The art and science of well-being at
work
Lucia Rahilly: Welcome to the McKinsey Podcast. I’m
Lucia Rahilly, McKinsey’s publications director—and I have a confession to
make: today I am really overtired. Nonetheless, I plan to have a pretty
productive day through some combination of caffeine, maybe a little sugar,
hopefully the odd adrenaline rush. So I’m doing what most of us do, which is
powering through the fatigue. But is my lack of sleep having more of an effect
on my performance than I realize?
We’re going to talk about sleep and other
risks to executive well-being posed by today’s relentlessly fast and furious
work culture. We’ll also discuss some techniques that high-performing business
leaders use to manage those risks successfully. Joining me in New York today
are Manish Chopra, a partner in McKinsey’s New York office and author of the
book The Equanimous Mind, which chronicles the impact of meditation
on his personal and professional life. Welcome, Manish.
Manish Chopra: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Lucia Rahilly: We also have Els van der Helm, a specialist in
McKinsey’s Amsterdam office, who advises McKinsey clients and consultants on
the importance of sleep in organizations. Welcome, Els.
Els van der Helm: Thank you.
Lucia Rahilly: And Caroline Webb, a former partner in McKinsey’s
London office and an external senior adviser to McKinsey on leadership.
Caroline is also the CEO of Sevenshift, an advisory firm that uses behavioral
science to help clients improve their professional lives, and she is the author
of the new book How to Have a Good Day. Welcome, Caroline.
Caroline Webb: Thank you.
Lucia Rahilly: I want to start by asking each of you to give a
few words of context on what seems to be a burgeoning interest in wellness, and
particularly in wellness in the workplace. People have been griping about the
accelerating pace of working life and its effects on attention and well-being
for 150 years, basically since industrialization, and probably before. So why
now—why this intensifying focus now on how best to cope in the workplace? Els,
let’s start with you and what you’ve learned from your research on sleep.
Els van der Helm: Even though people are used to being tired, I do
think it’s changed in that with new technology there are fewer moments in the
day where we take a break, have some self-reflection, and take it easy.
When I ask people in my workshops where
their phone is at night, 80 percent say it’s in their bedroom. Over half of
them check their email in bed. I think there is definitely something that has
changed compared with, say 20 years ago. We’re also much more aware of what the
effect is of a healthy lifestyle so that in general we know we should eat more
healthily and spend more time exercising.
I think mindfulness and sleep are the next
things to focus on. Companies are starting to realize that they have these
highly educated employees who are very capable, but that that’s not enough. You
need to make sure that they are engaged, happy, and healthy.
Lucia Rahilly: What about some of the research on brain science?
Has that illuminated the effects of well-being on performance in a way that
businesses can see? Caroline, do you want to take that one?
Caroline Webb: Oh, enormously so. I would say everything that Els
has just said is absolutely right, that the shift in technology has led to our
always-on lives. That’s obviously raised awareness of the impact of executive
well-being.
But I think it’s also the fact that the
evidence is just much sharper and more compelling. There are statistically
robust studies that show that when you are sleep deprived it affects your
cognitive functioning and your emotional resilience. There are studies, across
the board, that show that, effectively, what you’re doing is depriving the part
of your brain that is more sophisticated, what I call the Deliberate
System—you’re making it very difficult for it to do its job fully. For
data-driven, evidence-hungry, senior people who need to know that there’s a
real reason for shifting behavior, the scientific evidence really helps.
Lucia Rahilly: Manish, your journey seems to have been more of a
personal one. We were talking before this podcast started about the broadening
of meditation in the culture. Do you have thoughts on that that you’d like to
share?
Manish Chopra: Sure. I think it’s interesting what we’re talking
about. I think wellness and well-being are often used interchangeably. But what
we are talking about here is more along the lines of well-being. Wellness often
tends to focus more on the physical aspects of health and lifestyle, which are
also important.
I do feel that what is changing is that
people’s expectations for how effective they need to be have gone up because
they realize that the standards of the past are not going to be sufficient in
the future. Take, for example, even health. People are more focused on that
than they were 20 years ago.
The same way people are realizing
that—just like health is important to personal effectiveness from the
standpoint of lifestyle and retaining longevity—people are realizing that your
mind is the other asset that you have to continue to invest in.
So meditation, which, interestingly, grew
more out of the Eastern cultures and is focused more on liberating one’s self
from suffering, has found a very interesting audience in the professional
world, where it has a lot of other side benefits, which are a value to the
time-strapped executive—whether it’s stress levels, managing attention, speed
of decision making, resilience, and so on and so forth. So I do feel that the
time is right for these kinds of forces to converge to allow executives—and I’d
even say it doesn’t have to be an executive, any high-intensity professional—to
focus on these effectiveness habits, or different tools, that would make their
mind a more healthy asset than we’ve been able to do in the past.
Lucia Rahilly: Do you think that some of the attention to
meditation is driven by Silicon Valley, and luminaries in Silicon Valley, who
have taken up meditation? Like Steve Jobs, for example?
Manish Chopra: It’s not just Silicon Valley, right? Oprah Winfrey
is a known meditator, Ariana Huffington, and Congressman Tim Ryan.
Caroline Webb: The US Army.
Manish Chopra: The US Army is using it for posttraumatic stress
disorder; Bill George, who used to be the CEO of Medtronic and is now a
professor at Harvard. So I think it’s been a confluence of things. I think
there are people on the West Coast, for sure, who have jumped into this a
little bit faster.
The tech industry probably found a way
into this sooner because there’s probably even more information overload there.
And that has made it a little bit more acceptable. Frankly, I feel there are a
lot of closeted meditators out there in the corporate world who feel some sense
of uneasiness about being open about it.
Lucia Rahilly: I myself meditated for a couple of years, as I
mentioned to you. Talking about that in the workforce was not something that I
thought would enhance my professional stature, particularly. I was kind of a
closet meditator, in fact. And that leads to a question about pockets of
resistance, both at the individual level and at the institutional level, to
promoting this kind of well-being effort. Maybe we could talk about some of the
typical barriers that you encounter and how you’ve seen executives navigate
those barriers successfully.
Caroline Webb: I think there’s a mind-set shift that happens when
people start to take this seriously, which is to go from seeing the investment
of time in sleep, exercise, and mindfulness as a cost to thinking of it as an
investment. In fact, it’s not just an investment that pays back long term, it’s
an investment that pays back, all the evidence suggests, rather immediately.
The idea of that shift—that this is not down time, it’s simply investing in
your ability to have more up time—is something which I’ve seen at the heart of
everybody who makes a difference in the way that they’re living their lives,
and also in the way that their teams around them are living their lives.
One executive I was working with said that
she’d always thought of these sorts of investing in herself as something which
was nice to have. It was always lower down the list than everything that was
going on for her at work and with her family. Then she realized that that
investment in herself allowed her to be more effective in everything else she
was doing. That was what shifted her approach and made her take time each day
to invest in herself.
Manish Chopra: I boil it down to two things, and I think both are
perceived barriers: one is lack of time, and the second is lack of belief. The
lack of time, as I think Caroline just pointed out, is a little bit of chicken
and egg. The return on investment on that time is really high. But you don’t
know that yet because you’re lacking the second thing, which is belief. So just
like you talk to people who exercise regularly, they couldn’t go without it for
a long period of time without feeling something was missing.
The same is true for when you invest in
these activities that enhance your personal effectiveness, whether it’s through
meditation, exercise, or sleep management. But the science is there. I think
the role models which you were talking about earlier are a big factor in
overcoming skepticism because if they see a relevant person, or a senior
person, speak more openly about this, people tend to pay attention.
Lucia Rahilly: Yes, the experiential benefit. You described
yourself as a skeptic of meditation prior to trying it, correct?
Manish Chopra: It was an unexpected arrival at a ten-day retreat
that changed my mind about it.
Lucia Rahilly: Was that retreat the particular catalyst for you
to start? There wasn’t a business problem that you were trying to solve?
Manish Chopra: Ironically, I went to it because my wife found a
location that was offering the executive version of the course. I thought I was
going to have some networking opportunities. Lo and behold, I was suckered into
it. I thought I wouldn’t last even a day. I ended up coming out a different
person.
Lucia Rahilly: That’s fantastic.
Caroline Webb: I do think that there are two classic ways that
people get into this state of mind about the fact that it’s worth investing in
your sleep, exercise, and mindfulness. The two archetypes that I’ve seen are,
one, you dip your toe in the water and you’re convinced enough by the evidence
that you do—what you’re saying, Manish—you decide you’re going to try a little
bit, and then your brain gets that nice feedback loop, which is something we
know is needed to develop a new habit, and there you go.
The other classic archetype is a crisis of
some sort, some kind of transformational experience—and hitting the wall, hitting
the buffers, some major personal incident in your life. For me it was
definitely a health crash, where I suddenly realized that my body was not
somehow completely separate from my brain, and vice versa. That was, for me,
the big turning point. It wasn’t the same as a retreat, but effectively, I was
forced to retreat and think about what it takes to be effective when you’re
working very hard.
Lucia Rahilly: Els, you’ve done some research on the effects of
sleep deprivation on performance. Would you like to talk about that? You had
some interesting comparisons between sleep-deprived folks and drunkenness.
Els van der Helm: There are many things that happen when you don’t
sleep enough. Your blood pressure goes up, you’re responding differently to
sugar—and you can imagine what that means for your health longer term.
But when you look at the brain, there are
so many different functions that you need to master every day at work. You need
to be able to focus your attention and not be distracted by other things. As
Caroline said, the front part of your brain, the best part of your brain, which
makes you who you are and makes you smart, is the most vulnerable to sleep
deprivation.
The rest of your brain can cope relatively
well, but it’s also suffering. The front of your brain is the first one to get
hit. That also leads to us not being aware that we’re not functioning as well
as we are supposed to because that part of your brain also gives you that
insight. That’s why I think a lot people think they can just get away with it
and they’re functioning perfectly fine, when they’re not.
Lucia Rahilly: I’m one example of that.
Els van der Helm: There are these studies where they have two groups
of people. One group gets alcohol, the other, poor guys, get sleep deprived.
You can compare their performance on a host of different tasks and try to
equate—when they are equal. You see that if someone skips a whole night of
sleep, they’re legally drunk.
You’re basically at 0.1 percent
blood-alcohol level, which is double the legal limit for driving in many
countries. I often say this in my workshop where we look at, OK, what is
everyone’s sleep debt? What did you lose out on sleep this week compared with
what you actually need?
There have been so many people that lost
eight hours or more. I tell them that that is as if you’re showing up drunk at
work. We just don’t seem to realize that. It would be way more fun to actually
show up drunk at work instead of showing up that sleep deprived. I often refer
to the series Mad Men, taking place in the ’60s, where they’re
drinking and smoking in the office. And you think, What are you doing? You’re
at work! But we’re doing the exact same thing right now. We’re showing up just
as bad, in terms of performance. We’re not nearly having as much fun, though.
Lucia Rahilly: We’re also in denial about it, right? That
statistic about the percentage of executives who said that sleeplessness has no
effect on performance.
Els van der Helm: We looked specifically at leadership performance
and the behaviors that we already know are critical to the leadership of a
healthy organization: what effects does sleep have on them? Each of those you
can relate to needing sleep before you can be a good leader. Whereas if you ask
leaders themselves, Are you sleeping enough? The answer is no. Are you happy
with your quality of sleep? No. Is this affecting your leadership performance?
No. That’s scientifically impossible.
Lucia Rahilly: How much sleep is the right amount of sleep? What
is the guideline?
Els van der Helm: On average, the population needs about eight
hours, but it’s a normal curve. You could be one of the lucky ones that is fine
on seven or six and a half, or unlucky that you need much more than eight. I
usually tell people to try to figure out how much they sleep on vacation when
there’s no stress to mask how much you need. And, how much do you sleep on
vacation when you take the time to disconnect and sleep?
Lucia Rahilly: How do approaches like using caffeine affect
cognitive behavior after a sleepless night? Does caffeine give you the
temporary boost that you’re seeking?
Els van der Helm: It depends on the type of task. It definitely
helps in your subjective feeling of tiredness, your attention levels definitely
go up. But there are a lot of other things that happen when you’re sleep
deprived. It’s harder to think more creatively and come up with new solutions.
Caffeine doesn’t help you overcome that deficit.
Caffeine has a long half-life, so it’s not
out of your body that quickly. When you don’t get enough sleep, your sleep gets
a little bit more efficient at night. So don’t go crazy. It doesn’t fix
everything, but it gets a little bit more efficient with a little bit less
light sleep and more deep sleep. However, when you’ve had caffeine, that
doesn’t happen, because your brain has been tricked into thinking that it
hasn’t been awake for that long. Then you don’t get that better recovery sleep.
Manish Chopra: There is one thing that you guys were talking
about earlier that I wanted to comment on, and I’ll give you the one-person
view on this equation. I think there is an issue, at least in our culture, that
less sleep is like a badge of honor.
So never mind that people are not
admitting that it’s impacting their executive functioning, but I think for some
people, at least when I was early on in my career, you’d see people walking
around saying, “OK, so until what time were you in the office?” “Oh, I was here
until 3:00 AM.”
The thought that would go through my mind
was a combination of sympathy and, frankly, some sense of you need to get a
life. As opposed to expecting some kind of reward from me, an acknowledgement
that you are a superior being who can operate on three hours of sleep—they
weren’t getting it.
We were talking about the closeted
meditators and so forth. I think there is still some shame I see people
experience when they are admitting that they want to have a life. We need to
overcome that, in general, because otherwise all of these things are
theoretically good. Maybe there are some people who are higher performers or
senior enough to be able to say, “OK, I deserve balance in life.” But people
who, early on, start in high-intensity professions feel like this is the price
to pay to survive professionally. I think that’s one. I think the second thing
you guys are talking about, the balance, I feel like I’ve been an interesting
experiment in all of this myself.
I was the guy who had trouble getting out
of bed in the morning at 7:00 AM. My teams would joke about the fact that a
9:00 AM meeting could be too early for Manish. I started meditating, and the
whole equation turned upside down. I’m now the early-morning guy and have a
hard time sleeping beyond 6:00 AM even if I tried to.
On the one hand I think the baseline point
is—I completely agree that there is some critical number that you don’t want to
fall below, because then you’re running the risk of deterioration in all
departments of your life.
On the other hand, I do feel that there is
the ability to manage how much awake rest you can have versus sleeping rest.
What I mean by awake—some people call meditation restful awakeness—is, ultimately,
again, not as a scientist but as a practitioner, I feel that all of these
things are targeted toward slowing down the mind or quieting the mind to a
point where it can relax, restore, and repair.
Caroline Webb: I think there’s a general point that it’s good to
start to tune in to your body and your mind and what it needs. Because we are
all a little different. I would have no shame in admitting that I need eight
and a half hours of sleep, and throughout my whole career at McKinsey, I needed
to make sure I got that. I prioritized it and managed to make my way through 12
years at the firm without anyone thinking that that was too terrible an idea.
But I know that there are other people who
need even more, and there are people who can get by with less. There is a part
of me that thinks, “Oh, you know, I wish. I wish that I were like that.” But I
think that I’ve made my peace with who I am and what I need. For me, exercise,
we haven’t talked a lot about exercise, but I never have been a gym person. I’ve
been one of those people who has had dozens of gym memberships that have been
an incredible waste of money. It was only when I found ways to build it into my
everyday life—making sure that I walked to a meeting, for example, or just even
walk around as I’m doing a conference call, just getting a little bit of
activity. And becoming more adept at noticing when I needed that physical
boost, which, typically for me, is about every 90 minutes. I at least need to
stand up and kind of shake myself and do a tiny little bit of activity.
I think just being becoming better at
noticing when you’re worn down, when you need to take a break, when you need to
take a walk, when you need to slow down is central to getting this right.
Lucia Rahilly: Each of you has your own point of entry, again,
into finding this sort of productivity and focus and flow within our always-on
work culture. For Manish it’s meditation, for Els it’s sleep, and for Caroline
it’s a combination of different behavioral tweaks.
If executives can only do one thing every
day, if they have one thing that they’re willing to commit to every day as a
kind of starting point into addressing the mind–body balance, what would you
recommend that that one thing be?
Caroline Webb: That’s really tough.
Els van der Helm: It’s supertough.
Manish Chopra: I have one, an easy one. Don’t check email before
7:00 AM, or whenever you wake up, maybe two hours before. I say 7:00 AM. Maybe
that’s too late for some.
Caroline Webb: Not a problem for me.
Manish Chopra: Yes, exactly. Set yourself a goal to not check
your email for the first two hours you’re awake. That alone, it seems to me,
could change your effectiveness. Because I use the time to, first of all,
meditate or exercise.
If I’m going to force myself to stick to
certain habits, I can do that first thing in the morning. It’s a lot easier to
control your day in the morning versus in the evening when you have client
dinners and things like that. Or you’re traveling. And it also allows me to
spend time thinking about how I want to use the day.
Caroline Webb: I would broaden that to acknowledge that, for
people who are vampires, like me, who are not morning people, that the argument
for going off-line is very, very strong. The timing may be different. But I
absolutely, wholeheartedly second the idea of being more deliberate about
taking yourself off-line for periods of time, especially when you want to do
your biggest thinking and your deepest thinking. Whether it’s thinking about
what the day holds for you as you head into it, or even whenever your peak time
is, cognitively, just thinking about how you can help yourself be at your best
in that time. That usually means taking yourself out of the maelstrom and
giving yourself that space. But I think sleep. I was doing a talk with Google
last week, and I was asked, if you could argue for any one single change, what
would it be. The answer was to work at how much sleep you need and to make sure
that you get it. Els is nodding frantically at that.
Els van der Helm: Yes, what a lot of people do is not get that
amount of sleep during the week and then think they can just catch up on the
weekends, which doesn’t actually work. I think my advice would be also sleep
related. Stop snoozing. About 60 or 70 percent of the people I see snooze. So
that’s setting your alarm in the morning, waking up, falling back asleep. It
goes off again. So you wake up multiple times. It’s the opposite of what your
brain wants. It wants to wake up naturally. Instead, you make it wake up by
sound multiple times in a row, hurting the quality of your sleep. If I could
tell people to stop doing one thing, it’s snoozing.
Lucia Rahilly: Manish,
Els, Caroline, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us. You’ve given
us a lot to think about. For more on the topics of executive well-being and
organizational performance, visit mckinsey.com. Thanks for listening.
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