Why Successful Leaders Sleep

Despite not being high on everyone’s priority list, there’s nothing quite as important for a leader than to get enough sleep. If you consistently get good sleep (WHO recommends at least 7 to 9 hours every night), you have a far greater chance of being successful in your career as researched by Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter in this Harvard Business Reiew article. Furthermore, you’re also more likely to be a better leader and make your organization more successful as Dr. Nick van Dam and I have outlined here

Therefore, I was really glad to be invited by Maarten den Ottolander from Hemingway Professional Governance to host a webinar specifically aimed at supervisory board members on the topic of sleep. It was great to have an intimate session, allowing for more interaction as for many participants, it was their first ever session on the topic.

I thought I’d share the main 3 points we covered:

1. How Does Sleep Deprivation Impact Leaders?

There are a number of cognitive functions that decline when one doesn't get good quality sleep or not enough sleep:

To understand how there can be such a widespread effect of sleep loss on the brain, it helps to understand two main functions of sleep:

A) Sleep cleans the brain

This first function ensures that neurons can function and communicate with each other properly. It also helps prevent Alzheimer's disease but that I’ll cover in an upcoming LinkedIn article. 

B) Sleep keeps the brain in balance

The second function revolves around the prefrontal cortex (PFC) the front part of our brain that's highly evolved, but also most vulnerable to sleep deprivation. When we're tired, this part of the brain loses control over our amygdala, a structure important for emotional processing.

You might wonder how, despite these serious effects on your brain, you usually feel quite fine after a suboptimal night of sleep. Certainly you don’t feel as if you're making mistakes left and right because you're that sleepy. This is where stress comes in, and the hormones associated with stress (positive and negative forms of stress). Here's what is really important to note:

Most of us need stress to perform well, and our lives tend to be full of (mild) stressors such as deadlines, important presentations or calls where you need to be "on". The stress hormones can "mask" your sleepiness, but  unfortunately they don't prevent our performance from declining on most tasks.

2. “Sleeping On It” Is Not A Myth

Participants like Ate Visser were particularly interested in how sleep helps you gain insight, and I thought it’d be interesting to share it here too. 

As you might have noticed in your own life, sometimes solving complicated problems is very tough late at night, yet after a night of sleep it suddenly seems obvious what the best approach is. A beautiful study by a team of German researchers found for instance that a night of sleep led to twice as many participants (60% in the sleep group versus 23% in the wakefulness group) gaining insight into a hidden abstract rule. Several studies have shown such problem solving during sleep, and particularly difficult versus easy problems, one could argue the ones that leaders face on a daily basis. 

Check out our conversation on this topic here:

3. Sleep Loss Increases Risky Behavior

We also spoke about the impact of sleep deprivation on risky behavior, which I summarized in the above visual based on an extensive review by Professor Kilgore. It turns out there are many different effects of sleep loss on our behavior that can all contribute to an increase in risky behavior. I joked how there are no clocks in casinos for a good reason. But all joking aside, risky behaviors are known to be dangerous not just for the sleep deprived individual themselves, but also for their entire organization (see further below). 

So what does this mean to the organization as a whole?

If a leader shows up tired and not able to properly problem solve or recognize emotions in his/her team, you can imagine this hurting the organization. What perhaps you're not aware of, is the magnitude of potential consequences for the organization. One example of such a high profile catastrophe is the Space Shuttle Challenger that killed all seven astronauts on board. The night before the shuttle took off, NASA officials held a 2,5 hour conference call to discuss a potential fault. The official investigative report into the disaster concluded that poor decision-making in that call, which gave the go-ahead for the launch, was aggravated by the fact that two of the NASA managers were severely sleep deprived after long shifts. They ignored warnings from the engineers who refused to sign the launch recommendation over safety concerns. Similar errors during long night shifts were implicated in the nuclear disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, as well as the Exxon Valdez oil spillage.  

These are, of course, extreme examples of what happens when decision makers are sleep deprived, but the less extreme and much more common examples should still worry any supervisory board member.

My Key Message To Leader:

While it is often tempting to put sleep on hold to make an important decision or sort out another challenge, it is worth, as the saying goes, to “sleep on it”. If you’d like to know more about sleep, leadership and organizational risk, drop me a message in the comment section or at [email protected]

P.S. Curious about whether sleep deprivation is impacting you and your team members? Shleep will be publishing a Sleep Deprivation Checklist shortly so stay tuned!