The Cost of Endurance

In the early start-up years I was very absorbed by the business. It was fast-moving and demanding, and in some ways all-consuming. I was proud of what we were building, and I told myself I was doing it for the right reasons. But looking back, I was not always as present at home as I should have been.

My children were young. I was there physically much of the time, but I was not always really there. The part of the problem that took longest to see was that I had framed the long hours as being for them, which made it hard to notice that what they most needed was not the outcome of the hours but the hours themselves. Or rather, the attention.

That is a particular trap of the high-commitment culture: it is easy to be convinced that the sacrifice is the contribution. It is often not.

Decisions made under pressure

The long hours also affected judgement in more concrete ways. One that stayed with me was pressing ahead with an expensive first production run before we were ready. I was moving quickly, trying to maintain momentum, and I convinced myself we had done enough checking. We had not. The result was extra cost, delay, and avoidable rework.

It was not recklessness. It was a failure of discipline under sustained pressure: I had become so focused on keeping things moving that I had stopped pausing long enough to make sure we were moving in the right direction. In a physical product business, the consequences of that kind of lapse acquire a different weight because production turns a judgement error into inventory, rework, supplier negotiation, and delay rather than a release that can simply be rolled back. That pause, the deliberate check before committing, is exactly the kind of thinking that gets squeezed out first when the pace is too high for too long.

Endurance is not the same as resilience

There were also periods when I simply ran too hot for too long. I could sustain a very high workload, but eventually the quality of my thinking would start to drop. I would become more reactive, less reflective. At some point I would need to step away, reset, and recover perspective before I could produce anything worth producing.

The lesson I took from those periods was that endurance is useful, but it is not the same as resilience. A leader who only performs well by periodically reaching exhaustion is not running a high-performance model. It is a debt cycle. The performance looks real until the repayment comes due.

What I would do differently

I do not think the answer is less commitment. The drive that built those early years was real and, in its way, necessary. What I carry from that period is a different understanding of what commitment actually means.

For quite a long time I saw it mainly as a question of how much of myself I was willing to give. What I learned later was that leadership is also about preserving enough judgement, energy, and presence to give the right things to the right people at the right time. That cannot be done on empty.

The production run mistake, the missed evenings, the periods of reactive rather than reflective thinking: none of those came from insufficient commitment. They came from commitment that was not bounded, directed, or sustainable. That distinction matters more than the work culture conversation usually acknowledges.

What the team sees

The leader’s exhaustion is not private. The team reads it, adjusts to it, and organises around it in ways the leader rarely notices while it is happening.

When the leader is visibly running on empty, a specific kind of environment develops. People stop bringing problems because the leader does not look like they have capacity to absorb them. Decisions that should be made wait, because the leader is not in a state to make them well and everyone can see it. The team’s own energy tracks the leader’s; a visibly depleted leader is demoralising in a way that no amount of motivational communication can fully offset.

There is also a subtler effect. A leader who is running at unsustainable pace, and is visibly proud of it, sets a norm. The people who want to be seen as committed match the pace. The people who are not willing to match it disengage or leave. The team that results is not necessarily the high-performing team the culture intended to build. It is the team that was willing to run at that speed, which is a different selection criterion from the one that produces the best work.

None of this is visible to the leader in the moment. It is one of the more reliable costs of the high-endurance model, and one of the least discussed.