Let’s Discard ‘Work Hard, Play Hard’
Many high-achievers and leaders I work with quietly recognize they’ve developed an extreme relationship with work and play.
They describe long hours, 24/7 mental engagement, and trouble sleeping. They feel essential to team performance. They worry that taking time off will slow progress. They experience vacations as a juggling act: catching up on sleep, cramming in memory-making experiences, and occasionally sneaking away for work calls.
Over time, this pattern—so normalized in corporate culture—erodes focus, credibility, and performance.
So, what’s a better way?
Foster a High Performance Culture
Despite PTO policies, personal days, and sabbaticals, high performance isn’t the byproduct of working harder or hardly working.
High performance is the byproduct of conditions and norms that enable individuals and teams to care for one another, navigate complexity, and deliver better solutions—without burning out!
Some of the most effective ways to start fostering these conditions and norms are:
Capacity monitoring: Paying attention to the signals your mind and body send you when you’re nearing your limit, and channeling some curiosity and compassion for the signals your colleagues may be sending you.
Strategic thinking: Slowing down to assess the strategic value of incoming demands relative to your capacity, and brainstorming more than one way they could be handled, by you or your team.
Needs-framing: Framing a strategic need relative to your capacity and requesting additional support in specific and actionable ways, so your colleagues can right-size coverage when it’s needed most.
Scenario planning: Meeting with your colleagues to anticipate possible outcomes and prepare responses so your colleagues feel less anticipatory stress and more confident to deliver solutions independently.
Stress testing: Simulating high-stakes situations—tight deadlines or curve-ball requests—to uncover fears and missteps under safe conditions so your colleagues discover what level of complexity they can handle.
Error processing: Emphasizing that any recent mistake made is now an opportunity to revise the response or the effort, so your colleagues can recover quickly and perform even better next time.
Confidence building: Celebrating the efforts that worked and the behaviors you want to see more of, so your colleagues get a better sense of what performing together actually takes.
When these conditions are normalized, work will no longer dictate your entire life. It will become a game your entire team can play together—with and without you.
Leadership isn’t a 9-5 job, it’s a long game, so let’s help you enjoy it more!
