By | Josh Bersin | Global Industry Analyst, I study all aspects of HR, business leadership, corporate L&D, recruiting, and HR technology
As with many of you, I’ve been watching Elon Musk’s management style at Twitter carefully. Is it ok to lay people off anonymously and ask people to sleep in the office just because the new CEO overpaid for the company?
Well today Arianna Huffington’s article, Employees Aren’t The Only Ones Suffering From Burnout really nailed this topic. Everyone, from CEOs on down, will suffer poor performance when they are burned out, tired, or stressed.
I know it sounds cool to say “I’m powering through this” or “I’m killing it” when you work night after night on a project. But as many researchers know (including the US Military, by the way, which highly advises soldiers to sleep), the result of burnout is poor performance, errors, and even property damage.
Lack of sleep can cause lots of problems, as many studies have shown. In fact I kind of wonder if Mr. Musk was short on sleep when he put together the deal in the first place. And it may make one wonder about the engineers working on self-driving cars, along with many other Tesla safety features.
Sleep deprivation impairs memory, decreases cognitive function, and results in poor decision making [7–12]. This decrease in psychomotor performance is associated with an increased occurrence of error [8, 13–16].
Business Does Not Have To Operate This Way
Business success does not require brutal hours, constant stress, or unhealthy work. And I’ve studied this myself.
