Why being always on is costing you more than you think
When you are a leader, you are visible. People look at you whether you are aware of it or not. Team members, peers, bosses; they are all looking to you for different things: answers, reassurance, tone, results.
And you feel it. You feel the weight of the responsibility. So, you find yourself always trying to deliver what’s needed: whether it be motivation, inspiration, help, or success.
As a result, it is easy to believe that you must be switched on and positive the whole time.
A lot of the time, you can handle this. You can feel energised by the pressure, the pace, and the sense of purpose. But there are times when it wears thin, and it is then that leadership starts to feel like a performance that never ends.
The problem is that believing you must always be ‘on’ means you end up living with a version of yourself that isn’t real, and the cost to yourself and to the people around you can be higher than you realise.
What Loehr and Schwartz discovered
In 2001, performance psychologist Jim Loehr and journalist Tony Schwartz published a piece in the Harvard Business Review called ‘The Making of a Corporate Athlete’. It drew on Loehr’s decades of work with elite sportspeople and made the argument that the principles that govern peak physical performance apply just as directly to corporate leadership.
The central idea was that the enemy of sustained high performance is not hard work. It is the absence of recovery. In the book The Power of Full Engagement (2003), Loehr argues that energy — not time — is the fundamental currency of performance. And like any currency, it must be managed: you spend it of course, but you also need to replenish it.
They call this spend and replenishment mechanism: ‘oscillation’. World-class performers do not operate by pushing to the limit indefinitely. They work in deliberate cycles; oscillating between periods of high intensity and periods of genuine recovery. This rhythm builds sustainability. Without recovery, the ability to performance degrades over time. With it, the capacity to perform grows.
The same principle applies to leaders. The corporate environment tends to reward the appearance of relentless output through early starts, late finishes, always-on availability. But this mistakes activity for effectiveness. The human system, physical, emotional, mental, and what Loehr and Schwartz call the ‘spiritual’ (your sense of purpose and meaning), needs to operate in waves. Sustained engagement without recovery produces diminishing returns.
This is the territory of burnout and eventual breakdown. If you are familiar with this, you’ll know that sense having reached a limit that you just can’t go beyond. You know that your performance is down, but no amount of extra effort or mental anguish can bring you back to where you want to be. In fact, those they just makes things worse.
It is fine for us to have challenges. We hear all the time about the value of stretch goals, stretch assignments, growth opportunities etc. But the stretch zone, where growth happens, is not a place to occupy permanently. It is a place to visit, and then to recover from.
Recognising your own warning signs
Before you can manage your own oscillation, you need to notice when you are running low. Most of us have patterns, we just don’t always pay attention to them.
You might notice for example that:
small frustrations begin to feel disproportionately large (this is a big warning sign for me),
you lose patience easily (so is this),
you go through the motions of listening without genuinely taking anything in (tick),
the things that usually energise you start to feel flat (tick again).
These are not signs of weakness. They are data. Loehr and Schwartz describe these as signals of energy depletion across the four dimensions they identify: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
Importantly, these dimensions interact. Chronic physical depletion degrades your emotional regulation. Emotional exhaustion impairs your ability to think clearly. A loss of connection to purpose drains all motivation.
Your system is telling you that you need to rest and refresh before you can go again.
Building recovery into your leadership
But how can we do this? Surely, we can’t just say to our boss that we need to ‘oscillate off’ for a while, so we can’t take on this critical project or draft that urgent Board paper.
Well, perhaps we can and I’ll talk about how might do that in next week’s newsletter.
But it is worth understanding that Loehr and Schwartz emphasise that recovery does not have to be long to be effective. Small, intentional oscillations built into your ordinary working day and working week make a big difference over time. Their research showed that the length of recovery matters far less than its regularity and quality.
So here are some of the things you can do:
Protect micro-recovery moments. Between meetings or before picking up your phone, take a couple of minutes. Breathe. Sit. Do nothing. The parasympathetic nervous system (which is what brings us down from a stressed state) activates quickly when you simply stop. Most leaders never stop — they switch from one stimulus to the next. Brief pauses add up significantly across a working week.
Vary your energy demands deliberately. Not all work requires the same level of activation. Administrative tasks, reading, planning — these are naturally lower intensity. Be deliberate about sequencing your day so that high-demand activities (difficult conversations, presentations, complex decisions) are followed by lower-demand ones. And do this high demand stuff when you are at your best. For me, that is early in the morning (I am writing this, for example, at 6 am). For you, it may be late afternoon. Get to know what is best for you and work with it.
Protect genuine off time. This is where most leaders fail. They spend the evening answering emails or Sunday afternoon preparing for Monday. I get it. Sometimes these things are unavoidable but if you make a habit of them, they prevent the full recovery that makes the following week’s performance possible. Recovery needs to be intentional. Decide what works for you (exercise, time with family, sport) and treat it with the same discipline you bring to your professional commitments.
Notice your stretch zone threshold. Everyone’s threshold is different, and yours will vary depending on what else is happening in your life. A period of high personal stress lowers your professional capacity. A good run of sleep and exercise raises it. Get to know yourself well enough to adjust your expectations accordingly and get to know your team in a similar way so that you adjust what you ask of them.
A different vision of leadership
Apart from a few apparent supermen and women, the leaders who last are not the ones who are always switched on. They are the ones who learned to oscillate with intention, They work hard, then recover deliberately, then push on again.
Remember, recovery is not the absence of performance. It is what makes performance possible. If you recognise the 'always on' pattern in yourself, the answer is to do less, not more.
References
Loehr, J. and Schwartz, T. (2001). The making of a corporate athlete. Harvard Business Review, January 2001.
Loehr, J. and Schwartz, T. (2003). The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. New York: Free Press.
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