Leaders Underestimate the Real Danger of Work Overload
Stress
I commute back to Italy, from Germany (where I work), once per week. I stay in an apartment during the week and fly home to see my daughter and my wife on Friday nights. I then leave for the airport to return back to work, on Sunday afternoon. My daughter is fine with it. When she was small, I used to commute to Paris. She’s never known any other way of life, so that’s fine.
—Paolo, Italy
I haven’t seen my children except for weekends, for months. When I leave for work, they are asleep and when I return home it is too late to wake them. Even worse, I haven’t talked to them about why Daddy is never there. I want to do that but I haven’t got the time at the moment.
—Vasily, Russia
I mainly only see my husband, these days, over [video call].
—Stefanie, Germany
It wasn’t until I suffered my heart attack and then, shortly afterwards, my wife was diagnosed with cancer, that I realized that I had got this work-life-balance thing all wrong. I would strongly advise younger managers to delegate more, in order to free up more time and space.
—Craig, United Kingdom
In Japan, it was common for us to stay late. It was rare for me to leave the office before 10pm or 11pm, sometimes midnight. Then the company insisted we go home at 9pm. Nothing changed so now they turn off the air conditioning at 9pm. It’s still as it was, though. People now just work in the heat and humidity for a couple of hours.
—Takeshi,Japan
I’m 35. I work very, very hard but that’s ok because I’m in the ‘rush-hour’ of my life. From 30 to 50 it’s fine to work really hard. I’ll slow down a bit, when I’m in my 50s.
—Tomas, Sweden
These are some quotes from coachees of mine on the subject of time management. All the speakers are aged between 26 and 50 years, and all are leaders. Some, like Takeshi who has 45 direct reports, have large numbers of staff to manage, and some, like Stefanie who heads up a three-person team, have responsibility for fewer, but they (and many, many, many more leader-executives like them, whom I train and coach) all have one thing in common: They have enormous workloads with constituent strains on their schedules and work-life balance.
Driving the leadership bus does not only entail the day-to-day steering of the vehicle. Imagine, as a bus driver that you would be required to consider the personal development, strengths and weaknesses, communication and organizational skills, personal problems, promotion opportunities, and conflicts of all the passengers on your bus—even after you and they had alighted and gone to your respective homes. As we have discussed in previous chapters, leadership carries with it great responsibilities, most significantly, responsibility for humans, and often, their dependents. This extra burden—the paradigm shift from leading myself to leading others—can take its toll and be very demanding both emotionally and chronologically. The leader does not just park the bus at the end of the day, leave her seat, and toddle off home to her hobbies and pastimes. Leaders do not have the luxury of leaving their work on their desk, when they leave for home. Leadership can be a way of life; not just a job.
Most leaders report both an increased operative workload (due to greater amounts of meeting invites, human resources issues, workers council matters, report reads, presentation briefs, and so on) combined with additional cognitive and emotional pressure stemming from strategic responsibilities, reflection on team dynamic, staff strengths and weaknesses, conflicts, communication breakdowns, personnel challenges, and the like. If it were only the former (increased operative tasks), many would, no doubt, be able to assimilate better, but it is the latter (the stress of and reflection on managing teams and their idiosyncrasies) that encumbers young leaders most. Balancing work and private life commitments and being aware of and nurturing energy levels are two prevailing stress tests of the young leader.
I know what some of you might be saying (and I also very often hear such pretension from my participants): “I’ll be ok… I’m stressed now, yeah, but I’ll get through it… I’m young and healthy, I can cope with it…. I’ll slow down later…. I am under pressure but I have no option the bills need to be paid… Heart attacks are for old people… I’ll be ok.”
You may be okay. I sincerely hope that you are okay, but it is a truism that work-related stress is a very real, present, and worsening issue. A recent study found that 73 percent of the respondent working adults aged between 20 and 64 years reported suffering from stress, and that work is the most common cause of that stress (Statcan). What is more, our stress levels are rubbing off onto others, as noted by the American Psychological Association. “While 69 percent of parents say their stress has only a slight or no impact on their children, just 14 percent of youth say their parents’ stress doesn’t bother them (APA.org).”
Furthermore, the headache (pun intended) with all of this is that stress has a very real and physiological reaction on our minds and bodies. Chronic stress can lead to sleep disorders, back pain, headaches, panic attacks, burnout, tinnitus, and other afflictions (Techniker Krankenkasse 2012). An employee at a global player recently told me that the average age of death of their senior managers (64–67 years) is nearly two decades under the western world average. In fact, the Japanese have developed such a culture of overwork in recent generations that they have had to coin a term to describe what can only be translated as death by overwork. They call is Karoshi (過労死) (Nishiyama and Johnson 1997). South Korea and China evidently have a similar need for the term calling the gruesome phenomenon gwarosa (과로사/過勞死) (FT.com, Park 2016) and guolaosi (过劳死) (Oster, Bloomberg 2014), respectively, in their languages. I urge you not to make the mistake of thinking that such a dark wave will never affect western workers’ as much as it does in Asia. Prevalence of work-induced stress is on the up—44 percent of the people claim that their stress levels have risen in the last five years (APA.org)—and left unchecked, stress can develop into a very real and serious problem (Aldwin et al. 2017).
The classic metaphor for this is the frog in hot water. If you drop a poor frog into a pot and then slowly up the water temperature, the animal will continually adjust itself to the increasing heat; its stress receptors not correctly recognizing and identifying the calefaction. It will struggle through the last phase as things get unbearable, but it will sadly die when the water gets too hot. If, however, you were to drop a frog into an already boiling pot of water, it would immediately sense the extreme nature of the situation and jump from the pot to safety. Stress can creep up on us. We adjust well to increased stress and our brains develop coping mechanisms, which allow us to soldier on and borrow energy stores from other bodily systems (Fabritius and Hagemann 2017); yet, they can, in fact, hinder us in the long term. When we cope with stress, we do nothing more than hide it away. We do not solve the problem. The water gets hotter, but we stressed frogs do not leave the pot.
Such chronic, slow-burn stress can be easily understood as a chain (adapted from Kaluza 2018).
Stressor–attitude–reaction (adapted from Kaluza 2018).
In the stress chain, something or someone stresses us. This is a stressor. The impact is from the outside: external. Workload, time pressure, disturbances, conflicts, demands from others (and more) are commonplace stressors. The stressor seems unavoidable and causes us to work, think, or act differently, and this fuels the next link in the chain: attitude. How we emotionally and cognitively deal with stress, combined with how we put ourselves under pressure, can strikingly affect our stress levels.
Be perfect: a striving for perfectionism, often expressed as impatience.
Be strong: the lone warrior syndrome (wanting to solve everything on your own).
Be loved: a desire to be recognized or admired.
Be careful: a desire to be careful.
I cannot cope: fear of failure and deficient self-belief (Kaluza 2018).
These are the five prototypical attitudes found in overworked professionals, and all stoke our stress fires. The final, potentially destructive, link in the stress chain is our physiological, emotional, cognitive and behavioral kickback to the damage inflicted by the stressor(s) and our attitude(s). This is known as reaction.
Reactions to stress differ greatly from sufferer to sufferer, but they can include, but are not limited to:
- Warning signs of physical reactions: heart palpitations or abnormalities, breathing problems, sleep disorder,1 chronic tiredness, muscular tension, digestive problems, headaches, back pain, loss of appetite, sexual dysfunction (Kaluza 2018).
- Warning signs of cognitive reactions: constant cyclical thought, concentration disturbance, nightmares, day mares (picturing negative scenarios), drawing a blank. Warning signs of emotional reactions: nervousness, inner restlessness, feelings of fear, dissatisfaction, apathy, sexual listlessness.
- Warning signs for cognitive reactions: aggression, impatient fidgeting, irregular alcohol or caffeine or tobacco or food consumption, interrupting people, ignoring others, stuttering or garbling words.
When we notice the warning signs, if we act quickly, we can control our stress levels and so dampen the effect they have on body and soul.
Dealing with Stress
Kaluza (2018) suggests three approaches for managing the three links in the stress chain, one for each.
Instrumental Stress Competence
To endeavor to reduce the magnitude of external stressors, and in doing so, reduce the adverse effect the stressors exert on you, explore methods to improve your self-organization. Sadly, many external stressors cannot be avoided completely but many can be tapered with instrumental stress management. The classic instrumental stress management tool is the simple to-do list. However, one suggestion to implement before the to-do list, to aid time management and reduce stress, is the task-relevance portfolio.
Take a pen and a piece of paper.2 We are going to work analog for a few minutes. Draw a table (Figure 6.1) and label the four columns as per the picture:
Figure 6.1 The task-relevance portfolio: reflection
In column 2, list 10 to 15 typical tasks that you regularly (have to) take on in your daily work routine. Number them 1 through n in the first column. In the third and fourth columns, subjectively score from 1 to 10 (1 is not at all, 10 is very much) each task for its relevance (column 3) and as to how effectively you implement it (column 4). For example, in the following table, the manager deems spending time to organize e-mails as not very relevant (4), but feels that he or she is quite efficient at it (8).
Now, plot your results using the numbers from column 1 as labels onto a four-quadrant matrix, as shown in Figure 6.2. The tasks that fall in the four quadrants can now be identified as:
Figure 6.2 The task-relevance portfolio: matrix
Time wasters;
Time thieves;
Leaving the comfort zone; or
Match winners.
This is a simple, yet surprisingly effectual mechanism that can be carried out with just a pen and pencil (once you get good at it, you will even be able to sketch the matrix in your mind, without a pen), just about where ever you like (waiting for public transport, at your desk, in a lift, and so on). It takes just a matter of seconds, but its efficacy can be powerful. The task-relevance portfolio highlights which tasks you could think about dropping, reducing, or delegating away (time thieves), which you enjoy, but could do without (time wasters), and which you should try to spend as much of your time as possible engaging in (match winners).
A Canadian participant of mine, Chuck, who works for a global player automotive supplier, told me about one of the tasks he has to perform. On the last day of every month, he is required by his employer to go through his itemized telephone bill to mark which of the calls he made on his company cell phone were of a private nature and which were strictly business. The cost of the private calls is then deducted from his monthly salary. The process normally takes him around 20 to 30 minutes. Chuck is a well-paid executive earning over 100,000 U.S. dollars per year. The time he invests in checking his cell bill normally saves his corporation around five U.S. dollars per month. Chuck went back through all of his bills from the last year and calculated that he had saved his corporation, in total, 54 U.S. dollars.
This is an example of gross, bottom-left quadrant, time thievery. Having the expensive staffer spending precious time and money fulfilling a task that he is neither talented at nor is it hugely relevant to achieving his team’s goals is irresponsible and frivolous.
Mental Stress Competence
In addition to dealing with stress in an instrumental or pragmatic way, we can also take control of our pressure levels with conscious, mental control techniques. Often referred to as reframing (Browson 2010), appreciating your stressors and developing cognitive strategies to cope with them can be a powerful method for stress control, when developed carefully. Imagine you had a picture hanging in your apartment or house, which you had come to hate. The colors, images, and artist’s techniques were not to your liking. If you were to take the picture down and have it put into a new, snazzy, attractive frame is it possible that you would look at the picture differently? The picture itself has not changed, but how you regard it has changed. In reframing, we do not change the event that is stressing us, we change how we feel about it.
Browson (2010) describes reframing as “the act of taking a situation, event, interaction et cetera. you feel negatively about and changing how you view, and thus, feel about it.”
Four easy to remember reframing methods are:
Avoid, alter, adapt, accept. Adapted from Bassett (2014).
Avoid Needless Stress
You will not be able to sidestep all your stressors, but learning to say no to some external requests, averting distracting people or circumstances, and assessing the difference between must haves and could haves can help to reduce stress.
Alter Your Environment
Be strong in dealing with problems that stress you. Politely inform people that they or their actions are stressing you, instead of suppressing stressful thoughts. Increase your willingness to compromise and meet others in the middle. You cannot win all the time, and that is okay.
Adapt to the Situation
If you cannot change the stressor, change how you think about it. If something stresses you, spend more time thinking about things that bring you joy. If something appears taxing at first sight, reframe the situation to try to pick out the positives. for example, I am angry that the boss has taken me off project X—reframe to: Now I will have the time to concentrate on project Y (which I enjoy, anyway).
Accept the Way Things Are
Recognize that there are some stressors that we cannot change. Using valuable energy to fight some immovable forces is Sisyphean, in that it is futile in its nature. Instead, channel that energy to find the positives or learnings from stressful situations and accept that you have your strengths, but that no one is perfect.
One other mental stress competence is the recognition of our own ability to stress ourselves. So far, we have talked at length about external stressors (colleagues, deadlines, and so on), but lest we forget that we can, at times, be our own worst enemy. One of the most dangerous internal stressors can be, ironically, our own talents and strengths.
Think back to Chapter 4, where we focus comprehensively on the efficacy of recognizing our talents and using them to our advantage. What we did not consider is what happens if we exaggerate them. What happens if you overemphasize your strengths or lay them on too thick? The answer is that our strengths can become stressors, if we allow ourselves to overdo it in the strengths-based approach.
Take me as an example. Upon self-reflection, one of my strengths is my ability to communicate well. I have often received the feedback that I have a comfortable speaking style in front of a group, that I am rarely stuck for the right word, and that my active listening skills (more of this in Chapter 9) aid discourse. However, from time to time, I have also heard: “Just shut up! We get it. We’ve heard your voice enough today. Can you just give us a chance to think now, please without talking?” Public speaking is something I have always found easy; rhetorically I am rarely lost for the fitting word, but I do, indeed, sometimes not know when to stop. When I exaggerate on my strength of communication, it can lead to unnecessary stress as I realize that it is frustrating others.
I also consider myself adept at contextually reflecting on situations to learn from them best. But sometimes, the context reflection machine in my head goes into overdrive and I cannot stop thinking about what happened. Sometimes, I lie in bed at night, after a leadership workshop, turning the day just gone over and over in my head, mulling over whether I should have done this or that differently. Sometimes the machine runs and runs, and I end up with only five hours sleep. The lack of sleep stresses me and leaves me mentally and physically unprepared for the next day, which, in turn, again stresses me. Maybe you can see how the mental cycle of self-induced stress can quickly take its toll.
Reflect on your strengths as we mentioned in Chapter 5, but this time, consider which you may, on occasion, overdo and what stressful ramifications that may bring with it. When you have noted the potential stress-fuelling flipside of your strengths, reflect on how you can scale down their impact, using reframing and the four As technique.
Regenerative Stress Competence
The word stress literally derives from the Latin strictus, meaning tight, compressed, drawn together … physical strain on a material object (etymonline 2018). Our appreciation of the word in a psychological sense was not attributed until the 1950s. In other words, by definition, stress is a physical phenomenon, and so, as a result, we have a responsibility to our bodies to help them reduce its physical consequences.
We have the opportunity to slash stress reaction by active, physical regenerative means. According to Loehr and Schwarz (2005), the most critical and valuable resource available to any organization is its individuals’ energy. Our physical energy is our fundamental source of fuel, and it affects our concentration, creativity, ability to commit, perform, and emotionally manage any given situation. Deplete our energy reservoir (through poor quantity or quality of sleep, poor diet, poor fitness levels, reduced opportunities to recover during exertion, or poor oxygen intake (i.e., breathing)) and we and our productivity suffer.
It is an old cliché, but it still rings so true: if you wanted best-in-class performance from a racing car, you would fill it with the highest-quality fuel, lubricated with the best motor oil. You would not fill up with low-grade gasoline, and you would not consider not topping up the oil as that could be damaging to all parts of the machine. You would vigorously and carefully maintain all its moving parts, keep it well-aired and in a noncorrosive environment. You would not run it at top speed all the time, you would floor the pedal only when you needed a burst of performance, but otherwise, pace the car for the long haul. In just the same way (if we expect high-performance), we have a duty of care for our bodies just as we would take care of an expensive automobile.
Our physical energy is derived from our oxygen intake and our glucose reserves (gleaned from our diet), supported by reinvigorating sleep. Resultantly, our breathing, our sleep routine, and our diet are vitally important to our well-being, performance, and stress levels. It may sound like the most obvious piece of advice you have received recently, but look after your machine!
- Fill it up only with the highest-quality fuel and lubricate with the best motor oil, that is, balance your diet with healthy ingredients washed down with lots of water.
- Maintain your engine with care, that is, practice regular, energizing, invigorating, cleansing, mindful breathing techniques.
- Take your foot off the gas, that is, get lots of good-quality sleep, treat life and work as a series of sprints, not a marathon. Find hobbies, pastimes, and distractions from your work to allow you to return to your team with your batteries recharged. In order to be fully productive, we must disengage periodically and renew our focus. Just like with the sports car, we cannot run with the pedal to the metal all the time.
For the Time Management Toolbox
If I had a dollar for every time I had been asked: “Matt, how can I better manage my time?” So here, in no particular order (and this list should by no means be considered exhaustive), a quick-fire line-up of some bonus instrumental time management tips and tricks to help reduce stress and weed-out time those evil thieves:
- Apparently, Elon Musk insists on the two-pizza rule at his companies. Musk, the billionaire businessman whose companies have given us Internet payment, fossil fuel-free cars, and who wants to take us in his rockets as space tourists into the great undiscovered, reportedly demands that no meeting at any of his companies has more attendees that can be fed by two pizzas. In other words, if two pizzas were ordered and laid out on the conference table, they would have to feed and fill up every meeting member present. If there were 16 people, it is unclear as to how much appetite Musk expects of his staff, but the principle is, I think, a clear one. If you, as a leader, are chairing a meeting or have the responsibility to invite people to a meeting, then consider in depth, who really needs to attend. On the other hand, if you are invited to a meeting to which you think you are surplus to requirements, then have the courage to say so. Excuse yourself (or, ideally, reject the invitation in advance) and allow the required attendees (and yourself) to be more productive.
- Sync properly or do not sync at all. Sync all your calendars (including private events) to all your devices to help you keep an overview, save time asking for confirmation, and copying or blocking slots.
- Highlight calendar entries with different colors for different roles that you have to take in the meeting to speed up your meeting preparation.
- Use different colors for types of meetings (e.g., red for travel time, blue for sales meeting, pink for team meeting). This can save meeting preparation time.
- To prevent bothersome, external disturbances, block personal reflection or work time, that is, slots in your calendar, that appear to colleagues that you are in a meeting, and so discouraging them from inviting you to time-wasting appointments.
- If 4 does not work; if colleagues persist to invite you as they can see that you are the only participant in the meeting, arrange a calendar cartel with a friend. Both of you block the same slot, invite one another, viewers see it as a two-person meeting, and so both of you can enjoy your own personal reflection slot in peace.
- Set e-mail reading times. Only read e-mails from 9 to 10 a.m. and from 2 to 3 p.m. Spend the rest of the time on other pursuits.
- Set Outlook to open into the calendar screen, not into e-mail.
- Switch e-mail notifications off. Keep your focus on the here and now.
- One folder. Try it. Try using just one folder: a to-do folder. An e-mail you need to work on gets dragged to the to-do folder. Every other e-mail is left in the inbox. If you need one, use the search function. It is quicker than spending valuable time sorting e-mails into multiple, layered folders.
- Use rules to aid your e-mail software in preorganizing your e-mails before you read them, as they come in.
- One participant of mine revealed that he used one such rule to send any e-mail in which he was only in CC (i.e., where he was not the direct recipient) straight into trash. Time-saving, this one. But, handle with care!
- Try teleworking, at least some of the time. It can be eye-opening how productive one can be away from the noise and distraction of the office.
- Use digital, syncable to-do lists. They save time copying over, can be easily prioritized, (re)ordered, and collaborated on.
- Try writing to do lists at the weekend to better streamline your household chores, to seek out a few more valuable minutes of pure relaxation time.
- Attend a time management workshop.
- Do not add completed items to your to-do list as you write the list, just to give yourself a mental pat on the back. It wasted three seconds writing that already completed task.
- Elon Musk, apparently, publicly calls out inactive colleagues in meetings: He tells them that, if they are not going to contribute, then they should leave. Only attend meetings at which you can make a difference. Politely, but confidently, turn down meeting invites, which you deem time thieves.
- For leaders, who also have a family life, try adapting to your role. Take the kids’ favorite book with you on that business trip and read it over the phone to them, via video conferencing software or even send excerpts as a voice message. Give your children family vouchers that they can redeem when work is quieter. For example, trip to the ice cream café, game of cards, film night. With little tricks like these, working away from the family will seem less like a chore and more like an opportunity for you and your loved ones.
- As Yves Morieux, (TED, 13:13min) puts it, “drive for clarity and accountability triggers a counterproductive multiplication of interfaces, middle offices, [and] coordinators that do not only mobilize people and resources, but that also add obstacles.” Try and simplify your working environment. Eliminate as many checks, balances, and reporting functions as possible to optimize your time management, and hopefully, reduce your chances of slipping into the ugly world of stress.
Try some of these tips. They may save you some valuable minutes every day. That can add up to hours per month and days per year. Days that you could spend doing what you want to do and not stoking your flammable stress fires further.
When asked on their deathbed for their number one regret, no one answers with, I wish I had spent more time working! Yet, while in the rush hour of our lives, we seem determined to find any excuse available to work as much as possible. Without wanting to scare anyone, the rush hour of one’s life can fly by very quickly, and before you known it, you are looking back on a life infected by stress and all the nasty ramifications it carries with it.
I will leave the last word in this chapter to the poet Joachim Ringelnatz:
You no longer smell the scent of flowers, know only work; those endless hours. Your best years go flying past, until one day you breathe your last. As you look death straight in the face, he grins and you think: what a waste.
—cited in Merg and Knödler (2005:128)3
Chapter Leadership Challenge
Try the task-relevance portfolio on your to-dos and invite your colleagues to do the same. Use the findings to highlight any time thieves that may be doing their evil work in your time management. Then, develop strategies to reduce their negative effect on your schedule and/or your stress levels. Drink lots of fluids, try and get as much sleep as you can (there are apps that can help, if you sometimes struggle to fall asleep), eat healthily, and try to find time for a bit of movement and/or sport, and develop a booster or enabler sentence that you can repeat to yourself, when things seem to be getting on top of you.
Mine is: You cannot please all the people all of the time.
1 Barnes, Lucianetti, Bhave, and Christian. (2015) found that leaders who slept less than average, or reported poor quality of sleep, were far more likely to act aggressively or discipline unfairly at work.
2 I am grateful to my colleagues at the SYNK Group for this exercise.
3Translated by Matt Beadle from the original German by Joachim Ringelnatz.