Episode #456: Leaders Need To Protect Themselves

Business is stressful. It becomes very stressful when your industry is hit by a global pandemic. Just when you start to believe we might be finally escaping the death roll of the virus, we get Omicron pop up and raise the ante completely. Just to add to the stress levels we now look like we are entering a global economic meltdown, because of the impact of the war in the Ukraine and the sanctions on Russia. Oil, gas and grains are rapidly rising in price as are the delivery mechanisms of the global supply chain. If you are in certain industries the pandemic has smashed you, however other sectors have been sailing along quite unaffected. A global recession however, is much more democratic and will share the pain with everyone. As leaders we have to be the rock for our teams. Everyone gets nervous about their job and in some cases about whether the company can survive a one-two punch of the pandemic followed by a global recession?

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going” is an old mantra. For leaders though their role is equivalent to the captain of a sailing ship. Before the coal fired steam era, ships relied solely on the wind, tides and the skills of the captain to deliver everyone safely to their destination. The team relies on the leader as captain to keep the company and staff safe. The natural inclination is to start working 18 hours a day, frantically trying to keep everything going. This is not sustainable and is not necessary.

If you work eighteen hours a day and you have ten staff, they will outwork you. Their standard eight hours a day collectively adds up to 80 hours a day, compared to your eighteen. Working long hours under stress is tiring and the first casualty is judgement. Making key decisions when your brain is enveloped in a fog is not recommended. This however can easily happen, if you keep working long hours and don’t rest.

Rest here means rest for the physical body as well as the mind. Lying in bed or on the sofa with your brain on fire from worry about the future of the business, looks like you are resting, but it is actually not restful at all. You don’t get up feeling refreshed but exhausted. Being able to make good decisions, create a survival narrative and deliver it with conviction, requires energy and a fresh mind. If the leader is just whipping themselves into a frenzy of hard work to fix the issues, then the ship will go down, because the captain will implode.

As leaders, we have to understand our own energy wells and when they need refilling. Taking a day off is probably needed sometimes. Working eighteen hours a day is definitely not needed. The leader’s time would be much better spent investing in the team to make sure that what they are doing during their eight hours a day, are the right things, done in the right way. Not micromanaging but supporting and communicating. We can get into a loop where we are focused on getting deals done or selling our clients and so we abandon the rest of the team to let them work it out on their own. It is a natural inclination, but it misses accessing the power of leverage.

How many clients can we individually contact or see, compared to how many our team members can see are obviously totally different. The leader’s job during a crisis or a struggle for survival, is to be the fountain of optimism and hope. That sounds easy to say, but not so easy to do when you are staring into the abyss of corporate oblivion. It is even less easy when you personally are feeling exhausted every day. Case studies and academic theories don’t prepare you for the hand to hand fighting required to preserve cash, your only oxygen in business. We get ourselves into a death loop of stress, exhaustion and depression. The whole structure starts to unwind and begins to spiral downwards. We need an intervention, a break from the chaos, a little time to remove the fog covering our brains.

Leaders need to protect themselves, because if they push themselves over the line, then the whole team is lost. Stepping back from the fray may seem cowardly or weak, but getting a better, higher elevation of the battlefield, may be what is needed to find a way through the mud and blood of the strife. Take a day off or even a couple of days off, to recoup the energy needed to keep the team going. Come back refreshed to the problems and hopefully with some clearer thinking and better ideas. This is not our first inclination, but we have to listen out biorhythms and judge when we need to rest. “When the going gets tough, the tough step out, rest, clear their minds and then re-join the fray”. We have to upgrade our thinking to match the modern business world and be careful about applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems.