Your Team Sleeps the Way You Lead
HBR's Els van der Helm re-ran a leadership sleep survey ten years later and found almost nothing had changed; she says the cause is culture, and it comes down to what leaders allow and what they praise.
Prompted by “Research: Sleep Deprivation Is a Leadership Problem”, HBR (Els van der Helm).
HBR's Els van der Helm re-ran a leadership sleep survey this summer, ten years after the first. Among 1,009 managers and executives, almost nothing had changed. 39% still get too little sleep four or more nights a week, wearing a tracker made no difference, and nearly half say it doesn't affect how they lead.
Her explanation is culture, and it comes down to two things leaders control.
- What you allow: whether the 7 a.m. call is negotiable and whether the late-night email expects an answer before morning.
- What you praise: whether running on little sleep reads as commitment. Fix only the first and people sleep more but still hide being tired. Fix only the second and they're honest but still short on sleep.
Proof it can move: in a trial across 39 U.S. Army platoons, leaders got one hour of training on treating their people's rest as their business. A month later, their soldiers were more than twice as likely to be getting over seven hours a night.
When your emails land at midnight, what do they think you expect?
Whether you're a CEO or an owner-operator, nobody writes these rules for you. In a small or medium-sized business, you are the rule. If you send a message at midnight and someone answers at 12:05, that answer becomes the standard.
Test it out: this week, send your late-night emails the way you normally do and watch how fast the replies come back. If someone answers within minutes in the middle of the night, you have your answer: your team believes you expect it.
Then make it a standing habit. Write whenever it suits you, but use your email program's schedule-send feature (Gmail and Outlook both have one) so everything arrives in the morning.
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Originally posted on LinkedIn ↗