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Working yourself to the point of exhaustion can bring down those around you.
Working yourself to the point of exhaustion can bring down those around you.

Do you need to strive to be the best at your job?

GRAHAM JONES explains why working yourself to the point of exhaustion can bring down those around you.

Being a weather forecaster is a challenging job. Every day, people will know whether you are good at making meteorological predictions.

Recently, in the UK, the bulk of the nation was given a ‘weather warning’ by the Met Office, saying there would be thunderstorms and flooding from north to south. As it turned out, the severe weather was largely restricted to a few small areas. The rest of the country wondered why they had been warned about poor weather as they sweltered in the summer heat.

Despite what you might think, weather forecasting is highly accurate. The Met Office’s data shows that a four-day forecast is now as accurate as the one-day forecast was 30 years ago.

The meteorologists in Exeter, where the Met Office is based, do their hardest to get the weather forecast right. Indeed, the one-day forecast is now 97 per cent accurate. Given the vast variety of things that affect the weather, this remarkable feat shows how hard the forecasters work to do their job well.

I assume you, too, do the best you can in your job. I expect that you put in the additional effort required to ensure that your tasks are completed to the best of your ability. You might even be putting in the kind of effort we witnessed from the Olympic Games athletes in Paris.

However, we have also witnessed several individuals supposedly at the top of their game demonstrate that they are currently not doing their very best.

Sir Andy Murray, tipped for another gold medal, finished his professional career this week without even making it to the semi-finals. Adam Peaty, the swimmer, achieved second place silver despite a massive build-up suggesting he was sure to get gold. BMX cyclist Beth Shriever finished last in the final, even though she had won all her qualifying races.

What was remarkable about these people failing to do their very best was that they were ecstatic with their results. Three people are supposedly doing their very best, demonstrating they were not, and then all saying it is OK.

That’s not what you hear in most workplaces. People who fail to do their very best are either called out for it or asked to improve by their bosses. Or they are prepared to admit to it and apologise to their work colleagues for letting them down. This is not a healthy situation because the employee feels under personal pressure or bulldozed by bosses.

"Striving to do your very best can cause problems for you and those around you. That does not mean you should not aim for success."

A recent Healthy Organisation Index produced by McKinsey shows that these old ways of thinking are no longer applicable.

The report says, “Organisations can move away from treating employees as cogs who hit their deliverables to using an artists-and-athletes model, which inspires people.”

The report suggests multiple ways of encouraging people to achieve their best, including ‘empowering leadership’ that gives individuals more autonomy.

Some of those employees, though, will strive to achieve their most remarkable possible work. That may be good for them as individuals, but is it suitable for those around them?

A new study from the University of Pennsylvania suggests otherwise. This research shows that people at work often take on multiple tasks to demonstrate that they are doing well at their jobs. However, individuals who do this deceive others into believing that success is more easily achievable than is the case.

This is known as ‘the floating duck syndrome’. Your fellow employees, who are doing their very best, make it look easy, like a duck floating on the water, which is paddling like crazy underneath. This means that if you strive to do your very best at work, you are making it harder for your colleagues to do the same.

The McKinsey report suggests that we should be more like those Olympic athletes. We know how hard it has been for Adam Peaty or Sir Andy Murray to achieve what they have done. Their struggles to do their very best have been highly public. They were not ‘floating ducks’. If you want to emulate either, you know what you are letting yourself in for.

So, does that apply in the workplace? If you strive to do your best but paddle away like a duck on water, your colleagues will have no idea how hard it is to do what you do. This puts them under pressure and potentially leads to failure.

In turn, that leads to bosses admonishing or a personal sense of setback and all that entails.

Striving to do your very best can cause problems for you and those around you. That does not mean you should not aim for success.

Rather, it suggests that we should all be honest about our achievements and comfortable accepting that second best is often good enough—just like those failing athletes in Paris or those weather forecasters who are happy with less than perfect.

How do you know?

Recently, I was trying to get home from work in good time to watch the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympics. However, judging by the traffic on the roads, everyone had the same idea.

My journey was constantly interrupted by periods of sitting in traffic, going nowhere. There were no accidents or breakdowns, just many cars slowing down.

Now and then, I would realise the cause of the problem. Going up a hill, we slowed down to about 30mph on a road with a 70mph limit. Like me, I suspect you get frustrated by drivers who seem oblivious to the fact that to maintain speed going up a hill, you need to give the car more power. Their inability to realise this affects the rest of us.

Later on in the evening, having endured the four-hour Olympic opening ceremony, the Olympic gold medallist Rebecca Adlington made a pithy comment. She pointed out that for several points in the opening ceremony, the attendees were left wondering what was happening and completely unentertained.

The ceremony occurred along the River Seine and in various venues around Paris. On TV, it all seemed to flow seamlessly, albeit slowly. However, for the people assembled in the hub of the ceremony, the Trocadéro, not much was going on for most of the time.

The organisers appear to have thought about the television audience but not the people in Paris. It’s rather like the slow drivers - they were focused on their driving, not their effect on other people.

I have encountered the same thing in the workplace. Like me, I suspect you have colleagues who focus on their work but disregard their impact on others around them.

For example, I once had a colleague who dutifully went through his tasks in the order they arrived. For him, that was logical. However, he did not appear to think that he should consider what to do about the needs of his work colleagues. He was very frustrating to work with.

Some years ago, Australian researchers investigated work-life balance and found that the most significant impact came from our co-workers.

This suggests that we are impacted most by the other people we work with, not the job itself. In her book on burnout, Dr Darlynne Kerr indicates that when some people work to the point of exhaustion, they are not affecting themselves but also those around them.

These research elements suggest that people focus on doing a good job without realising the impact they are having on those around them.

It’s the same factor again as the slow drivers on a hill or an event organiser who is concerned with one audience on TV, forgetting those in the live audience.

It is the same with our work colleagues who believe they are doing an excellent job because they work late to finish everything. Or they think they are doing very well because they finish all their tasks on time with no delays.

But have they looked in their ‘rear-view mirror’? Have they considered the impact of the way they work on those around them?

Whether you do a good job is not about whether you are performing your tasks efficiently or effectively. It is about how you go about your work and its impact on those around you.

Even if you work alone, your work will affect your family, customers, or suppliers. You are only doing an excellent job if you do not negatively impact them.

I suspect the organisers of the Olympic Opening ceremony will be patting themselves on the back for doing a good job; however, the hundreds of thousands standing in the rain across Paris who were rather bored for much of the evening might have a different view.

The lack of focus on the impact on everyone meant the organisers didn’t do as well as they might think.

Like so much in life, you will do a much better job at work if you spend your time focusing on the impact you have on others. Just thinking about the job and trying your best could mean that the people around you think you are not doing well despite your best efforts.

 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Graham Jones

Contributor •


Graham Jones studies online behaviour and consumer psychology to help businesses improve website success. Visit: grahamjones.co.uk

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