What are the Hidden Costs of Overwork?

When hard work costs more than it helps

00:00Bill Gallagher: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken, Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:25Bill Gallagher: I want to talk to you about the hidden costs of your hard work, the hidden costs of your hard work. We all know the obvious costs of it, right? When you work too hard, we know there's an impact on your stress, your health, your family, your fun, your fitness, your romance, your family life, right? We know there are obvious costs when you work too hard. But what if I told you that your hard work might not actually be helping the business? What if I told you your hard work might actually be costing the business more than it's helping? It's probably holding the team back in some ways that you don't see.

01:09Bill Gallagher: I want to talk to you about this hidden price tag of overwork. So I was coaching a CEO a few years ago of a SaaS company, first time CEO, first role, and a good business background on the finance side. But now he's running a SaaS company and really struggling, really worried about getting it right and trying to get by on two to three hours of sleep a night, every night, for a year plus, right? Think about that. Two to three hours of sleep a night, right? And this is not the first person I've encountered that tries to do that over time without some kind of cost.

The CEO who survived on two hours of sleep

01:49Bill Gallagher: And so this guy's working on everything, worried about everything, trying to get it right, and in every detail, in every part of the business. Now, with a good finance background, this makes sense. They're used to pouring through the books and the numbers, finding the facts and figuring things out. But as a result of being overly technical about it and worried and anxious about the whole thing and not experienced as a CEO, right, they were costing the business a great deal in a whole bunch of different ways.

02:23Bill Gallagher: So what was going on? One, everybody was anxious and walking on eggshells. They were worried that they were going to get it wrong or they'd start down some path and the CEO would change the direction on them because they wouldn't have consulted him. So initiative was next to nothing because they were all waiting for the CEO to weigh in on something, give them some direction or get involved in some challenge that they had, waiting for their time. They also were getting misdirection. So the CEO is now so tunnel visioned into the business, right, that they're missing the big picture. They're not looking outside of the world strategically. They're looking at every person and everything and every dollar spent and every dollar in and every customer and every system and the development and all that kind of thing. But they're not experts in all those things. They're not experts in selling and customer service and marketing, and they're not experts in development and any of that stuff, right? They're experts in at best a couple of things. But now they're involved in everything, right? Trying to work very late in the night, figuring things out, over-researching everything, getting involved in everything. So team's initiative is down. The leader has tunnel vision. They're not bringing a strategic and outside perspective to things. The other people aren't contributing anything and they are countermanding in things well outside their depth, right? Things where they have people on the team with good experience. Instead of giving them feedback and helping them develop their voice, they're doing it.

03:52Bill Gallagher: The company really struggled. Burned through several rounds of funding. And ultimately, that CEO failed and the business was broken out and other people took over parts of it. And the grand scheme of the unified business was not realized, right? And no amount of coaching could make any difference. I said more than once, stop doing this. It's not helping. It's not healthy. You are not doing well. And I can think of so many examples, things where they took a basic idea and then they spun it out of control without any depth. So a job description, a job scorecard for something that was supposed to be a simple kind of a role, and they spun it out into a whole manual for the job. They don't have any background in that particular job that I'm talking about or the many others that were like it, but they were involved in it. They couldn't let go, right? And they thought, well, I'm just going to work so much harder than everyone else because I'm invested in this company, my career, my actual money, my time, my life invested, had massive impacts on their family life, on relationship, on their health, their weight, their fitness. But the business had a real cost as well. Had a real cost on the business, the business success, and the opportunity missed in growing a company that had lots of potential to do the things that they originally set out to do. And no amount of coaching or things that I said made any difference in that case. And probably, I don't know, maybe they would have listened to somebody else. Clearly not to me in this case. So I was not effective in that.

Rallying a team beats doing it yourself

05:37Bill Gallagher: And I want to use it with respect and anonymity, right, to help you, to help me, to help everyone else, to help all our current and future clients and all our listeners and viewers of the program to not make the same mistake. If you find yourself doing that, you know, every now and then there's a crunch time, there's a thing. But if you find crunch time is every time, if you find the big crisis is every week, every month, every quarter, every year, then it's time to stop, right? A little bit, a few months here and there, a few weeks, a few days, a single kind of thing. But when one crisis and one drama connects to the other and you're always working too hard, in truth, you want to be able to tackle a big crisis with a little bit of focus, but a lot of elevating the team up. Not driving the team, not in everything they're doing, but elevating the team, rallying the team.

06:27Bill Gallagher: When I think about the biggest success that I could think of in my career from a leadership standpoint, it was really when I rallied the team to do something that I had no idea how to do on my own. I couldn't figure it out. I gathered the team together. I empowered them. Collectively, we did the work. I didn't work actually that hard in that time period. The moment I started to empower them, I started to work a lot less. Together, we did a lot of interesting things. We worked very hard. We got through a difficult period, but the shift was my not trying to do it all. I couldn't do it all. I didn't have the answers. I didn't know what to do. I didn't have the skills. But as a leader, I could rally the team around a different future.

The hidden business costs of overwork

07:12Bill Gallagher: So think about, right, there's obvious personal costs and you're taking them because you think maybe that's helping, right? You're sacrificing your health, your family, your kids, your fun. The fun and the friends is one of the first things that we're willing to give up. And then we'll sacrifice our health. We'll do that. Then it'll start to go to our relationship. And then we will start to sacrifice our kids. Kids are usually, you try to make time for them and you preserve that time for the family stuff. But all kinds of other things you sacrifice really first because you think you're doing something good that's going to pay off in the long run and it's not forever, except it becomes habitual. And then you start doing it forever. So but now think about this, you're suppressing the team.

07:54Bill Gallagher: Consider where you might be robbing them of initiative, of ownership, of their roles. Consider where your tunnel vision within the company and the company's problems have you so inwardly focused that you're missing strategic opportunities. You're missing innovation because you're not thinking outside the box longer term. You're just in the crisis and in the struggle of running the business. That's the tunnel vision.

08:21Bill Gallagher: Then think about the limits, as a bottleneck in production or in anything else. Think about the limits of your capacity. Even if you're Superman and you manage to get by on thirty minutes of sleep at night in a sustained way, you are ultimately a limit on the business. If you don't become an empowering leader who learns to work through and with many people, then it's always going to come down to you and your way of working. And sometimes structurally, it's set up that way. I run a coaching organization. I have some assistant associate coaches and some subject matter experts and a lot of support staff, but I am a kind of a limit by design in this thing. And with the exception of those other associates, and until I use that, I'm a bottleneck in natural inherent bottling. So I want to shift not only the design, but then I want to shift also my way of behaving with the whole thing.

Shifting from bottleneck to enabler

09:21Bill Gallagher: And now think about the cost. Recruiting, engaging people is really difficult. Think about talent churn now. If you've got people who are suppressed, who are held back, who are uninspired by your hard work, a super hardworking leader isn't particularly inspiring. We might think, Oh, people look up to us. They'll be really grateful for our hard work. And you'll get some of that. But more than that, you'll get like it's like a one man, one woman show over there. It's not going to be the thing that makes a difference. So here's the thing I think that's really useful to keep considering. Most business owners that I've encountered and been work too hard and still feel stuck.

10:08Bill Gallagher: I'll say it again. Most business owners work too hard and still feel stuck. So if you'll shift your leadership, we'll help you to build a stronger team, and you'll start scaling with ease. We want you to grow your business, but we want you to grow your business without sacrificing your life. And that really is the key to the whole thing. I hope it's been helpful. I hope it gives you something to think about. Start to go notice the hidden costs in your business. You can spend some time noticing the real costs. You probably have been aware of those, at least in the background, but I bet you're missing out on some of the costs. Go looking for the hidden costs, and maybe that'll be enough to get you to start to evolve your leadership style, your leadership approach. Hope this has been helpful. We'll talk to you again next time. In the meantime, keep scaling.

10:54Bill Gallagher: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken. Do Less. Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.