Written by: David Kegley, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
When More is Expected of You
When I talked with one of my friends in Singapore several months ago about her executive position in banking, she related to me that a new manager was pushing her team toward a 12-hours a day, 6-days per week schedule she used to know two decades ago. “Isn’t that an old workaholic model she asked rhetorically?” She was obviously frustrated with the manager’s work ethic. The strains placed on executive leadership begs questions of time management and how much effort people should give to their work on a daily, monthly and annual basis. The “Workaholic Model” also puts a strain on a person’s health and it could be argued that work in excess of a certain number of hours per week (is it 40, 70, 80, or more?) actually results in less productivity, not more. It’s not difficult to reason that there is a point beyond which the quality of work drops off. It’s also not difficult to reason that human beings, to varying degrees, have a tolerance for work we are willing to do beyond the magic number of 40 hours per week. What’s yours?
Increasing Your Performance with the Hours You Do Have
Whatever that number is, most of us want to find a way to perform with excellence and efficiency. In this article I’ll share three strategies for upping your game in this arena from my perspective as a certified health and wellness coach.
Strategy No.1: Get the sleep you need first. How many of us have operated under the mantra, “Work is the first order of business and sleep is a luxury?” I used to think that the more work the better and the less sleep I could tolerate the better, even if it meant adding caffeine, adrenaline or all other means to compensate. Science no longer supports that. Lack of sleep is known as an “all cause morbidity,” meaning that without adequate amounts of sleep all of our vital systems will suffer. Ture our bodies eventually will not allow us to stay awake if we push it to the limits, but we can operate just under those limits and our body’s stress levels will show signs of damage. By contrast, most of our performance levels, including the sharpness of mind, reaction times, creativity, sociability, sense of humor, accuracy and other things are at their best with optimal amounts of sleep.
There are several ways to learn our own body’s optimal amount of sleep. One is to see what happens when you find a comfortable bed while on vacation and are able to sleep without the pressure of having to get up for morning deadlines. Aside from the make-up night’s sleep, of course, what would you say was the average leisurely optimal sleep for you on vacation? Another way to find that optimal night of sleep is to see what a good night of sleep is when you wake up feeling refreshed. And a third way to know is just to be aware of what your historic average good night of sleep tends to be. Be generous. Most of us underestimate how much we really need. For some reason, we tend to hold to a need to short-change ourselves in this area.
Strategy No.2: Rebalance your nutrition and movement. The most mental sharpness, the highest return on your energy investment imaginable, often comes from a modest Mediterranean diet and more than 150 minutes of movement per week.
You’ll also be much better off if you don’t allow yourself to sit for longer than 45 minutes at a time. You’ll feel sharper, perform better at your work, and probably be happier overall. Of course, that 150 minutes of movement is only a starting point.
For some, it will be hard to simply get up and begin to walk around for 30 minutes a day, five days a week. For others, there will be a desire to increase the morning jog past two miles a day, six days a week. These movement parameters are highly individualistic, but the low end is 150 minutes of movement per week. The high end is usually governed by injuries and time. Be careful to avoid injuries as they can take you from being a highly athletic person to starting all over in nothing flat—they can be worse than simply walking for 150 minutes per week!
If you added adequate sleep to your profile, it could yet again increase your effectiveness. The world of executives needs you to be a leader in a healthy lifestyle—not as a prudish, self-righteous jerk about it, but as a confident, high-performing trendsetter who knows where you’re going and why.
Strategy No.3: Humane goal setting that you can thrive on. Executives arrive at top level management or the C-suite because they have achieved remarkable outcomes along the way. You know how to set Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound (SMART) goals all too well. What I am suggesting is that your day may be so crowded with such goals that your own self-care can scarcely breathe.. That is what this article is dedicated to. Whatever enterprise you are working for certainly deserves you at your best and I’m going on the assumption that you want to be at your best.
Being at your best is the result of discipline that begins with making the hard choice at the beginning of a chain of hard choices to take care of yourself first. This means that you will become the leader of your own life first, then the leader among your peers in a series of hard-won choices that require you to manage yourself daily. This is not selfish, instead it is bringing your well-nourished, well-rested self to the table to make alert, intelligent, creative, cooperative and collaborative decisions that benefit the greater good. The hard work here may involve an occasional 70-hour workweek, but that will be the rare exception. The real hard work will be keeping your workload to a manageable level while getting a good night of sleep, eating the right foods and getting good amounts of exercise.
That’s where humane goal setting comes into play. Given that you are most likely immersed in the goals of your business, here is my recommendation for your own personal goal setting:
Set your own SMART goals, for these areas of your personal health:
Sleep
Food
Movement
Next, reduce the expectation of your personal health goal by 2/3:
Expand the “by when” date by triple(!) and then break down the accomplishments into weeks, then days.
You probably think this is a crazy way to accomplish anything but here’s what you are initially going for. You want to completely, under all circumstances, in each case, absolutely CRUSH your goals! For the first three months and then again for the next three months of incremental progress, you want NOTHING but success! You want to move the needle ever so slightly, ever so incrementally in your favor and feel absolutely confident that you can keep moving forward in these tiny little increments. Even if in the first few weeks it only feels like you are going through the motions, you just stay the course, keep going through the motions, keep feeling proud of yourself for achieving the goal as stated. Now, at this time, if you need to go back and redo your original goals for sleep, food and movement, taking them down to more manageable and tiny increments, feel free to do so—it cannot be overstated.
Every day, look at your goals and set out to make those tiny wins. Do this as though you will accomplish a marathon within the first year. Obviously, what I’m encouraging you to do is to plan for a long game and to make big gains by way of small increments. But I don’t want you to look forward to the end of the year much. Keep looking at those little incremental wins, like placing one foot in front of the other. Keep setting the tiny incremental goals and absolutely CRUSHING them. When you go to work, you’ll be awash with so many other things, however you’ll begin to take with you the pride of managing yourself and contributing to your own wellbeing.
We used to think that sleep, food, and other health metrics were unimportant in relation to our work effectiveness. Instead, it was all about the hard work, the long hours. The person who could work the most, the hardest, multitask, drink the most caffeine, etc., was the star worker. But people’s bodies couldn’t take it and burnout and ethical breakdowns became the norm. Those burnouts and breakdowns cost the business world dearly… and still do. It’s time for your leadership to show a different way.
Want David to help you with your executive performance? You can reach him at: drkegley.com or LinkedIn
David Kegley, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Dr. Kegley specializes in coaching well-educated, progressive leaders and executives who have been stopped in their tracks due to health setbacks. His doctorate is in theology and preaching. His first 25-year career was in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., where he was a Pastor and Head of Staff. But, after getting nearly burned out, getting diagnosed with Prostate Cancer, and going through cancer treatment, he emerged as a credentialed coach. Now he Coaches in the areas where he experienced his own humility and growth: Health and Wellness, The Cancer Journey, Burnout Recovery, and Leadership and Executive.
