Leadership Lessons in Raising a New Guide Dog: Lack of Sleep and Emotional Intelligence

“You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus” Mark Twain

We welcome Vespa, our recent Guide Dog puppy my wife and I are raising to hopefully help someone who is sight impaired. Vespa is our 9th puppy over many years and is a 7-week old beautiful yellow lab owned by Guide Dogs of America. We are beginning a new team leadership journey for the next 18-months to help him become ready for all the technical training he will receive when he is mature to hopefully become the “eyes” and companion for someone who is blind.

Some of you have followed the journey of our last guide dog puppy Ajax who is in his formal training and has another month or two to decide if he will pass to become a working guide dog (stay tuned and I will keep you posted on his progress).

It’s not atypical for a new puppy to adjust to its new surroundings, puppy raisers and daily routines. Right now Vespa, tends to wake us up every 2-3 hours at night so we are feeling that early puppy raiser sleep deprivation so common at this stage of his life. He seems to be sleeping a lot but I feel a bit like a waking zombie during the day being pretty tired and exhausted during the day as every new parent understands.

An early lesson in raising guide dogs is just how important sleep is for both the puppy raisers and the dogs!

Employees are Pretty Ineffective Without Sleep

Most leaders and talent believe they can ignore exhaustion and a “marker” of successful performers is to thrive on stress and pressure. Actually, just the opposite is true–the “best of the best” manage energy and not time and thrive on renewal of their emotional, cognitive, physical and spiritual energy each day.

The general effect of sleep deprivation is pretty widely known. If you get less than just 2 hours of sleep than you need you are likely to have pretty significant decline of memory, decision making, and psychomotor performance (thank you retired National Safety and Transportation Board member and friend Mark Rosekind, Ph.D. for all of his fascinating research studies on sleep and fatigue over many years). Miss an entire night of sleep and your overall performance is pretty much a bad as somebody legally drunk in the State of California.

And, as if decision making and psychomotor performance isn’t enough, new research by Sheldon Cohen and his colleagues found that those who get 7-hours or less sleep a night are almost 3 times more likely to get sick than those getting 8 hours or more sleep at night (they determined this by placing cold viruses in study participant’s noses).

Particularly now given our current situations, it is critical to get adequate rest and sleep to function effectively and remain healthy. One recent article of mine summarizes some of our current thinking about the importance of sleep and the negative effects on both productivity and well-being.

Does Lack of Sleep Make you Less Emotionally Intelligent?

In a study by Els van der Helm and colleagues at UC Berkeley, it appears that lack of sleep compromises one important aspect of emotional intelligence. The ability to “tune into others” and have social awareness are critical aspects of those high in emotional and social competence. In an interesting study of 37 healthy participants (21 women) who were randomly assigned into a sleep control or sleep deprivation group were asked to recognize the intensity of human facial emotions.

Participants who were sleep deprived had a marked and significant blunting in the recognition of angry and happy emotions and these differences were most notable in female participants. This finding might be most fascinating in light of the “tend and befriend” effect in women than enables them to “tune” into the social cues of their offspring and others (mediated by the hormone oxytocin).

The good news? The deficit in emotional intelligence (i.e., being able to accurately discern the correct identification of emotional expressions by others) was completely restored following one night of recovery sleep.  Indeed, we can make up our “sleep debt” by getting at least one night of solid quality sleep.

My own published research with executives found that lack of quality and quantity of sleep compromised the leader's social and emotional competence. Using a validated measure of EI leaders with poor quality sleep were rated significantly lower on their empathy and interpersonal skills compared to those who received adequate sleep at night.

I’m glad I can’t really see any of your faces right now as apparently my emotional intelligence is much lower than normal due to my lack of sleep with our new puppy…..Stayed tuned for more leadership lessons with Vespa in the weeks and months ahead….Be well….

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