Working harder is not the answer.
I was in my third year at Google, trying to prove myself by earning a promotion by working late into the night and on the weekends. But despite how much time I spent at work staying on top of my email and going to meetings and preparing slides, I wasn’t delivering much impact.
That lack of impact meant that my manager asked me to take on yet more work, and I said yes because I thought that if I could just get the promotion, everything would change: I’d get more respect, I’d have less work, people would listen to me, etc. But more work meant more time, and somehow I still wasn’t doing enough – I had to go faster and faster while working longer hours just to keep up.
Eventually, working so hard had a cost. After several months of 100 hour weeks, my body gave out. I woke up with a 103-degree fever on Christmas Day, and spent a week in bed recovering. While convalescing, I realized just how unhappy I was – I wasn’t seeing friends or family, and my physical and mental health were in shambles. I decided that the promotion wasn’t worth the wreck it had made of my life.
That choice changed my life. I learned to have more impact without working harder by focusing my time on the most impactful projects; that eventually led to me running business strategy and operations for Google Search Ads for six years as Chief of Staff. I learned to say no to meaningless work, and to set boundaries around work so I could have a personal life; now I run my own coaching business while parenting three kids with my wife. But it all started by realizing that working harder was destroying my life.
In working with extraordinary leaders both at Google and as an executive coach, I’ve seen that the most successful leaders are not the ones that work the hardest – they are the ones who thoughtfully invest their time and energy by ruthlessly prioritizing the work where they can deliver the most value. They get work done through others by building coalitions of mutual success where everybody benefits.
I’ve started calling this approach the Executive Mindset, as it’s a shift from what brings success as an individual contributor. Instead of working harder and doing more yourself, it’s stepping back to reflect on what’s most important and getting the work done through others who are a better fit.
After realizing that I was offering similar advice to dozens of different leaders who realized they needed to change how they approached work, I condensed the key learnings into a class, Scale Your Leadership with the Executive Mindset.
If you are working harder and harder but not getting the chance to break through to the next level, this class is for you. The next cohort starts next week on Sept. 4th, and I’d love to have you join me.
Ask me any questions in the comments, or sign up from the link in my profile.