In principle, there is no issue with an organization being sweaty. If you asked an athlete or a doctor, they would say it is the most natural thing and happens regularly.

In organizations this has gone into overdrive. Senior managers, scrum or tribe leaders, first line managers, they all share similar narratives. They find their activities and responsibilities fulfilling, mostly rewarding, and providing personal growth. The challenge is the relentless, ongoing and never stopping volume. It is felt as too much of a good thing over a too long period.

I nearly never identify an unwillingness to do hard work, which contrasts a lot of the writing in media outlets.
CEOs and executives have an outstanding foundation with their employees. Yet, we might drive them permanently beyond their resource levels and create performance fatigue, change or transformation tiredness.
What is missing is cooling down periods. Here executives to middle managers step in. It is their remit to create the conditions for an organization to flourish and show healthy performance towards its diverse stakeholders.

What you can do

Let’s look at three instruments CEO’s and executives can introduce across the business:

1. When is hammock time? Start thinking your business like a rhythm

“Business is like diving. At some point you have to come up for air.” A favorite quote by one of my executive clients. When are the business, units or teams allowed to purposefully intentionally reduce the intensity of their activities, because they need time to recover and recharge? Follow the rhythm of your businesses and units and you will find the periods where you encourage your colleagues to recharge openly and fully visible.

Our research shows that organizations typically follow a pattern or rhythm of engagement and performance, for example, throughout the financial year. What we coin as collective energy, the shared emotions, thinking patterns, and shared effort and activities that employees invest for the goals of the organization, cannot go endlessly up. The latter would mean endless sweating all the time.

In reality, organizations or teams follow typical trajectories.[i] Think Overheating when you see sharp increase in energy that turns into a steep decline due to burnout. Upward Ripples is consistent positive shared engagement short periods of respite. Upward Shock means the business explodes energy but is also working on sustaining this sense of high engagement. Rolling Waves means your business goes through multiple high intensity, often parallel transformations such as strategic reorientation, restructuring, or cost effectiveness programs. A bathtub type of energy trajectory where managers after success focus on businesses recovery from long stretches of tiredness and low involvement.

Successful senior managers look out for trajectories and their organization’s rhythm across a number of weeks or months with typical ups and downs of human engagement and performance. Once you understand your trajectories, you identify the periods of peak performance that add value to your stakeholders AND also the cooling down periods that your employees require.

2. When was the last time you encouraged people to stop doing meaningless activities?

If you ask executives to first line employees, they all mention the same: I am involved in activities that do not add value to our key strategic and operational purposes. That insight is not a hurdle. The hurdle is, how do we go about to stop doing things without the blame game. Managers role model this and introduce tools and instruments like stop doing activities or simple spring cleaning to embed this habit. The trick? Not to populate the identified time and resource but to use it for employees and managers. 

3. Is being busy systematically winning the career race?

Final question, and in need of being high up on the executive agenda: Are you sustaining or challenging a culture of busyness in your firm? If I would work for you, is work inhumanely demanding, being permanently under stress is considered a good thing, and having a completely booked diary for weeks and months is in fact rewarded and embedded systematically in promotion processes or performance reviews? This is where executives can uniquely change the narrative and transform the management systems, promotion and culture that actually allow managers and employees to work towards healthy performing.

Here is the deal.

If you made it to the end of this piece, then you personally make good progress because you find time to reflect and recharge and work on your leadership practice. How about using your executive influence to create the groundswell for intentionally sweating at work and finding space to recharge.

This makes it more likely that you serve your stakeholders successfully with outcomes that add value to businesses, employees, and society.

[i] Vogel, B., Raes, A. M. L., & Bruch, H. (2022). Mapping and managing productive organizational energy over time: The Energy Pattern Explorer tool. Long Range Planning. 102213.