A world where leaders advocate for naps and employees feel good about 9pm Slacks

because we should take care of each other

The basic economics of work assume the employer tries to get the most work out of an employee while paying as little as they can get away with. Similarly, the employee tries to do the least amount of work while being paid the most they can find in the market. Fundamentally, it’s a trade.

Time is money, money is time, right?

But what if that’s a bad system? A system based on the maximal extraction of the other party. What if instead the we had a system, or at least a subculture at the team level, that was based on generosity?

Let’s assume to start, that not always, but occasionally, evening work is necessary for your business. Even if you try your best to create a culture of sustainability and pace the work appropriately, inevitably at some point something needs to be redone, there’s a dependency you didn’t realize, or something just takes longer than you thought. It happens. In those moments, as a leader, you hope your team will show up for you and for the work. That showing up has a cost (as I’ve written about previously), but you determine that pulling someone away from their dinner or child or sleep is, on this occasion, worth it. You’re taking a withdrawal from that person. The only way that’s even slightly okay (on occasion) is if you’ve already made the deposits.

In the same way that great work sometimes requires investment from people to go “above and beyond”, it’s also true that sometimes the work slows. It could be a break between projects, waiting for another team to deliver something you need, or simply a canceled meeting. In those scenarios, a leader’s job is to FIGHT THE INSTINCT to pull more work from the backlog. Anyone can invent more work or find something that would be “good to do”. But that’s the exact opposite of what you should do in these moments. Instead, we should all see these moments as opportunities to make a deposit.

What does that look like? Saying,

• “We’re good for today… go sign off!”

• “We don’t need anything at the moment. Go take a nap!”

• “I’ve got it from here.”

As a leader, I’m always trying to maximize the quality of work AND minimize the amount of work the team is doing. If spending time on something is not going to meaningfully increase the quality of work, then my goal is to return that time to the individual. Don’t get me wrong, often it feels impossible to do for long stretches, but it’s still my goal. And when I do feel the need to ask for something at 9pm, I hope that that person knows I’m not trying to extract more from them—I’m asking out of a meaningful need. And I try my best to keep it rare.

I’m using the language “deposit and withdrawal” because I find it catchy, but make no mistake I don’t believe this article to be transactional advice for leaders to cleverly get their people to work evenings. It’s not a trick. It’s a genuine belief that the amount of work someone does should balance out to the 40 or 45 hours you agreed to, and so if you know you have to occasionally eat into non-business hours, you’d better give some business hours back. It’s also born from an annoyance with the busywork that arises from “Well, this person has some time, we might as well give them something to do that could possibly create value.”

There is another way. What happens when instead of trying to get the most for ourselves, we try to do the best for each other? What if it’s the team’s job to take care of creating brilliant work and having the leader’s back, and the leader’s job to take care of the team and keep overwork to a minimum?

It only works if everyone is in it. The leader who starts prioritizing the work at a regular cost to the team’s nights and weekends will soon find themselves with a team who learns they have to prioritize themselves or no one else will. And conversely, a team that doesn’t truly care about the work, the leader, or ideally both, will find itself with a leader who feels they have to demand time and care or they won’t get it.

The trick is that no one wants to start the generosity for fear that they’ll be taken advantage of. The team member fears if they put in extra hours and overdeliver, they’ll only be met with a leader who says “thank you” and now expects that regularly. The leader fears if they allow for downtime they’re not getting the full value of an employee, they’re not doing their best by the business, and that maybe employees will start to always expect to do less.

It reminds me of the game theory strategy “tit for tat”.

Under tit for tat, a player will begin by cooperating, then in subsequent iterations will replicate whatever their opponent did last time. So if their initial cooperation is punished with defection, they will then reciprocate in kind. fs

Put simply, it means that in a cooperative system, the best strategy is to start with generosity. Only if someone takes advantage do you switch to looking out for yourself. If we assume some employees really are trying to do the minimum, well, “fool me once…” as they say. But even with that risk, game theory teaches us that it’s STILL the best strategy to start with generosity. Or in other words, to treat employees all as high-performers who care, advocating for their naps, and deal with any under-performers on a case by case basis.

Or if game theory isn’t your thing but classic Christmas movies are, it reminds me of the scene at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life” when George Bailey finds himself broke and the entire town shows up for him with cash and money wires and gold watches. That happened because he spent his life making literal “deposits” in his community the form of home loans and kindness. Did Mr. Potter successfully extract more from his people and customers? Certainly. But, in the end, it’s George Bailey who ends up “the richest man in town.”

That’s the kind of leader I hope to be.