Sleep affects leadership, yet it is hardly considered. Evidence is that your sleep has a direct bearing on the way you lead. Sleep also affects performance of your team.
If you want to be an admired leader, sleep is a good starting point.
Sleep is becoming a rare commodity. Lucky are those who realize that are only 24 hours to all of us for grabs, of which 7 to 8 hours are necessary to sleep to recover from the mental bruises that we all undergo during the day, not just in the name of ‘work’ but also ‘relaxing’ activities.
Yes, in today’s world, relaxing needs time. Most of your ‘relax hours’ are being taken away by the digital world. WhatsApp, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Jio etc. are meant to relax but the content is more than the time you have; and that eats away your sleep. Not to forget Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and host of others.
If you want to be an admired leader, sleep is a good starting point.
Digital world is like a black hole; the addiction is so strong that it is difficult to escape from it – it gobbles up time, including sleep time.
More than the work, it is non-work that is burning you now. It’s high time you realize that and organize your life, sleepwise.
Be sleep-wise!
Sleep should be an integral part of health and not be a leftover between work and life.
However, if work is the culprit for your inability to get a good sleep, then, there is some good news for those. Some company owners are realizing that work hours in day shouldn’t be more than eight. Even if commute takes three hours, the employee is left with thirteen hours, of which seven to eight hours can go for sleep, leaving you with five to six hours for everything else, including a little digital entertainment.
Jason Fried, co-founder and CEO of US software company Basecamp, says prioritising sleep – and ensuring he’s regularly getting enough hours of quality rest – is a major part of what makes him a good leader.
This type of ‘sleep leadership’ is twofold, explains Tori Crain, assistant professor of psychology at Portland State University, US.
“One, it’s about supporting workers in their sleep. That’s things like a supervisor showing care and concern and checking in,” she says. “And then there’s this other component that’s more around understanding and communicating the importance of sleep to doing a good job and performing in the workplace. That can mean leading in a way that helps employees get more sleep, and role modelling for employees how leaders themselves are sleeping and balancing work and sleep, and how they’re thinking about sleep in relation to their work.”
It is during the pandemic that companies began to realize the importance of employee wellness, and in many organizations the employees themselves demanded it. Flexible working policies, increased leave and mental-health apps are some of the common approaches. However, encouraging good sleep behavior has also emerged as another approach to support employees from burning out.
Sleep leadership is about how leaders can promote sleep among employees.
The challenge that corporate workplace considers it inappropriate to talk about what’s happening in your bedroom is no more seen as a taboo. Swiss sleep neuroscientist Els van der Helm says a “younger generation of workers has changed this taboo dramatically. They want to talk about all these personal topics at work, because for them, work and personal life blend much more together”.
Now, countries like Spain and Italy allow mid-day lunch and snooze breaks; and companies like Zappos, Cisco and Google have nap rooms or pods.
A survey in 2008 showed more than 30% of American companies allow or encourage napping during the day, and 15% or more provide a place to do so.
Some companies prioritize policies that care for employees’ sleep hygiene even outside working hours.
Former Google executive Eric Schmidt has also written about the importance of sleep to employees and leaders alike. At health insurance Aetna, employees who can prove (using Fitbit data or other means) that they’ve had a good night’s sleep can receive a per-night monetary incentive.
Exceptions apart, for most of us sleeping just 6 hours per night for 2 weeks is like functioning as poorly as having not slept for 48 hours. For most of us, one night of sleep loss leads to 11% decrease in response time, the equivalent of being legally drunk.
Sleep impacts leadership by reducing alertness, attention, and memory. When a leader’s ability declines due to lack of sleep, the performance of the team declines.
Tired leaders do not inspire, and they lack empathy and energy to support others, and this has an effect on the team. Soon focus is lost, problem solving deteriorates, and judgement and perspective is at its low.
Sleep deprivation has a multiplier effect – if most of your team members are not getting enough sleep. Leaders should not praise or encourage employees sending an email at midnight as this is compromising work-life balance that includes sleep.
For Basecamp CEO Jason Fried, sleep leadership is just practical. “When you’re tired, you suck,” he says. “You don’t think clearly or lead others well. If you run a team or are in charge of other people and you’re sleep deprived, you’re making their lives a lot harder. You’re not pleasant to be around, you’re not all there. You’re short and terse and all the bad things that come from being exhausted.”
And according to van der Helm, studies have shown sleep deprived leaders tend to “have less followership. They’re less inspiring. The team of a leader who’s had a bad night is much less engaged at work.”
Instead of wellness initiatives starting with diet and exercise, it should start with sleep as it is as basic a need.
On the flip side, employees who’ve had too little sleep aren’t performing at their best. “They’re interpreting workplace stressors more strongly than if they were sleeping well,” adds Crain of Portland State University. “They’re more likely to be reactive to stressors in the work environment and have a harder time regulating emotions.”
Crain further says, there’s a “truly reciprocal relationship”, between sleep and work. “If people aren’t performing at work, it causes stress, and stress impacts sleep. Not sleeping well impacts work performance.”
The impact of sleep deprivation at work is really big, and so there has to be a push for it to be addressed at work. If employees don’t sleep well, then you know that work can be the cause and also the solution.
Instead of wellness initiatives starting with diet and exercise, it should start with sleep as it is as basic a need.
To sum up, benefits of good sleep include improvement in critical thinking, creativity, relationships, performance and general health.
Sleep is known to remove poisons from your brain thereby protecting you from Alzheimer’s disease like nothing else can.
Wellness initiatives in corporations talking about work-life balance should focus on sleep emphasizing that sleep is a basic need to recover and rejuvenate.
The role of Occupational Health (OH) physician in an organization should be to promote the ‘sleep leadership’ agenda among employees as part of wellness initiative.
In absence of ‘sleep leadership’ in the organization, the OH physician should apprise the leadership about its risks to the business and encourage to have sleep as a performance improvement agenda.
For those who are on their own or work for smaller companies with no access to OH physician, just make sure you sleep for 7-8 hours daily. ‘Sleep leadership’ in such situations becomes ‘sleep discipline’, as you are your own leader!
With the workforce increasingly being dominated by millennials and Gen-Z, ‘sleep leadership’ will find a platform soon in organizations where it hasn’t; that’s the future and that’s the solution to improve performance!
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Dr Ajay Sati is an Occupational Health physician who prefers to describe himself as an Occupationist, to denote, ‘an expert in diseases and other concerns of occupations’. Dr Sati has managed health and wellness programs in industries he worked, like the atomic energy, and energy (oil & gas) in India and overseas. He was involved in many greenfield and brownfield projects providing inputs from health point of view. Known for SOPs and protocols, he is currently involved with an energy MNC in designing protocols to support employees during the covid pandemic, and protocols to safely reopen offices and plants.
