Slack off to Get Ahead
by Barbara Reinhold
Here's a question for you: What's the fastest way to get your team members to create and reach new goals on their own? If you're a super-conscientious manager who always gives 110 percent, you might be surprised by the answer.
You, my friend, may be responsible for the lapses in productivity your team has been having of late. But how could that be? You're there early, you leave late, you have high standards and you're a no-nonsense, let's-get-this-work-done boss. Who could have trouble with that?
Well, almost everybody under 35 will be put off as well as lots of folks who are older than that. If you're too much into a hardworking hero image, you're making the basic leadership mistake of deifying work addiction and forgetting what makes people want to work hard for you -- feeling they know you, trust you and respect your decision making.
Research shows that the biggest predictors of bad judgment are sleep impairment and lack of life balance. In short, when you begin to take your job too seriously and forget to relax a little and have some fun, you're undercutting your own ability to bring an alert mind to the challenges at hand. You're also turning off the people you need to have behind you. It might have looked impressive to be wounded yet stagger on, your troops following you to the cliff's edge in those WWI movies, but half-alive leaders are hardly what we need.
As James Waldroop and Timothy Butler, two psychologists who head the Harvard Business School career office, pointed out in their book, Maximum Success, "Heroes, while frequently prospering early on in their careers, have limited success later on…Any business comprises the people within it, and if those people are unhappy and burned out, they will begin to leave, setting off an even greater disastrous cascade of stress and burnout, further departures, and so on…The company will gradually begin to see the hidden cost of all those astonishing accomplishments."
So what can you do to increase morale, collaboration and productivity in the team you're trying to lead? Slack off a little yourself, and give your team a chance to shine.
