Overtime is destroying your career

You glance over at the clock and see that it’s already 5:30. Time to call your spouse and let them know you wont be home for dinner for the 6th time this month.

You are stuck at the office working, trying to get caught up, trying to stay afloat.

As the minutes tick by into hours, you can’t help but thinking that there has to be a better way to get this done.

And there is.

There are really only 3 ways that you can handle a chronic overwhelming workload.

The first is to distribute it among your team, forcing your employees to work over time and burn the candle at both ends. 

This is a short sighted solution though, because the more you overwork your team the greater the chance that they will leave. And we both know that losing someone else on the team would break the team as a whole. No amount of overtime would be able to catch up on the already overstretched workload.

The second option is to buckle down, sacrificing your personal and family life for your job. It’s hard to call it a career at that point, because missed deadlines and objectives will ground your trajectory in the organization. 

Now to be fair, there are short periods of time where overtime may be called for, and a certain amount of short term sacrifice does lead to long term gain. You may be saying, that sounds like a mantra I can rally my team around.

It does have a good ring to it, and it invokes warm feelings of teamwork and accomplishment.

Unfortunately those good intentions typically lead to burnout. There are only so many times you can say no to family dinner, your kids game or recital, or a date night with your spouse before everything starts to suffer. 

When you are constantly stuck at work, sacrificing your family, friends, social life for your job,  you end up with the problem of under-time. 

Under-time is when despite working longer hours, you are less productive because you aren’t motivated, and are fatigued. You end up shooting yourself in the foot. The more you work, the less productive you are, and the more overtime you have to work to try and catch up. It’s a dangerous trap to get caught in, and has been the demise of many leaders rising careers. 

Your third option is simple.

Get the right people on the team.

If you are clocking chronic overtime there are 2 simple causes. Either you don’t have enough people on the team, or you have the wrong people on the team.

It may seem obvious, but with too few people on the team it’s an easier problem to solve. Just hire an A-Player that can come in to your team, seamlessly integrate, and immediately lighten the load. 

The harder issue here is when you have the wrong people on the team. They aren’t meeting expectations, and everyone else is having to pick up the slack. 

This is where you need to make the critical decision to be a leader and get them on a performance plan that will get them up to speed, or to let them go because you are crippling the opportunities of everyone on your team by trying to carry the weight of an under-performer. 

One problem, three solutions, four different paths to take. Which one will you choose?

Maybe it’s time to rethink your overtime strategy.