For a long time I believed my drive to succeed was my best quality.
It was a mask for a fear of failure.
That is what workaholism is: the reach for control at the moment you feel powerless. Work is available, it is measurable, and it is endless. So it becomes the reliable go to when fear arises.
I want to respect that urge before I argue with it, because it sometimes works. Many people who work beyond their capacity produce extraordinary results, earn real praise, and advance. That is undeniable. People do costly things for a reason. But those costs can neutralize or overwhelm the immediate benefits they gain.
It is your business if you want to work extended hours, and many people do out of a genuine sense of necessity. When I worked in public policy advocacy, long hours were the rule, not the exception. Researchers who study workaholism arrive at the same place: it is a compulsion, not merely an expectation of the job.
I remember putting in 12 hours at the state capitol, testifying at committee hearings, making office visits, meeting with allies. That was the expectation during the five intense months of a legislative session. But after that 12 hours, I drove back to the office to prepare for the following day. It was the legislative session, so two others were still working at their desks. They could see the wear of 12 hours on me and knew I was no longer working out of expectation, but out of fear for the day ahead.
One of them said,
“Don’t be here.”
This is not a self-care post. Self-care is the source of my own wellness and it is mandatory for me. I am not suggesting it is mandatory for you.
What I am saying is that the hours you work out of anxiety and perfectionism are harming your organization. Every minute past the time you committed to yourself to stop working takes something from the mission rather than adding to it.
Why the work itself gets worse
Anxious energy is your threat system. Threat detection is automatic, and it should be. But it separates you from the part of your brain that relates to other people emotionally, and it degrades your access to the neocortex, where wise action gets chosen. Stress releases one set of chemicals that does two opposite things. It weakens the prefrontal cortex, where you weigh options, and it strengthens the amygdala, where alarm lives. Judgment goes down as the alarm goes up. Control of your behavior switches from the thoughtful brain to the primitive one. That is a survival feature. And it is a liability with costly consequences.
I am 57 years old, and every time I have acted from that survival response, it has produced a negative outcome. Sometimes barely noticeable. Sometimes major enough to shake a career. I did it as a supervisor, and a team member quit. I did it in advocacy, and alienated an ally. I did it in my private practice, and I lost a client.
Why your staff gets smaller
Here is the part that gets missed.
Your threat state does not stay in your body. Stress is contagious, and the research on leaders is specific: a leader’s distress crosses over into the team and shows up in how that leader supervises. As a neuropsychologist writing in Harvard Business Review put it, micromanagement usually begins in the manager’s own anxiety rather than in any deficiency on the team.
And control seeking compounds. When you take over the work of others, you take away learning and growth. Decades of research on how executives actually develop is clear: roughly seventy percent of leadership growth comes from challenging assignments, twenty percent from developmental relationships, and only ten percent from formal training. Work is how people grow. When you hoard it, you close the training school.
I have done exactly this. One January morning I had three fresh interns eager to immerse themselves in the work, and I handed them outdated fact sheets to read, because I could not make the time to teach them. I was protecting myself, and I made them smaller to do it.
The cure is competence you build
A leader’s principal role is to create other leaders. It looks like:
- Investment. Giving team members real work, matched to a person’s skills and to the growth they are reaching for.
- Failure. Failure was not just an option on my teams, it was necessary. Imperfect results shape future success. The research is consistent: people can only make the journey from imperfect to competent where it is psychologically safe to try.
- Learning. The growth happens inside the work, through a process of failure and success. Depriving people of the ability to contribute steals their growth and harms your organization.
- Achievement. People start producing outcomes you can genuinely work with, and the work becomes theirs.
Then the cycle pays off. As I improved at this, I found that on more and more days I had no reason to be at work after 5pm. So I left at 5 and went to the gym, then home for an evening with my wife and a healthy meal, and I slept on time. I got healthier and less likely to fall backwards. My team produced higher quality work than I could ever have imagined. And my anxiety levels dropped. Most of my star team members and interns are today doing jobs with higher responsibility levels than I ever had. They exceeded me. That’s the job of a leader.
Which underscores my point. Workaholism, chasing the work out of anxiety and a need for control, cannot tolerate this process of investing in others.
Workaholics do harm. Leaders who create other leaders excel, as a collective.
Build leaders who build leaders.