Stay fresh and inspired

When people are fatigued or over-pressured, their cognitive, affective, sensory and communicative capacities are severely retarded. Tim Roberts says you have a responsibility to others to look after yourself so don’t risk stress and burnout

The sun is bright here in New Zealand’s summer. The cicadas’ lazy chorus ebbs and flows on the breeze. Large orange monarch butterflies glide overhead. Silvereyes flit from tree to tree like painted sparrows.

I can hear the distant sound of the surf breaking, mixed with the comforting drone of fat bumblebees fumbling past me, drunk on pollen.

This is spaciousness. This is relaxing. I feel alive, alert and energised. This is how I do my best thinking and this keeps my ideas fresh and me fresh too.

Sometimes I walk barefoot on the beach. Other times I
wander into the bush, past tall and slender nikau palms and quirky cabbage trees. Out of such freshness comes a much higher quality of work and a greater “bounce back” or resilience. What I have just described sounds fun – but it is also part of my weekly discipline.

In addition to what I do for a living, I purposely do other things to stay fresh, centred and playful. I no longer work “hard”; I do work well, perhaps better than ever.

Years ago I knocked on a priest’s door. I said, “I’m sorry to disturb you, I know you’re busy.” The priest replied: “What good would I be to people if I was busy?”

I am interested in freshness, or the capacity for renewal as a theme in leadership (and we are all leaders at different times). Freshness is a primary duty of leaders yet so few honour those they serve by disciplining themselves to stay fresh, inspired, alive, and alert. I regard this as a moral failing.

Leaders are only as effective as their capacity to think, feel, intuit, converse, challenge and act creatively. Too many leaders play destructive games with their energy levels. They, and their followers, suffer as a result.

Some people are effective as organisational leaders, less are effective as interpersonal leaders, yet even fewer are effective as self-leaders. To have an integrated and powerful leadership presence, a leader must develop strengths in all three of these
leadership domains.

Abdicating our self-leadership, or how we commune with and nurture our self, is a pointer to a lack of critical awareness and an imbalance in attention.

American architect William McDonough regards pollution as a symbol of design failure. I regard the lack of freshness I see in leadership as a system failure. People who say that we live in busy times and must expect stress and burnout are morally bankrupt.

Leaders project themselves onto those around them. People model how their leader behaves rather than what the leader thinks they are communicating. An ancient Chinese view is that:

“When people are influenced by their rulers they follow what their rulers do, not what they say.” Chinese Book of Leadership and Strategy.

Consequently, a leader who demonstrates a toxic self-leadership style will be influencing people and certainly compromising tangible and intangible aspects of performance.

Who will be paying for this care-less behaviour? The leader will pay in terms of health and perhaps through less success. The customers, however you define them, will shoulder this burden by receiving lower-quality service.

Don’t misunderstand. I am not talking about the life-work balance, although it is related. I am talking about hard-nosed productivity.

After decades of research, it seems indisputable that when human beings are fatigued or over-pressured their cognitive, affective, sensory and communicative capacities are severely retarded. Is this good for core
business? Can a leader function without these capacities? The answer is a resounding no on both counts.

It is sheer irresponsibility for a leader (or parent) to allow him or herself, to become regularly qualitatively depleted. Equally, it is a failure of leadership to sanction the depletion of those people around the leader.

I am reminded of a manager I know. I use the term manager because he was not acting as a leader. This manager thought he was efficient, effective and liked. He worked over 70 hours most weeks. His staff viewed him as driven, overbearing and demanding.

The manager was usually tired and this caused him to
be forgetful, disorganised, pessimistic and defensive. He was neither efficient nor effective. This manager was constantly projecting the message that: “I’m too busy with important things to talk to you!”

His people became alienated. Some adopted similar behaviours to the manager. Others started to rebel against this prevailing “time-scarce” mindset by withholding their best work. In his department, it seemed that people were not a priority and that problem-finding and blaming others was.

Suddenly the manager was taken ill with stress and depression. Of course he was not really“taken” ill in the sense that he was swept away, although it must have felt like that to him. He had set up the exact conditions required for stress and depression to take root and grow stronger.

The manager went off sick. Someone acted in the manager’s place and, not surprisingly, the staff were happier and more productive. The manager came back to work and a few months later was once again working excessive hours. Conditions crept back to their previous state of imbalance.

Yet no one on the staff complained or stood up to the manager. This manager was not a bully. He was essentially kind. He was just preoccupied and abrupt.

All his staff unconsciously colluded with him. They grumbled yet accepted these poorthinking conditions. In short, they all abdicated their personal responsibility and sacrificed their own sense of self-leadership.

Eventually, the CEO summoned the manager and said: “If you can’t find a way to do your job in 35 hours a week, we will hire someone who can and you will no longer have that role.”

You might think this has a happy ending – it doesn’t. The manager is still working many hours. Staff are still complaining but not taking action and the CEO has been proved a hypocrite.

Although the CEO is aware of what is happening, he is turning away and abdicating his responsibility. The CEO is sanctioning oppressive work practices that harm productivity. As a leader, he is a husk.

This is a true story, and it is not neat and tidy. Is there a morale to this story? Yes, look to your self-leadership, whether you are a formal leader with a title or an individual without one. You have a responsibility to others to look after yourself.

It’s no accident that people perform best when they can be authentic, playful and when they are able to be curious. In my view, these are the minimum requirements for work, closely followed by finding ways to stay fresh.

But we are complacent. We think we work in a predatory culture – predatory in the sense that performance demands we do more with less and that humans will be the casualties in this. We expect to work harder, rest less, play less and to drive our teams to produce more.

This is delusional. This is an excuse. Too many people defer their power and collude in their own oppression, which has unsavoury consequences on decision-making, collaboration, the ability to read complexity, relate to people and attune to situations.

It is obvious that in the near future such an attitude will be condemned as roundly as we condemn sexism and racism.

If you work in such conditions, ask yourself the hard question: how am I contributing to this? If you are a leader, ask how you are causing and/or modelling the behaviour needed to maintain this sad status quo.

If leaders want people to contribute their best, they have to work in the best conditions for contribution – there are no shortcuts. As a leader, if you won’t change this, who will?

It may take more than a day, a month, a year a few years to change but does the extent of the challenge make it less or more important.

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