The work industry has changed substantially over the last few years, particularly with the pandemic forcing a lot of people into remote/hybrid working.
What has existed for some time, though, is the hustle culture. It’s like a badge of honour where sleeping less is often equated with working harder.
Sleep shouldn’t be seen as a luxury but as a necessity in order to perform better within the workplace. When you’re in a position of leadership, being at that peak level is certainly important.
Sleep deprivation will only silently degrade a leader’s cognitive edge, and that might not be noticeable to begin with. Superior leadership is built on superior recovery, so optimal sleep is what’s needed for strategic execution, emotional intelligence and team performance.
If you’re looking to improve your leadership performance this year, then here’s how better sleep can help you do that.
The Cognitive Engine: Sleep and Strategic Decision-Making
Sleep loss can often impair your prefrontal cortex and lead to reckless choices or analysis paralysis.
REM sleep is important to achieve during your night’s rest because it’s helpful in fostering creative connections and helping leaders solve complex business challenges. It’s good to notice the impact that a lack of sleep can have on your attention span and the ability you have when it comes to pivoting during a crisis.
It might not be something that you notice at first, but it’s something that your team might be attentive to. Therefore, it’s helpful to check in with your work colleagues as they’re the ones who’ll notice these things and highlight them when they’re perhaps negatively influencing performance levels.
Making reckless choices is never good for business, and as a leader, you always want to lead by example.
There are many reasons for a lack of sleep and what influences it. These include:
Lifestyle
A high caffeine intake, especially consuming it late in the day or evening, can often contribute to inconsistencies at bedtime. Using blue light-emitting screens before bed also helps suppress melatonin production.
Environment
A bedroom that’s often too warm, noisy or contains disruptive lighting is never a good environment that you want to have when it comes to getting a good night’s rest.
Health
Your health can really impact your sleep, especially if it’s something like chronic stress or anxiety. Those feelings can often keep you up at night.
At the same time, there are underlying conditions like restless legs syndrome and sleep apnea that can contribute to sleep quality too. It’s good to look at your overall health in general, exploring supplements like https://northernpeptides.is/ which can help improve bodily repair and function. Combining this with a good night’s rest may be the solution you’re after.
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and Team Culture
Sleep is a great help when it comes to emotional regulation and putting you in a good mood to start off the working day.
Mood regulation, if not well maintained, can lead to irritability and lower a leader’s psychological safety score amongst staff members. No one likes to be around someone irritable, as it can often put a dampener on their day as well as your own. That can lead to friction within teams that slows down the productivity of the day and even the week if it continues.
Sleep-deprived brains will often struggle to accurately interpret employee facial expressions and vocal tones. That can lead to missed signals and perhaps to taking something that’s been said the wrong way. That can end up riling an individual up and causing a lot of tension within the workplace.
When a tired leader’s toxic mood or erratic behavior continues, this will often trickle down to other members of the team. Compromising the overall team’s morale and productivity isn’t something you want to be the one who is causing, especially as a leader within the organization.
If you’re noticing a change in your mood and behaviors, it’s better to address these sooner rather than later. If you allow it to continue and go on for days and weeks, then it’s going to be hard to repair those working relationships. Often people say things in the heat of the moment, and that can escalate to relationship-breaking moments when you’re sleep-deprived.
Executive Presence and Influence
Feeling fatigued is something that can limit a lot of things going on within the body, both physically and mentally.
For example, it’s good to know how fatigue can have a negative impact on vocabulary and can slow down verbal processing. It also weakens presentation delivery, which is something that can be detrimental when you’ve got some very important client pitches that are coming up.
It’s not a good look as a leader to be lacking that skill set, especially as what you do should be role modelling to everyone else within the organization. It’s helpful to introduce a better sleep routine fast when you find it’s becoming more of a problem as time goes on.
Deep rest is good for the benefit of stress tolerance. It allows leaders to remain calm and composed when faced with a lot of heavy pressure from the higher-ups or from the responsibilities of running a team or company in general.
Without that rest, it can send a person into a spiral, and that’s not good when situations are evolving and require a calm head at the helm. By being well-rested, you’re projecting that same energy and vitality required to help motivate others.
Sleep is an Investment That Your Body Needs
As mentioned at the beginning, sleep is an investment that your body needs, but also in order to help your company’s bottom line. If you’re not getting ample amounts of sleep every night, then this can very quickly cause damage to business productivity.
You want to shift from the mindset of ‘sleeping when I’m dead’ to ‘sleeping to win’. As a leader, you can’t afford to lack sleep; otherwise, you’ll just end up burning out. You’ll make mistakes, and that’s not good to make when you’re leading a company or a team.
The changes you make can start tonight, from winding down earlier for bedtime to creating the optimal temperature in your bedroom for a good night’s rest.
