One Christmas Day, I sat down to work on a handbook. It was not meaningless work. Quite the opposite. I was in my first major leadership position and there was no single guide bringing together the information staff and parents kept asking for. The handbook would solve a genuine problem. It would make things clearer, reduce repeated questions and help the organisation work better. I had also decided that it needed to be ready when everyone returned in the new year. I felt behind. So, while my wife, children and in-laws were together, I spent hours working. At the time, I could explain exactly why. Looking back, I struggle to explain why any of it had to happen on Christmas Day.
That is one of the difficulties with exhaustion and overwork. From inside them, individual decisions can look entirely reasonable. There is always another email, another deadline, another problem that would be easier if it were resolved now. Nobody necessarily announces that work has become too important. Life simply starts accommodating it. You socialise a little less. You take longer over things. You stop getting involved in things you would normally enjoy. You arrive home with very little left. Eventually your world has become smaller, but because every reduction happened for an apparently sensible reason, you may not notice the pattern. I have experienced different kinds of exhaustion during my career. Sometimes the environment in which I was working depleted me. At other times, I helped create the exhaustion myself because I was determined to make the work as good as I possibly could.
The second kind is particularly difficult for conscientious people to recognise because it can look so much like commitment. I hold myself to high standards and I am highly self critical. Earlier in my career, particularly when I had something to prove, hard work became part of the evidence I presented to myself that I was doing the job properly. Later, when I no longer felt I needed to prove that I could lead, the motivation changed rather than disappeared. I had been promoted, worked in larger organisations and returned to roles with more experience and confidence. People thought I was good at what I did. I thought I was good at it too. Then the pressure became not to let them down. The story in my head was different, but the behaviour could look remarkably similar.
There are times when exceptional effort really is required. I have worked in situations where somebody simply had to carry the boxes. I have no objection to long hours when circumstances genuinely demand them, and I do not believe sustainable working means pretending every workload complaint is automatically reasonable. I remember giving a capable colleague in Germany around eight hours to produce a short video and being told the time was insufficient. The disagreement eventually reached the works council, and I challenged it strongly because I believed the expectation was fair. Protecting people from unreasonable demands cannot mean abandoning reasonable expectations of performance. The question I would ask now is simple: help me understand what the barriers are. That question leaves room for both possibilities. Perhaps the workload is unreasonable. Perhaps something is preventing a capable person from delivering. Perhaps the expectation is reasonable and performance needs addressing. Curiosity does not remove accountability; it helps us apply it fairly.
The irony is that I have often extended that curiosity to other people more readily than to myself. If somebody on my team was overloaded, I might tell them to work from home for a day so they could concentrate on a major project without the normal interruptions. I would ask what could be taken off their workload. I would have regarded that as sensible management, not weakness. Yet I could interpret the same adjustment in myself as evidence that I was not coping. I knew the advice. I simply did not always believe I was entitled to follow it. That contradiction matters because experienced leaders are not necessarily protected by knowing the right answers. We can be very good at recognising healthy practice for somebody else while constructing an exception for ourselves.
Perhaps one useful test is to ask what advice we would give someone we respect if they were behaving exactly as we are. If I discovered that a colleague had spent hours working at home on Christmas Day to finish a handbook they had decided ought to be ready in January, I would be appalled. I would ask why it could not wait. I would probably tell them that nobody needed that level of sacrifice from them. Yet when I was the person doing it, the deadline felt real and the work felt necessary. High standards and self punishment can sit surprisingly close together, and I am not convinced we can always see the boundary while we are crossing it.
Exhaustion complicates that judgement further because it does not merely reduce energy. It can change the way a situation appears. When I am very tired, I become slower. I overthink. I can become more emotional and more inclined towards worst case scenarios. I sometimes vocalise those possibilities too, which means my depleted state does not remain a private experience. It can affect the emotional temperature around me. That does not mean every concern produced by an exhausted person is irrational. Often there is a real problem underneath it. The difficulty is proportion. A possibility that deserves consideration can begin to feel like the inevitable outcome.
Very early in my leadership career, I remember being at work after very little sleep when a family member was involved in a tragically difficult situation. My concern was genuine and I knew it was affecting me. People around me could understand why I was upset, but some could also hold the situation differently. They could see something serious without experiencing it as the catastrophe I was imagining. Looking back, I do not regret that colleagues saw me emotional. I have never believed leadership requires pretending not to feel. What matters to me is recognising how little capacity I had available to process something genuinely difficult. Exhaustion had not invented the problem. It had changed the weight I gave to its most frightening possibilities.
That is why people who know us well can sometimes see deterioration before we do. My wife has been the broken record in my life on more than one occasion, telling me that work was affecting me while I denied it. There was no dramatic intervention that finally changed my mind. My stubbornness simply wore off long enough for me to admit that she was right. Repetition itself became information. One comment can be dismissed as somebody else’s interpretation. When a person who knows you intimately keeps saying that you are more negative, more overwhelmed or simply not yourself, perhaps the useful response is not immediate agreement, but curiosity.
Leaders face an additional problem because hierarchy makes this kind of feedback harder to receive. I have always tried to build teams in which people can speak freely, but psychological safety does not make hierarchy disappear. It is one thing for a colleague to challenge a proposal. It is another for them to look at the person leading the organisation and say, ‘You are exhausted and it is changing you.’ If somebody reaches the point where they are prepared to say that to their boss, the signs may already be difficult to ignore. Leaders therefore cannot outsource responsibility for noticing their own deterioration to the people around them. We need other signals too: changes in patience, perspective, pace, relationships, judgement and the parts of life that have quietly begun to disappear.
Organisations can make this harder because visible effort is easy to praise. Someone is always first in, last out, answering messages at unusual hours and volunteering for the difficult job. We call them committed. Sometimes they are. I have praised that behaviour myself and probably will again when the circumstances genuinely warrant it. The challenge is recognising when exceptional effort deserves recognition without allowing it to become the expectation. There is something admirable about somebody stepping up when it genuinely matters. But visible effort and valuable contribution are not identical, and neither tells us whether the pattern is sustainable. If we praise sacrifice without becoming curious about its cost, we can accidentally turn an emergency behaviour into a cultural expectation. The employee receives admiration for giving 120 per cent, then quietly recalibrates 120 per cent as the new 100. Returning to something sustainable begins to feel like underperforming.
The cost does not vanish simply because the work continues to be good. When capacity is limited and we refuse to compromise at work, the compromise happens somewhere else. For me, that was sometimes at home. I could protect my professional standards and still get the job done, but the people closest to me received whatever remained. That is an uncomfortable sentence to write because my family has always mattered more to me than my career. I was brought up with a strong belief that you look after your family, give them a good home and do what you can to make sure they are safe and happy. Yet it is perfectly possible to believe your family comes first while repeatedly giving work the first claim on your energy.
That contradiction has become harder to ignore as my children have grown. You can recover from exhaustion. You cannot recover time. A holiday may restore you, but it cannot return the evenings you missed or recreate a Christmas when your children were younger. I used to reach school holidays depleted and sometimes spend the first week or two ill, as though my body had finally been given permission to stop. I thought the holiday was the recovery plan. In reality, I had spent months borrowing against it. Even when the break restored me, it could not repay everything that had been spent getting there.
This is why I have become wary of defending rest only in the language of performance. There is plenty of evidence in ordinary experience that rested people think more clearly, regulate emotion better and work more effectively. But if we are not careful, even wellbeing becomes another productivity strategy: sleep so that you can produce more tomorrow, take a break so that you can return sharper, spend time with your family so that you can come back to work refreshed. Those things may all happen, but they are not the only justification. Some parts of life deserve protection because work is not entitled to all of us. Playing with your children does not need to improve tomorrow’s leadership performance to be worth doing.
I am still learning that. I have not arrived at some enlightened point where I always close the laptop at the right time. In fact, while building The Quiet Leader HQ, I have caught myself repeating parts of the old pattern. I want the website to make a strong first impression. I have built it myself with very little financial investment beyond the site itself, and my hope is that people who arrive here understand who I am and perhaps think, ‘I can relate to this person.’ Though during its creation I am conscious of how little time I am spending with my family.
There is an uncomfortable irony in trying to protect future time with the people you love by taking yourself away from them in the present. I can see that contradiction now in a way I probably could not twenty years ago. Seeing it does not automatically make me stop. Fear of not being able to provide a solid future still makes me work harder. But at least I know what I am fighting.
That may be one of the more useful questions underneath overwork: not simply, ‘Why am I working so much?’ but, ‘What am I frightened will happen if I stop?’ The answer may be failure. It may be disappointing people, losing status, appearing weak, becoming financially insecure or discovering that we are not as indispensable as we imagined. The fear may even be entirely understandable. But once we can name it, we have a better chance of deciding whether another hour of work is genuinely solving the problem or merely soothing the fear for another hour.
For me, another test is marginal value. I am willing to put enormous effort into something when that effort materially improves the result. Eventually, though, there comes a point where a day’s work might produce one per cent improvement. At that point, perfectionism can become difficult to distinguish from an inability to let go. ‘I have done everything I reasonably can’ is a more useful standard than ‘I have done everything I possibly can.’ The word reasonably forces other obligations back into the equation. Excellence has a cost, and responsible leadership includes deciding when the next increment of quality is no longer worth what has to be surrendered to obtain it.
None of this gives us a clean formula for sustainable leadership. There will be late nights. There will be crises. There will be moments when somebody has to carry the boxes, and I would distrust any philosophy of work that pretended otherwise. Equally, there will be people who use the language of workload to avoid reasonable expectations, just as there will be organisations that use the language of commitment to normalise unreasonable ones. Leadership requires judgement between those extremes. We should be able to ask people for a fair day’s work and defend their right to have a life beyond it. We should be able to admire extraordinary effort without quietly making extraordinary effort the admission price for being considered committed.
Perhaps the harder challenge is applying that same fairness to ourselves. I have spent much of my career knowing things that I have not consistently practised. I have encouraged other people to slow down while accelerating myself. I have told people that asking for help is sensible while worrying that my own need for help might reveal weakness. I have protected other people’s capacity while treating mine as something to be stretched. Experience has not removed those contradictions. It has made them easier to recognise. Sometimes that is what growth looks like: not becoming the person who never repeats an old pattern, but becoming the person who notices sooner and has a better chance of choosing differently.
If I could return to that Christmas Day, I would not give myself a lecture about burnout, productivity or sustainable performance. I would tell myself to close the handbook. Go and do Lego with the kids. Play with them. Have a glass of wine with your wife. Sit with your family. Just stop. The handbook could have waited. There would be more work in January and considerably more work in the years that followed. What there would not be was another Christmas with those children at exactly that age, with that particular family gathered in that particular room.
The work will still be there. Time as a whole family will not.
If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.