Shhhh…if you listen closely, you’ll hear the cries of some leaders who are extremely exhausted. In the face of keen competition, leaders are stretched to their limits. They are expected to imagine new strategies, overhaul business models and maximize operational rigour. Workplaces have become battlefields. There’s a spiralling tug-of-war between the drive for profits, the demand for more productivity and the need to protect employee wellbeing.
Leaders are being tasked to convert businesses from fragile to formidable, to cope with the winds of rapid change. The clarion call has become, “Find a way and lead the way.” They are expected to possess the capacity to grow more leaders and to produce teams that function beyond maximum capacity. This means finding leaders who are charismatic, influential and capable of heroic sprints. This task is never accomplished overnight, because these are rare individuals, who bring competence, tempered by wisdom, to the job.
Burnout is guaranteed, when the prescriptive action is aimed at symptomatic relief, instead of correcting the cause of excessive hours.
While we admire these leaders for their ability to accomplish greatness, their early stories place them far from the realm of leadership glitterati. More often than not, their journey to leadership elitism, has been chequered with fails, misses, near misses, and successes. So, they are intimately familiar with the rugged terrain that is known as culture, change management, teamworking and operational rigour. They would have lived through their own leadership failures, plugged their blind spots, and emerged weather-worn but victorious, in the people development business.
Getting leaders to the finish line of greatness does not have to be at the price of exhaustion. Yet, burnout has been normalized as the yardstick for assessing leadership success. We see leaders slugging it out at work and pausing for air, only when their bodies signal that a collapse is impending.
It’s time for businesses to ensure that exhaustion is not the price being paid for leadership excellence.
One telltale sign shows up when the majority of the leadership team members stay late every day and go into their offices on weekends as well, just to get on top of their workloads. Practices like these, point to either a lack of control over workloads, an unreasonable volume of work, or to leaders who firefight their way through their workdays. Burnout is guaranteed, when the prescriptive action is aimed at symptomatic relief, instead of correcting the cause of excessive hours.
The question to the business is simple. Why is there the need for so many members of the leadership team to clock in such excessive hours? Is the reason systemic, or purely the result of poor hiring and executive development practices?
I believe a reset is overdue. It’s time for businesses to ensure that exhaustion is not the price being paid for leadership excellence.
When a business stops reinforcing, recognizing and rewarding exhaustion as a leadership badge of honour, the entire ecosystem and culture will reset for the better.
When a business stops reinforcing, recognizing and rewarding exhaustion as a leadership badge of honour, the entire ecosystem and culture will reset for the better. Allowing the unwritten expectation of excessive hours to evaporate, will permit leaders to exhale and reclaim balance. Newly promoted leaders will have a fighting chance, at the start of their journey, to avoid making firefighting a way of life. Pushing to the brink of collapse is not a healthy experiment for either the leader, or the business.
Leadership teams have begun to step away from authority-heavy practices and to co-create workplaces with employees. Shifting generational mindsets have created environments where employees want an experience that goes beyond grinding jobs. They want to be associated with a business that is a brand with a purpose beyond profits. Leadership success therefore, becomes measurable on the basis of impact, instead of hours worked.
It’s time to retire the notion that exhaustion is proof of leadership commitment.
It’s time to retire the notion that exhaustion is proof of leadership commitment. It’s equally important to send a signal to leaders-in-waiting, that impact and busyness, are not equal partners in measuring leadership success.
These small acts demonstrate that rest is a desirable leadership discipline and overwork is no longer a pipeline to promotion.