Sometimes I get why people get annoyed with elite schools. They excel at giving me advice which costs more than common sense but is worth less.
Or sometimes just worthless.
The kind of advice I refer to often masquerades as legit insight resting on a foundation of cutting-edge research. This stuff is everywhere. And while some of it has value, a lot of it lies somewhere between dubious and cringe.
Oh, and most of it emanates from self-proclaimed theorists rather than proven practitioners. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
I noticed an example of this species of insight in a recent Harvard Business Review article entitled:
“Want to Be a Better Leader? Stop Thinking About Work After Hours.”
Let’s set aside two marginal skirmishes before we proceed.
First, I will not choose this moment to assail the profligate abuse of leadership as a term. Experience and education tell me leadership is distinct from management and administration, but also that it is used as a catch-all referring to individuals who practice all three skills concurrently. We’ll delve into that later. For today, we’ll accept its colloquial use as intended by the article’s authors.
Second, to proceed we must temporarily suspend reason and set aside countless fundamental assumptions of human psychology for the purpose of this analysis … so we can pretend, as the article’s authors do, that humans are actually capable of deciding what they think about and when.
Of course, we’re not. Trying not to think about something makes it even more irresistible. If I tell you “don’t think about an elephant” … what do you think about?
Now let’s recover from the digression.
I can summarize the article by sharing its intro paragraph:
If you are like many managers, you may feel a need to stay constantly connected with work, even after formal working hours. Given the high demands of a leadership role, you may perceive that the only way to perform well is to work around the clock. As a result, you find yourself ruminating about an issue with an employee, trying to think of a solution to a client problem, or creating a mental to-do list long after you have left the office for the day or turned off your computer.
The balance of the piece goes on to say that basically it’s bad to do this. That doing this makes a leader less effective, especially when they are new in their leadership role.
I’ve got a few issues with this.
First, it’s the sorta thing that would make Captain Obvious green with envy. Most of the people this article is talking about are mid-level managers, who have been a notoriously overworked demographic since hierarchies were invented. In three decades, I’ve never met one who warmly welcomes the infestation of work responsibility into every segment of their personal life.
Personally I’ve never enjoyed 3 A.M. escalation calls. Never wanted a situation where I write performance reports in front the television, answer texts in a movie theater, or suffer invasive distractions about a looming presentation over dinner.
But that’s the reality of management roles in the prevailing work climate. You make more money, and you have a clause in your contract stating that work during unsocial hours will sometimes be required. “Sometimes” is of course like a mesh screen door in a hurricane. “Always” is more accurate.
And yes, over the course of time, this contributes to fatigue, burnout, and under-performance.
The rare moments in my own management journey when I was able to contain work to something like work hours occurred when I was (a) senior enough to control my own diary, and (b) proficient enough to make time go slower.
Like any other honed skill, management proficiency increases with experience. You get faster. You get more adept at sorting issues, keeping easy things easy, and ignoring that which should be ignored.
And as you grow in seniority, there are fewer Bobs stopping by to drop meetings into your schedule, render unsolicited folksy wisdom, or place flaming bags of managerial excrement on your desk.
So it is equally obvious to say new managers will be even more overwhelmed than their wily counterparts by after-hours calendar chaos.
But second, this is just really bad advice for individuals. If your organization has a culture of expecting 24/7 presence and you decide to unilaterally act against it, you will be shouting in vain at the tide. You’re going to fall behind everyone else as they continue in the established norm.
If you are a leader of exceptional proficiency, speed, and ingenuity … or if you are surrounded by an exceptional team capable of picking up part of your role while holding onto their own … you may be able to cover for your elective re-balancing.
But it’s far more likely that if you go into shutdown mode after hours, your individual throughput will drop, this will be noticed by executives who see you as a unit of production and grade you on value added, and you will stand out unfavorably.
The consequences for attempting stuff like this can be painfully life-changing. Degraded performance assessments. Reputational decay. Loss of progression. Bypassed for promotion. Reduced compensation. You could even drop into the “needs managed” category and find yourself fighting for professional survival.
So my advice is do not try this at home. Not individually. Not until your organization embraces a norm accepting it. Not until you feel psychologically safe pulling the throttles back.
And the thing is, feeling safe to not think about work is probably the only thing that will keep you from thinking about work.
This, to me, is the message we should be getting from cutting-edge research on how to excel in demanding leadership roles. Experts should be advising organizations (and their executives), not individual managers, on how to set the conditions permitting the safe adoption of an improved work/life balance. Which the authors of this article argue, and I agree, is in the interest of organizations because it will see leaders perform better.
Organizations need to innovate their work practices, calibrate their expectations, and move away from efficiency models that assign value based on individual throughput.
Until that happens, articles like this one will continue to read like advice for victims on how best to absorb abuse.
Very few people don’t want a personal life. We call them sociopaths, and they are rare.
People want a life. But they also want to be successful. So they will do what they perceive is in their interest. What there is an incentive to do. What they believe their boss wants them to do.
When a boss injects 80 hours of work into a 40-hour work week, subordinates will conclude they are expected to work during their personal time.
When a company runs a scaled 24/7 operation with a single responsible leader and the budget doesn’t provide for a deputy or assistant, they will conclude they need to handle everything themselves. Including escalations, emergencies, briefings, and engagements of shift workers.
So if the point here is to provide some solid advice for leaders on how to achieve a better balance, my input is to influence what you can within your sphere of organizational influence.
Here’s some stuff I did that worked.
Tell your team you don’t want them online after hours.
Call them out when you see them breaking this norm.
Schedule meetings during sociable hours. Don’t let meetings run over into late evenings.
Inspect the hours your people work. Call them out when they work more than you want.
Sit with your people and support them reaching a better balance by removing work or adding staff.
Check your team’s leave balances. Force them to schedule holidays. Make leave balances a recurring talking point. Know how many people need to be on leave in order for everyone to get their entitlement, and measure against this regularly.
Review your own calendar and your team’s meeting schedule every 6 months. Meetings have a way of multiplying without you noticing. They need to be culled.
Review staffing every 6 months. Do you have enough people for each individual to have a sustainable workload?
Be careful about the social outings you sponsor. People will feel pressure to attend them no matter what you say.
Most of all, set the example. If you’re not able to embrace balance, your people aren’t either. But if you are able and you choose not to, you are setting policy with your actions.
In my last role, I treated Friday as a free hit for my front office team. Our weeks were front-loaded, so they were meeting their contractual hours by lunchtime on Thursday. I scheduled zero meetings after noon on a Friday. I left as early as I could, doing whatever work I could at home, quietly and out of sight, so they could be free to quit early.
I did what I could get away with short of hurting my team or my own progression. And the team responded by becoming damn near best in the world at what they did.
Meanwhile, I tried to influence the organizational norm as best I could. But had I unilaterally drawn a thick red line around my 40-hour contract, it would not have changed anything accept my own reputation and standing.
I admire researchers and academics keen to shift workplace cultures toward greater balance and wellness. The working world needs this.
But getting there means counseling and educating and pushing organizations to change the structures, systems, and expectations which shape employee behaviors.
Telling individual employees to oppose norms and try harder to control their own hours won't change anything.
But it will lead to frustration and professional risk for those who listen.
And when they say “yeah, but I saw this really good article in Harvard Business Review,” … it’ll be heard as a punchline. Right before they exit the stage.
TC is a former military commander and operations General Manager who writes about organizational leadership.