It’s 11:30pm, and you’ve been fretting all evening about a knotty business issue. A potential solution suddenly pops into your mind, and you knock off an email to one of your reports asking them to get onto it. She replies to you 90 seconds later.
What do you do?
1. Nothing. This is exactly what you expect from your leadership team. You believe that truly committed executives make themselves available 24/7.
2. Email her back expressing surprise that she’s checking her work email so late, while secretly being pleased that she’s still working.
3. Email her back chiding her for looking at her emails during her ‘down’ time and apologising for not having waited until the morning. You realise that this is the third time in the last week you’ve done this, and inwardly resolve that you must stop pestering your people out of hours.
Some organisations encourage their high-potential people to devote their entire lives to the business, seven days (and nights) a week. As I wrote in my previous blog, this ends up creating ‘lost leaders’, successful people who have over-invested in their work lives and end up neglecting their lives outside work.
Some organisations do this deliberately, usually by fostering or tolerating a culture of over-achievement or excessive commitment. Executives who go home at the appointed time, or in some cultures even those who take their full holiday allowance, may face hidden penalties, such as being passed over for promotion. Systematic under-resourcing, which inevitably creates excessive workloads that push conscientious people into working well beyond their hours, can be dressed up as ‘commitment’. In fact, it’s a strategy that can easily slide from misuse to become abuse.
Other organisations may suffer from over-commitment accidentally through factors such as the need to be in contact with overseas teams in different time zones; and, in any organisation, the omni-present smartphone and access to email makes it easy to slip into an ‘always on duty’ mindset without meaning to.
And some organisations may mouth politically correct clichés about work-life balance, while sneakily squeezing the lemon as hard as possible. I often wonder whether the ‘campus’ nature of today’s tech companies, where employees can eat all their meals, exercise, socialise, do their laundry and even sleep, is in reality the employer trying to make work so agreeable that their employees rarely feel the need to go home. An all-night hackathon is presented as a massively fun event, with beer, pizzas and high-fives creating a huge buzz… or did you just get your coding staff to program for 20 hours straight without paying them extra?
At this point, and especially if you considered that options 1 or 2 above were appropriate, you might be wondering why your organisation should give a damn about any of this. A cynic would say it’s in the organisation’s interests to work its top people as hard as it can, and then cut them loose as soon as it detects signs of burnout.
If that’s your mindset, try this; what do you think would happen if you were able to bribe your people to work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, non-stop? Of course, the answer is that their output would soar for about two weeks, and then everything would go to pieces, because an exhausted workforce means collapsing productivity, increasing numbers of mistakes, and a rapid decline in quality.
It’s my firm view that the over-commitment made by lost leaders makes a business weaker. How can your organisation keep in touch with your thoroughly diverse clients and consumers if all your top people live their entire lives in the company’s echo-chamber? If their best mates are work colleagues, if they don’t have time to meet people outside work, and if they spend no quality time with their kids and partners, then how on earth can they understand what’s happening in the real world?
Having an active and good life beyond work allows your leaders to come to work with their minds refreshed, and helps them make better decisions. And if you try to prevent this from happening, you will lose the best people you have, and will fail to attract the bright young high-potentials who should be your future leaders.
The market is already moving. A new report from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills finds that the number of men working part-time in management or professional roles will increase 25% by 2024, as they seek a better balance between their private and personal lives, and their public life in the workplace. One word of warning – the organisation should never try to make these decisions for its employees. Doing so is at best paternalistic, and at worst looks sinister. When Apple and Facebook offered to freeze the eggs of female employees so that children wouldn’t interrupt their ‘peak’ career years, they rightly faced a storm of criticism.
Instead, the organisation should remove the factors that lead to over-commitment, and be open to reasonable requests for flexible working, so long as it doesn’t cause you commercial problems. So, don’t under-resource at 95%, accept that 110% resourcing will allow your people to do the job well, without damaging themselves or leading to excessive stress and even burnout. Don’t tolerate abusive cultures, and remove leaders who use ‘commitment’ as a cover for exploitation. And remember, you’re doing these things because they make your business stronger.