Always On Leadership

Why It Is So Hard To Step Away

As leaders we can find it very hard to put down work, step away, leave things to our team, and take a break.

You may feel like if you step away or take your eye off the ball things will fall apart. There is so much to do, your email keeps piling up, or someone might need you. When the to-do list is so long, stepping away can feel impossible.

This commitment to always being present, on the ball, and available usually comes from a place of very good intention. You care deeply about the work you do, the people you work with, and the mission of your organization and so you want to do everything within your power to make it succeed.

The Costs Of “Always On” Leadership

But “always on” leadership has real downsides.

Let’s start with the downsides for you as the leader:

• If you are always either at work, available to others, or thinking about work you aren’t taking time to reset and relax your mind. You also aren’t getting the rest you need. This impacts your energy, your creative problem solving, and your capacity for emotional intelligence. In short, it actually makes you worse at your job.

• Being tethered to work at all times has a big personal cost, impacting your relationships with family, friends, and yourself. The constant split focus means that you are often physically present but emotionally absent. Your interactions with family and friends are rushed, and you find yourself becoming irritable with the people you love. And your physical and mental health suffer.

There are also downsides for your team and organization:

• If you are always present and available your team is never learning to solve problems on their own. They don’t have the opportunity to take risks or try new things without you monitoring them or catching them if they stumble. This impedes their development and the organization is missing the opportunity to benefit from their full input.

• People need to feel ownership and autonomy in their work. When you keep a hand on the steering wheel at all times you may be inadvertently signaling to your team that you don’t trust them. This ultimately leads to disengagement and can impact retention.

All of this creates a culture that is self fulfilling. Because you are always there your team doesn’t get the chance to build their capacity by handling things on their own, which in turn makes it harder for you to step away, and on and on and on…

Is It All About Your Organization? Or Is Some Of It About You?

“Always on” leadership might be at least in part about you, rather than about what the organization or your team actually needs.

Sometimes being “always on” is about you fully expressing your commitment to the mission and demonstrating what it looks and feels like for you to be values aligned. It can be very difficult to pull apart which of your actions are about a need of yours rather than a need of the organization.

I speak from experience here! A mantra that I have repeated to myself regularly over the years is “I will go to bed every night knowing that I have done absolutely everything I could for the mission.” You care about this work! It is part of who you are! And you are a high achiever who gets things done and does them well. Of course you want to give it your all. And over time, it makes sense that your commitment and work ethic has crept into you always being on.

Disrupting The Pattern

The first step to disrupting this pattern is becoming aware of it. When you find yourself struggling to disconnect or jumping in to solve a problem that isn’t yours to solve, pause and ask yourself: “Is this something that can wait an hour? Can it wait until tomorrow?"

By extending the time before you jump in you give yourself a bit of breathing room and also give your team the chance to try and figure it out first. Reflect on how that felt. What felt easy? What felt hard? What did you learn?

Over time these small efforts will combine to create more space for you and for your team, and build a healthier way of being.