autonomy remained central throughout the process, consistent with the APA’s ethical principles (American Psychological Association, 2017).
Closing Reflection
Workplace strain is not always caused by having too much work.
Sometimes it grows from the space between what we expect from work and what work actually gives us.
A capable employee may begin carrying more because he cares about quality. A manager may begin seeing that behaviour as useful.
Colleagues may slowly step back because they feel criticised or unnecessary. Before anyone notices, the person who wanted the team to function better has become isolated from the team.
That was the deeper lesson in this case.
Workplace adjustment counseling was not about teaching the client to tolerate poor work or accept every organisational decision.
It helped him decide where to push, where to speak, where to delegate and where to let something remain imperfect.
Professional competence is useful. But when being dependable turns into believing that everything depends on us, work becomes unnecessarily heavy.
Sometimes working better with people begins with allowing them to carry their share.
References
- American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct. American Psychological Association.
- Gingerich, W. J., & Eisengart, S. (2000). Solution-focused brief therapy: A review of the outcome research. Family Process, 39(4), 477–498. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.2000.39408.x (PubMed)
- Michie, S. (2002). Causes and management of stress at work. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 59(1), 67–72. https://doi.org/10.1136/oem.59.1.67 (PubMed)
- Naidu, V. V., Giblin, E., Burke, K. M., & Madan, I. (2016). Delivery of cognitive behavioural therapy to workers: A systematic review. Occupational Medicine, 66(2), 112–117. https://doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqv141 (PubMed)
- Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95–103. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045357 (PubMed)
- Vermeulen-Oskam, E., Franklin, C., Van ‘t Hof, L. P. M., Stams, G. J. J. M., Van Vugt, E. S., Assink, M., Veltman, E. J., Froerer, A. S., Staaks, J. P. C., & Zhang, A. (2024). The current evidence of solution-focused brief therapy: A meta-analysis of psychosocial outcomes and moderating factors. Clinical Psychology Review, 114, 102512. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2024.102512 (PubMed)
