What advice would you give a stressed colleague?

"If I had a colleague who was stressed out, I would recommend that they look at the factors that regularly stress them out and create some boundaries surrounding those stressors. Perhaps a colleague keeps interrupting them, resulting in missed deadlines. These distractions need boundaries, so I would start there. If the workload was overwhelming them, I wouldn't hesitate to lend a helping hand if I had the capacity."

Discuss what you would say or do to help a coworker cope with the stress they were feeling on the job. If you have an example of a time you helped a colleague in this situation, now is a great time to walk through your communications and actions to ensure that your help was well received and productive.

"First and foremost, I would take an approach where I listened to them and was empathetic to their thoughts and needs. Kindness can set a tone moving forward. Knowing that stress tends to snowball, having them discuss their issues to get to the root cause of the issue would be vital. From there, it's a combined effort to come up with a solution, and I'd never hesitate to do that here at Northrop Grumman."