Sustainable Leadership Over Performance Leadership

I've always had a fairly high capacity for work. Give me a problem and I'll usually want to solve it. Put something in front of me that needs building and I can get pretty absorbed in it. There have been plenty of seasons in my life where working harder genuinely helped.

The danger is that you can start believing you can live that way forever. You can't.

I've watched leaders produce incredible results while running at a pace that was slowly wearing them down. I've done versions of it myself. From the outside, everything can look healthy because the numbers are good, the organization is growing and things are getting done.

Nobody puts exhaustion on the monthly report. Only performance gets rewarded and there's a reason leaders fall into this trap. Performance is easy to see. You hit the target → You grew the business → You fixed the problem → You worked late and got the project finished when everyone else had gone home! People notice those things. They praise the person who stepped in and saved the day. I've never heard anyone get the same applause for going home at a reasonable hour because they built a team capable of handling things without them.

So we learn what gets rewarded. Over time, being busy can become proof that we're important. A full calendar feels like progress. Constant problems make us feel needed, and getting through another exhausting week can almost become a badge of honor.

I've become much less impressed by that than I used to be. A great month can hide a bad way of working One of the problems with performance is that it can hide the cost for quite a while. You can work too much and still produce excellent results.

A leader can be exhausted and still close the deal. You can neglect your health and still have a record year. Your marriage can be struggling while your business is having its best quarter ever.

For a while, the results make it easy to believe everything is fine.

That's what makes this difficult.

Bad habits don't always produce bad results immediately. In fact, some unhealthy ways of working can produce very good results for years. Eventually the bill tends to arrive somewhere. It may show up in your health. Perhaps your family gets tired of competing with your work. Maybe you lose good people because nobody can keep up with the pace you've decided is normal. Or you simply wake up one morning and realize you're tired of the thing you once loved building.

I've started asking a different question... When I was younger, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I could accomplish. I still care about results. I don't think there's anything noble about leading badly, missing targets or pretending performance doesn't matter.

These days, though, there's another question I find myself asking.

Can we keep doing this?

Can the team keep working at this pace?

Can I keep making decisions this way?

Can the business continue growing without everything eventually finding its way back to me?

Can I live like this for another five years and still like the life I've built?

Those questions have changed the way I think about success. A business can have an incredible year while building habits that make the next five miserable. I'd rather build something that can keep working after the adrenaline wears off.

Sustainable leadership can look less impressive but there's a part of sustainable leadership that doesn't always feel very exciting. It can mean slowing down long enough to teach someone instead of doing the job yourself. You may need to leave a problem with someone even though you know you could solve it faster. Another person might make a decision differently than you would, and you'll have to resist the urge to step in. I've found that hard at times.

When you've built something, you know how you want things done. Handing over responsibility means accepting that someone else's version may not look exactly like yours.

But if I'm the answer to every difficult problem, I haven't really built much beyond myself. That becomes a very expensive way to lead. Your team learns from the pace you set and leaders communicate more than they realize. You can tell people to take care of themselves, then send emails at midnight. You can encourage your team to take time off while everyone knows you haven't had a proper break in two years. You can talk about family being important while regularly cancelling your own family plans because work came up.

People notice!

They learn what the organization really values by watching what gets rewarded and what the leader does. I've had to think about that in my own life. If everyone around me feels they need to run at my pace to prove they're committed, then I need to look at the pace I'm setting. I may be creating a culture I never intended to create. That matters to me. Rest isn't something you earn when the work is finished. This one took me a while, I've always liked finishing things before I relax. The problem with leadership is that the work is never really finished. There will always be another email, another opportunity, another person who needs something and another idea worth exploring. If rest has to wait until everything is done, you won't rest much.

I've become more comfortable with leaving a few things unfinished. And that doesn't come naturally to me. There are still days when my mind wants to keep working long after I've stopped. But I've learned that tired people don't always make good decisions. We become impatient. Small problems feel bigger. Listening gets harder, and we start reacting to things we might have handled very differently after a decent night's sleep.

Being exhausted isn't proof that I've worked hard enough. I want to be able to do this for a long time and at this stage of my life, longevity matters to me more than it once did. I still want to build things. There are businesses I want to see succeed, people I want to help and work through Rebuild Africa that I hope continues making a difference long after I'm gone. I don't want to arrive there completely worn out. Nor do I want everything I've built to depend on how much energy I personally have left.

Good leadership should eventually create more people who can carry responsibility. It should produce systems that don't need rescuing every week. The organization should become stronger without requiring the leader to become increasingly exhausted. I believe that more strongly now than I did twenty years ago. Perhaps experience has simply made me less interested in proving how much I can carry. I'd rather build something that lasts. I'd rather develop people who don't need me in every room. I'd rather have enough left at the end of the day for the people I love.

And I'd like to keep enjoying the work.

There will still be busy seasons. There will be weeks when leadership asks more of us than we'd prefer to give. I've never found a version of life where everything stays nicely balanced. But a demanding season and a demanding way of life aren't quite the same thing.

So here's the question I've been sitting with: Is the way you're leading today something you could keep doing for the next ten years?

If the answer is no, I think that's worth paying attention to before success makes it easy to ignore.