“Fatigue Is Your Enemy”

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A couple of months ago, Harvard Business Review posted a good blog on the impact that fatigue has on our bodies and effectiveness.  Fatigue Is Your Enemy – Harvard Business Review  But making the case for self-care is relatively easy. Scientists, theologians, psychologists and leadership experts have proven its positive affects again and again.  But taking action for self care is a different story.  As I witness my clients wrestle with fatigue , despite knowing that they should ‘do better’ at taking care of themselves, I’ve learned how actively we collude with ourselves and each other to keep us all working to exhaustion.

To address the chronic fatigue among our leaders, staff and organizations, it’s not enough to rejigger our calendars. You’ve probably tried, and it probably didn’t work. Vanquishing the energy of fatigue requires confronting ourselves and each other at a very personal – even existential – level.  Sure, you say you want to take better care of yourself, but that has some uncomfortable and potentially serious consequences.  If your self-worth is built upon being indispensable to others, then self-stewardship will mess with that in a big way. You’d have to delegate more and discover that someone else can do the task and render you irrelevant, or that they will fail and make you look bad. Could you recover from either of those? Or maybe self-care will require you to take some time off and discover that the office operates just fine for a while without you. Then where will you be? Or perhaps you would have to deny help to someone. What would that mean about you?

Attending to your own renewal is not just complicated for you. It’s also complicated for those around you. Many of the leaders I work with have had others beg them to take better care of themselves. And yet… When they responded in earnest, when they drew a line or refused to pick up a task they used to accept without hesitation, others were not always pleased. Whether explicit or implied, the message they received went something like this: “Sure, I wanted you to take care of yourself, but not NOW.  Not in THIS recession. Not on THIS task. Not if it affects ME.”

Fatigue, if unheeded, is an enemy.  It drains your sustainability, generativity, creativity, clarity, strength and grace.  But vanquishing that enemy will take a lot more than a simple resolution to take your lunch hour, leave at 5, or use your vacation time.  It takes real courage to take the risk that your value does NOT depend on saying yes to every request.  It takes courage to tolerate the discomfort of making others uncomfortable, disappointed or angry.  It takes a willingness to step out of sync with our culture’s obsession with busy-ness, its worship of work, and its celebration of heroic effort.

It is no small feat to take this enemy on.

What about you?

How does fatigue affect you?  How does it affect your mood, sense of well being?  Your relationships?  Your effectiveness?

What 1 – 3 self-stewardship changes would you like to make?

What internal resistance would you likely confront if you actually made those stewardship changes?

What external resistance would you likely confront if you took action to take better care of yourself?

 

Are You Missing The “Potent Pixels” of Leadership?

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I’ve noticed that leaders often have very interesting notions of what constitutes ‘leadership.’  Some managers view leadership as something that exists outside and apart from them. They think of leaders as only those who make the grand speeches and set sweeping agendas. So, often, when my clients’ jobs don’t require this sort of large-scale thought and action, they dismiss the reality of their role and squander their potential for impact. If you asked them, they’d say that they are being appropriately modest. But I’d say they are missing the boat.

On the other hand, some of my clients are the speech-makers and agenda-setters. They have their eye on the far horizon and the big picture. They identify themselves as leaders, but don’t see their small actions as having anything to do with the task of leading.  By focusing on the large perspective and the grand act, they’d say that they are maintaining necessary focus. But in the process, they are overlooking the potential for impact that’s right under their noses.

What’s the limitation of both these points of view: either that we are too ‘small’ to have real impact or too important to worry about the impact of small things? Both perspectives overlook what I call the “potent pixels” of leadership. Potent pixels are the small details of behavior and demeanor that your followers are watching like hawks. They are the undramatic, often unconscious gestures upon which others determine your character, form your reputation and decide whether or not to trust you with their loyalty. Whether or not you’re paying attention to the pixels, they are absolutely forming the picture of your leadership.

What are some examples of potent pixels that you may not be leaning (and leading) into? It’s what you do (or don’t do) once you’ve made a commitment, however insignificant.  How you respond (or don’t) to the distress on a colleague’s face. Taking the risk to surface the unspoken tension that’s arising around the table. The small move you make in a meeting to make it safe to bring a wild idea. A passing smile in a hallway.  The consistent reiteration of an important goal; the consistent applications of standards of performance. The sincerity and specificity of your praise. The questions you ask and the spirit in which you ask them. The energy and engagement with which you listen. What you do – and how you do it – when someone pops their head into your doorway and asks, “Do you have a minute?”

It is in the pixels, at least as much as in the grand speeches, where your leadership legacy gets laid down.  But most managers never see these moments come or go.  As a result, fail to capitalize on the most powerful leadership moment they have: the one that’s happening right now, right here, with this person.

You don’t have to create leadership pixels; you don’t have to schedule them into your already-crammed schedule.  They’re already sitting right in front of you, and they are there for the leveraging. The question is whether you are observant enough to see them and engaged enough to make the most of them.