As we grow into more senior roles, constant fatigue becomes a real risk for most executives. I have felt this myself and I know several friends who are absolutely miserable. Very few talk about it openly. In my friend’s circle, this has been a recurring topic for a while. We joke about it as the natural outcome of getting old – but we are all well aware that age is not the root cause, or at least not the biggest reason.
I am in a plane now on a work trip to India and thought I will post a rant on this topic.
As I look back at my own career – I can see a certain paradox. I have been exhausted from having too much to do. I have also been equally exhausted from having too little to do. Either way the outcome is terrible. Exhaustion should not be worn as a badge of honor if it’s perpetual.
In my case – being bored out was an even bigger challenge. My brain just switches to a low power mode and I kept doing stupid repetitive things mindlessly. I grew bitter and there were physical symptoms like throwing up and so on. Thankfully I could change roles relatively quickly when I ran into those situations. I no longer accept roles unless I am very sure that the mission excites me. It took some hard knocks before this wisdom kicked in and I wish I was smarter about it earlier.
These days I ask myself a simple question “What will break if I am not around for a couple of weeks?”. If not a lot will break is the honest answer – it is usually a good indicator that being bored out is just around the corner and I am largely doing repetitive work that can be delegated or automated. Then it’s time to find a new mission. You and your boss might not agree about this though. Be fair and give your boss the time and context to process this. Also the mission might not be a new job or role – it could be a side project that excites you and is white space for the company.
Since I have also worked with and managed a lot of execs over the years whose careers I have observed closely, I am reasonably sure this has been the case for at least a good proportion of them.
Most senior leaders walk unsuspecting into an agency trap. The transition from an individual contributor to a manager is hard. It’s equally hard if not harder to become the manager of managers and every step up from there. It takes some time to realize that you no longer can directly influence the outcome like you used to in your previous role. I still struggle with this every time I take on a new role, but usually get over it faster thanks to the life experience gathered along the way.
As I look back at the relatively low exhaustion roles I have had earlier in my career – I think one reason is that I had a lot of peers I could freely talk to. I didn’t have to think about “is it ok to be vulnerable?”. Every step up after that, my peer group shrank and it took me a while to realize that it’s ok to be vulnerable to your team as well. I can’t say I have quite mastered it but I am a lot better at it today than say 15 years ago.
Senior leaders are managing the collective anxiety of a lot of people in their organizations – and often outside their organizations. You need some venting mechanisms built quickly to deal with it. The comfortable thing to do is to lean on others in the same situation – your peers and your direct reports and your boss. There is value in that – but there is a challenge that we might not immediately realize. It’s super easy to fall into an echo chamber where everyone feeds into the insecurities of everyone else.
Echo chambers are a reality. I don’t think there is a way to avoid them for good. The closest to a good strategy that has worked for me is to spend time with people with very different interests. I find time to hang with people who train dogs (they have their own echo chambers but it’s so different from my line of work and it’s almost therapeutic for me to deal with that for some time). I am an avid reader – and I consciously spend time choosing books outside the world of technology for about half my reading. It works – it not only reduces my cognitive load, it even sparks new ideas for my line of work
Somewhere along the way I lost interest in chasing vertical growth in my career. I started enjoying helping my team grow more than my own progression in the hierarchy. It didn’t stop me from getting promoted multiple times after that – that’s the irony of this story. It is quite a liberating feeling when you don’t feel like you need to run at an unsustainable pace. It’s not like I don’t care for money and some luxury anymore – I am not a saint by any stretch. It’s just that I value other things also in equal measure and can make better trade offs.
One of the things I try to do is to take a pause and do an ROI evaluation on the important things I have been doing in the recent past. I make a list of things and people that give me energy and another list of things and people that drain my energy. Then I find ways to spend more time on the former and less on the latter. I don’t always succeed but even if I can shift the balance by ten or twenty percent, the results are amazing.
And Vijay Says... 