Sleep Well, Lead Well (Part 1) – Importance of Sleep for Leadership Performance and Wellbeing

“Most of the mistakes I’ve made, I made when I was too tired” – Bill Clinton

In this article I’m going to refer to several sources that identify the threats poor sleep can have on leadership performance. I’ll provide some feedback from a poll I’ve carried out within my network and a couple of personal anecdotes. In Part 2, I’ll draw on a similar selection of sources to provide a range of solutions which I hope will benefit you in improving your leadership with better sleep.

The threat to leadership from poor sleep
Essentially, the threat to leadership from insufficient or poor quality sleep comes down to biology. The area of our brain driving the key faculties of leadership (problem solving, planning, focus on results, EQ) is the area that is most dependent on sleep. Those whose roles are dominated by these faculties are most at risk of performance decline if they are not managing their sleep, and will benefit the most from maximising the benefits of their sleep.

In a recent article, McKinsey Consulting talk to the negative impacts on leadership from inadequate sleep across four areas – goal orientation, effective problem solving, openness to differing perspectives and being supportive of others. They cite numerous research papers documenting the negative impacts of sleep deficiency on these traits, as well as learning, trust building, communication and effective decision-making.

The challenge we face to get better sleep
Research also highlights challenges in many working cultures, where emails sent late at night, overseas conference calls are scheduled in the middle of the night, and the norm is to stay up late to work towards a major deadline. This culture of sleep abandonment is addressed at length in ‘The Sleep Revolution’, a situation the author describes as a ‘sleep deprivation crisis’.

We can also look to technology, especially the intrusion of devices into our pre-sleep hours, along with the sleep disrupting blue light they emit. We bring laptops into our bedrooms, phones to our night-stands and tablets for our bedtime reading. All of these can compromise one of our fundamental performance enhancers; the quality of our sleep. Many of us, myself included until fairly recently, have or do operate like this, either when we need to mange intense work demands, or habitually living under the fantasy of ‘sleep less – get more done’.

As well as my personal experience with diminishing leadership performance due to lack of sleep, I can also reflect on a particular team member I managed years ago, who rarely slept more than 4 hours a night due to a mixture of work and personal commitments. Their behaviour portrayed the sleep-deprived employee perfectly, highly caffeinated, reactive, low trust, and an anticipatable productivity cycle which diminished significantly from around 2pm onwards.

In surveying a group from my network, 80% recognized a reduction in their effectiveness as a leader if they slept poorly. 60% said their working practices could potentially negatively impact on their sleep, and 75% said they believed the business they lead would benefit if they slept better.

In Part 2 of this blog I’ll cover a range of solutions to improve sleep quality. My intention here has only been to shine a light on the subject and share the insight’s I’ve gleaned through my research, hopefully to your interest and benefit. If you’re interested in learning more, please see the links below to review the sources for this article, or feel free to get in touch to discuss how we can work together to improve this part of your and your business’ wellbeing and performance.

http://sleepeducation.blogspot.com.au/2010/02/bill-clinton-importance-of-sleep.html
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-organizational-cost-of-insufficient-sleep
http://ariannahuffington.com/books/the-sleep-revolution-hc