The sweet spot

I saw a friend the other day who had recently had a second baby. As is often the case, many of the challenges she was encountering were nothing to do with the new arrival and everything to do with her older child, who had had her entire world turned upside down by the arrival of an unrequested sibling and, perhaps understandably, had now turned into a small witch. I could relate - strongly. In the first few months after my son was born, my daughter would frequently refuse to leave the park or playground, hit the new baby over the head when she was feeling cross (and, frankly, when she wasn’t) and sometimes, inexplicably, lie down on the pavement and declare that she wasn’t moving.

I reminisced about these joyful occasions with my friend and also passed on some of the best advice I received during that period: lower your standards. Kids go to bed without a bath? Doesn’t matter. Screen time limits? What screen time limits? If they’ll only eat cereal for dinner, get those Shreddies out of the cupboard. Do whatever it is you need to do to get to the end of the day physically and mentally intact - to quote another well known parenting adage, your goal is that everyone is fed and no one’s dead.

This excellent tip can be applied to a whole range of situations when one aspect of your life is proving particularly challenging - if you’re grieving, if you’re physically or mentally ill, if you’re going through a difficult time at work. We only have so much time and mental energy on any given day, so if a lot of that needs to flow in one particular direction, other areas of your life may need to change shape to compensate.

In a leadership context this approach can also be helpful, although in a slightly less straightforward way. Sometimes, we need to lower our standards at work because we are dealing with something seismic in our personal life and we may not have the capacity to fire on all cylinders. And sometimes, one particular element of our job expands way beyond its usual parameters - an HR issue that explodes and suddenly occupies your every waking moment, a funding application that needs a lot of dedicated time in order to give you the best shot of getting the money, a hole in the budget that urgently needs solving and becomes your top priority. In these instances, we may need to look at the other areas of work that we usually deal with and decide what the minimum acceptable standard is during this period - or even, seeing if there’s someone else who can take them on whilst our energy is needed elsewhere.

The reason I’ve described this as a less straightforward option for leaders is because of the number of people whose work intersects with our own. For example, the decision to skip a few meetings to free up more time for some intensive work on a budget or artistic project will have a knock on effect on the other people who are attending that meeting. This isn’t an insurmountable problem - simply something that needs to be thought about - and it highlights the importance of intentionally cutting back your energy in particular places. Too often, when one area of our work is exploding, we still feel like we need to keep on top of everything else, which, because we are not robots, has the potential to lead to either burnout or a crunch point where all those other things have to be dropped anyway, and in a much less controlled manner than if you’d planned for it in advance.

Many leaders that I meet in our sector view themselves as a bottomless resource - I have this tendency too, although I think it’s diminished a little with age. When times are tough, you just work harder - doesn’t matter what you’re dealing with outside of work, or that one particular part of your role is taking up far more time than it usually does - rather than balance things out, we simply up the ante and hope that things get saner in the fullness of time. Once a reasonable level of time and energy is exhausted, we burn ourselves to find more.

The economist Kate Raworth has written a book called Doughnut Economics in which she lays out a theory for how society can meet the needs of its people and not destroy the earth in the process. She represents this by way of a doughnut, the idea being that everyone should live within both their and the earth’s means, depicted by the space within the double ring. If part of society is living in the hole in the middle of the doughnut, they are not experiencing the quality of life that we want for ourselves and our fellow humans, and they will need more resources in order to live safe, full and happy lives. For those living beyond the boundary of the doughnut’s outer ring, their lifestyle is impacting negatively on the planet and they, ultimately, need to consume less. Her thesis is that we must move away from growth as our primary driving force and instead think about an upper and lower limit of wealth, resource and comfort that we want all of humanity to live within.

The underpinning fact of Raworth’s theory is that the earth is not an infinite resource - and, as I’ve suggested above, neither are we. I like to think of my own version of the doughnut from a leadership perspective - if you operate in the hole in the middle, you’re essentially phoning it in, and if you’re consistently beyond the outer ring, there lies burnout. But in the middle is the sweet spot - working hard but not drawing on a well of energy that has already been emptied.

My friend with the new baby was a bit uncertain when I relayed my ‘lower your standards’ advice to her - I think she feared that, once you drop them, they’ll never go back up again. This is one’s inner perfectionist talking - in reality, we know that change is possible, and that what shifts one way can always shift the other. The same is true in our working lives - your identity as a committed and high performing leader won’t disappear if you take the decision to consciously cut back on some areas of work when you’ve got others that are taking more time and headspace. Much like parenting, the teams you work with are likely to do as you do, rather than as you say - in living within the ring of the doughnut, you’re modelling what’s possible at work and building a culture where no one has to give more or less than they’re physically or mentally able to.