How Leaders Fight Back Against Overwork

Here’s what’s strange: When we examined the data on effectiveness and motivation, we identified a good-sized chunk of people who reported feeling both pretty effective (getting all or most of what they need to do done on a day-to-day basis) and motivated (highly or somewhat more motivated recently) but also feeling always or often overwhelmed. Twelve percent of our sample felt that way — almost 1 in 8 people.

I love a counterintuitive finding, but this one really puzzled me. These folks were wrestling with exhaustion and turned on the afterburner? Instead of quiet quitting, they were quiet questing? Quiet quickstepping? (I’ll stop — verbs that start with Q are in pretty short supply.) In my mind, high levels of overwhelm should be productivity and motivation killers, but these folks defied that otherwise logical assumption. These leaders are “desert flowers,” thriving under harsh conditions.

Digging into the data further, we found that this effective, motivated, but overwhelmed group of leaders has some lessons for us all.

Three Lessons on Overwork

Let’s explore what the desert flowers can teach us about work overload.

1. Actively, passionately fight the ways that work is “too much.”

I’ve lost track of how many conversations I’ve had about how difficult it feels to fight the overwhelming nature of work. Many people feel hopeless about it. Intensified work is, after all, what social scientists call a “wicked problem,” with many tangled causes; fighting bad work can feel like wrestling an octopus.

But the desert flowers are indeed fighting. We asked our study participants whether they were taking action against the three dimensions of work intensification. The desert flowers were far more likely than the average person to be passionate about trying fixes. They were 43% more likely to consistently try to reduce workload, 55% more likely to regularly try to work more independently, and 48% more likely to habitually try to reduce emotion in the workplace. The action is a big piece of these leaders’ secret sauce for staying motivated and effective even when they feel work is too much: They’re focused, day in and day out, on doing something about it.

Let’s look at one example: managing emotion in the workplace. To fight this aspect of work intensification, the desert flowers began from a place of self-regulation but quickly looped in other people. This group frequently described taking thoughtful pauses from work, with other coworkers in tow: “I do positive affirmation exercises with other members of my team,” one respondent reported.

That comment embodies three constructive choices that surfaced in a number of the group’s other research responses: a thoughtful pause, a reframe along positive lines, and a moment of community. The desert flowers are not going it alone or relying solely on themselves. To create a better emotional ecosystem, they’re marshaling the energy of the team around them. This is a highly active stance.

2. Shift some of your energy from mindfulness to managing work.

Like all of our respondents, the desert flowers were indeed using mindfulness as their primary self-reported strategy to remain effective under overwhelming conditions. But here’s what’s interesting: Compared with the overall population, they were 13% more likely to use strategies around managing the work itself. (Self-care, the third bucket of strategies, was pretty much equally utilized by both desert flowers and the overall population.)

The desert flowers are reallocating some attention — from controlling their own reactions to their work, to actually trying to get unwieldy, messy workloads under control. This represents a significant mindset shift from “My own thinking is what I can control” to “I can get the work itself to calm down.” Once again, it’s a high-agency point of view. With apologies to Taylor Swift (no relation), these leaders are saying they’re not the problem. It’s the work, and it can be addressed.

What, exactly, are the desert flowers doing? To address sheer task overload, as well as highly interdependent work, they often reach out to coworkers for help. A popular theme among many open-ended responses was study participants’ fearlessness in giving workload away. They don’t shy away from “old-fashioned” techniques to make work volume and deadlines more manageable, such as breaking down work into component tasks, creating prioritized to-do lists, and — my personal favorite — doing one thing at a time.

3. Carve out space for more independent work — even if that’s taboo.

Reading the first two lessons and examining the data, you may wonder, how do the desert flowers consistently engage in empowered behavior when they admit to feeling overwhelmed frequently? One intriguing clue may be structural: These leaders were 14% more likely to note that they could get many critical tasks done without the participation of others. Simply put, they worked more independently than the overall study population.

That’s intriguing, since only 17% of them were individual contributors, compared with 28% of the overall study sample. The desert flowers mostly sat in interdependent management roles and yet felt better able than many people to work independently.

Do the desert flowers just have good luck here? Do they sit in more organized, less bureaucratic organizations or roles? Nope: They were 33% more likely than the overall population to say their manager doesn’t prioritize work well and 7% more likely to say they’re burdened with bureaucratic tasks.

For the desert flowers, independent work may not be a feature of the corporate environment but instead a deliberate personal choice. It may sound simple to try to work more independently. However, this behavior is a truly countercultural move in many organizations, where the need for constant collaboration is drummed into everyone, from the entry-level ranks to the C-suite. The problem: As the work of Rob Cross, Cal Newport, Bob Sutton, and others has made clear, collaborating all of the time actually makes us exhausted and unproductive. If the desert flowers are using more felicitous “figure eight” collaboration techniques — where they alternate working closely together and doing heads-down independent work — they may feel less drained by overcollaboration. That leaves more energy for tackling work intensification on a daily basis.

Where to Bloom?

If reclaiming that energy sounds appealing, you may now be asking yourself an important question: Should I get on the road to becoming a desert flower — or should I choose to bloom somewhere else?

Start by thinking about how you could get started on using the desert flowers’ active strategies to combat an overwhelming world of work. One great place to start is picking which of the three dimensions of work intensification hits you the hardest. Are you most affected by the sheer workload/tight timing, by having to collaborate with too many people, or by a highly emotional workplace? While the desert flowers push back on all three dimensions, that can be a diffuse starting point (and may be somewhat overwhelming).

Instead, pick one area and test out three or four ways to make concrete progress. For example, if overcollaboration is really chafing you, are there meetings, initiatives, working groups, or processes where you can sensibly excuse yourself? Can you agree with your teammates to parcel out more independent work? Look within yourself, too: Are you doing pieces of other people’s jobs, and should you stop?

Remember, you may decide to work on being a desert flower for now, but that should not be the forever goal. Job markets aren’t infinitely fluid: We all have to support ourselves and our families; we can’t magically dance into the right sort of organization. In that sense, it’s logical to figure out how to thrive despite overwork in your current company. But in the long run, from a mental health and a productivity perspective, we should all be seeking out environments (within our organizations or elsewhere) that are not overloaded.

We can be desert flowers, but we can also decide to flourish in richer soil.