Ben Morton argues high-performing teams fail from lack of recovery, not lack of effort. He uses the Corporate Athlete framework from Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, which shows elite athletes cycle stress with intentional rest. Morton trained for an 86-mile ultramarathon using the same rhythm, treating recovery as work itself.
Hi there, I'm Ben Morton, and welcome to The Leader's Kitbag, the podcast that delivers practical leadership insights in less than 10 minutes. Each episode tackles a real challenge faced by leaders and managers, with simple ideas and tools you can take away and apply immediately. And because leadership doesn't happen sitting behind a desk, Many of these episodes are recorded outside whilst I'm walking and thinking. They're informal, unscripted, and straight to the point. So, wherever you are, let's get started and sharpen your leadership skills one episode at a time. Think about the last time you made it to a holiday. You'd probably been running on adrenaline for weeks. And then you suddenly stopped, and it's likely that within a couple of days you came down with a really heavy cold or worse. And it happens so often that we almost think of it as normal, but it's not normal. It's a signal. Your body will have been holding it together under sustained pressure, and the moment you finally stop, it lets go, and your immune system which has been suppressed by the stress hormones finally catches up. And here's the thing, if work is getting the very best of us, our sharpest thinking, highest energy, and most patient self, then that means those that we care about the most are getting what's left. I'm in the Brecon Beacons this week to deliberately rest and reset. You see, I'm in a demanding period of work right now, totally by choice, but I've learned by getting it wrong that pushing hard only works if you deliberately build recovery around it. And that idea comes from two people who I want to credit: Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. In their brilliant article, The Making of a Corporate Athlete, they make a compelling argument that the real enemy of high performance isn't hard work. It's the absence of recovery. Loehr and Schwartz studied elite athletes and discovered something that changed how they think about high performance in our world. You see, elite athletes don't just train harder than everyone else, they recover better. They work in deliberate cycles, periods of high demand followed by genuine recovery, and it's that rhythm— stress, recovery, stress, recovery— that builds capacity over time and more importantly allows them to perform when they really need to. And in my experience, in many cases often, maybe. For leaders, there's no planned recovery. There's no end to the hard stretch. They just continue, one demanding period rolling straight into the next. Now, this isn't to say we all need to train like elite athletes, but the principle around recovery is directly relevant to us as leaders and indeed how we live. Think about this year, for example. Do you have periods of deliberate rest and recovery planned in, or are you just working at the same level of high intensity continually? And when you do take a break, are you actively recovering, or are you perhaps just working a little less somewhere different. This week is mostly about mental recovery for me, plus a little bit of physical tapering. See, the mountains are my reset. They always have been. And in a week's time, as I'm filming this, I'll be running my second ever ultramarathon, an 86-miler. And the way I've trained for it is using the approach I've been talking about today. Periods of demanding training and then periods of deliberate rest. But this time round, I've been thinking about the rest slightly differently. I've not been thinking of it as a gap between the blocks of training. Rather, I've been thinking about the rest as part of the work. So here's my invitation for you. Look at your calendar or schedule for the rest of this year. And identify all of the really intense busy periods. Maybe print it out and shade it so you get a real heat map of what the year ahead looks like. And then armed with that information, plan in the times when you absolutely need to take a break to rest and recover. And if you do that, you can ensure that work doesn't get the very best of you and those that you care about the most aren't just getting what's left. That's it for today's episode of the Leader's Kitbag. Hope it's been useful, and remember, look after yourself and those you've got the privilege and responsibility to lead. And until next time, lead on!
