Bill Gallagher uses two CEO case studies to show how unhealthy busyness destroys sleep, health, and strategy. Eddie slept 2-3 hours nightly and crashed his company. Rocky micromanaged everything and tanked decision quality. The fix: delegate, skip decisions under $10k, and actually rest.
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Really curious about being too busy. I've been thinking a lot about this lately. When are we too busy? When are we not busy? Look, I work with busy people. I'm a busy person. Somebody asked me yesterday, you know, are you still busy? Are you retired? Like, like. No, I'm really busy. And pretty much everyone I'm working with is busy. I think listeners, viewers here, you're busy, but when are you too busy and when is busy healthy? And what does too busy mean? And how do you fix it? Right? So I think, you know, there are times where you're too busy and you probably get tired, and there are times where you think you need to be busy or busier than you actively are. So I think both things are going on all the time. There's like a level of busyness, but busyness, like activity for activity's sake, because we have like an emotional need, we have guilt, we're driven, we are worried about things, is probably never healthy. So what is good, what isn't good? I think fundamentally I'm talking to busy people, right? But let's have the right kind of busy. Let's be busy in the way that you design intent that fulfills all your, your intentions, but not the kind of busy that has, like, unintended consequences. So let me show you a couple of examples, a couple people that I coached that I think really exemplified the wrong kind of busy and, and what happens with it. So, you know, when you're too busy, it means you're not sleeping well. You know, there's health impacts, like, you know that your thinking gets frazzled, you know that you don't have as much fun, that you get cranky. You have some variation of all of these things. I do. I think we all do. Right. So you know that that's obvious. I was coaching a guy, I'll call him Eddie, just to keep it anonymous so that he doesn't get the pressure. But a tech CEO, he really needed to get a win. He felt the pressure. He wasn't confident yet in his role. He had bought the company and he had a business background, but it wasn't in that specific role with that kind of company in that industry and so on. And so he wasn't confident. He got really busy. He tried to sleep like only two, maybe three nights, three hours a night for like several years. As soon as I found out about it, I talked to him about it, I encouraged him to stop doing it, we talked about it, but he kept doing it. And the result of it on the personal side is Pretty obvious. So he got foggy, he gained weight, he stopped having as much fun, his family got divided, his marriage failed, his family was divided. And so there's all that. Right. So sleeplessness, health effects, gaining weight, family impacts. Right. And that's a big deal. Like your family splits up. Right. So we know carried on long enough, and yet he felt like he still had to do it because he wasn't winning. And in fact, the more, like, busy, the more he tried to work, the worse things got. It didn't get better. So I think that in that case, what we're missing is it's the wrong kind of busy, and it's having some business effects you're not clear about. So let's take the case that something like that has happened or will happen to you at some point. It's for sure happened to me as well as some of my clients. In that case, you will start to see some other effects. So his people started to get upset, frustrated, the morale went down. There was a decline in morale. There started to be more churn. New people they brought in, didn't turn out, had to leave before they had realized what they were brought in for. And people who'd been around the company for some years left because it wasn't fun anymore. He took ordinary, basic things that were out of his domain, and he meddled in them. So he became a micromanager. He got involved in every part of the business because he felt like personal responsibility as the CEO, and it ultimately caused the company to fail. So the company failed and was sold off in parts. And he was highly resistant the whole time through the coaching. It failed after we stopped coaching the company. But, you know, it doesn't like I. I failed as a coach because I didn't manage to interrupt the behavior. Right? So there's one example, one story. You see the personal side first, the business side catches you off guard. So when you get too busy, you're involved in too many things, you're doing things you shouldn't do. Your people aren't doing the things that, that they want to do. And they get annoyed, frustrated, irritated, because you're in their business, doing their things, not letting them work it out. So teams diminish, results diminish, things get worse. You keep trying to do more hard work. And ultimately, like in the case of Eddie, failure, like big, personal, now, Eddie's still alive. People are all still alive. Business was sold off, the customers, and things are being handled in a new way. But Eddie had huge impacts in his life and his career to his business and so on. You don't want that. Like, so there is definitely kind of too busy and a pattern that you can get in and a reason that you can get there. Let me give you another example. Also a new CEO. I'll call this guy Rocky. So this company goes, it's breakout company. This company goes from inception to $2 billion valuation. Rocky's working at the company, comes in to take over from the founder and they start to have some real challenges. So Rocky tries to be Superman and Rocky starts flying all around the world, visiting all the offices, meeting with customers, things like that, keeping unbelievable hours. And I would say Rocky was involved in kind of a different kind of micromanagement, but still trying to be Superman to the thing instead of letting the people do. In Rocky's case, I don't really know what the personal effects were. I imagine that it's stress and family impacts and things like that, but I don't actually know. What I do know is that Rocky's thinking his quality of the company's strategy declined and people were working on too many things. So they opened up too many fronts. They tried to do too many things. He's involved in everything, which meant that everything sort of had to wait for his participation. Everything of consequence, all the big things had to wait for his participation because he's like everywhere. And people got frazzled because they'd get like emails at 2, 3 in the morning to have ready for a 9am meeting. And you know, so they'd wake up at 5 or 6am and they'd see this and their whole day would be frazzled. Right. Things like that were starting to happen. This company goes from up to 2 billion and then down to less than 150 million and is sold off in parts. You know, things changed in the company though. The world changed the strategy. But the reason they didn't overcome, I say looking at it with, I mean, you could feel it at the time, but now looking at it more clearly is that he was trying to be Superman, right? And he was trying to go everywhere and that the quality not only did the. The impact of the team was degraded, but the strategy was compromised. And so they're all doing too much. And with him having. And their bandwidth is limited because he has to be involved in everything and the failing. I think in Rocky's case, he might say differently, but I think the failing is not looking in the mirror. So in his case, he wanted me to coach everyone but him, so he wants me in everybody else's business, but him and I think this is a common kind of thing. If you notice that you'd like a consultant, a coach or somebody to work on the people that are a problem in your company to help you and you maybe got the wrong people or that kind of thing and you're not taking a look in the mirror, that's a real issue and it's a struggle because you know, nobody wants to think it's their fault. But it's also like to take a look in the mirror. Like if things are not going well in your life, your business, looking in the mirror is the most powerful way because even though it's no fun to for it to be your fault, you can do something about you. Like it's easier to impact you than everyone else. And if you could see that you are the originator of it. So too busy, you're busy. But when busy becomes a racket, like a cop out thing, you say, oh yeah, I'm so busy right now. Oh, I'm busy. Right. Maybe take some time off, maybe step back. If you're involved in decisions that are worth less than $10,000, maybe that's not something you should be involved in. What is it that you could say? Where are you meddling in things, in the people? Where are you not taking time? You know, I'll talk about it in subsequent ones, but there are a lot of great examples of leaders of really well known companies, as well as some of the ones that we've coached that either just got the message from the beginning. They were an empowerment, they were a healthy, balanced kind of a leader right from the get go. And then there are other people that have had transformations. I'll talk about some of those in some upcoming episodes. But when you have a transformation, you see something about yourself and you shift as the leader. Then all the work that we do in strategy and getting your execution dialed in, dialing in the team, the people actually stick around. The people level up because you're not being too busy, you're not micromanaging, you're not kind of a frazzled, not clear thinking, unhealthy sort of a person. Think about being your most powerful self. You're rested, your fitness is great, you've eaten well, your romantic relationship is in good shape, your family, your fun, your hobbies, your friends. You're a whole person with a whole rich, diverse things. And all of those things like bear in on and give support to your ability to lead powerfully. Right? Then your people are all encouraged to have similar kinds of lives. And they're all Leading their best selves, doing their best work. And the best. It's not about doing a million hours a week and not getting any sleep and that kind of thing. That's not sustainable. There will be times, right? There will, I'll talk about in a future episode. There will be times, but if you were the COO of a big rocket company where something had blow up and you'd need to like huddle up and like put in some extra hours to figure it out or leading up to a launch or that kind of thing. But then other times where your launches would want to be like routine, right? And so our day to day life shouldn't all be crisis all the time. No sleep, all stress, like that kind of thing until you die. Life is hard. Whether you're a CEO, a CEO, whatever, any level of leader, or whether you're digging ditches or working the service industry, or whatever level kind of life you live, it's all going to be hard. What makes it less of a thing is when you're powerful, when you're effective, when you're rested, when you're clear thinking, when you're doing your best work, right? And as a leader, our work is amplified and rippled across so many other people because we touch and interact and we're the focal point for a lot of things when we're doing our best work. So where could you carve out a little more time in your day? Where could you let your people go a little bit? What's one thing that you could do this week to bring a little bit more balance into your life? A decision you could step out of, a meeting, you could untangle yourself from a matter that you could let the team sort itself out in. That would be my coaching for you this week. Look for what you could do. Hope that's helpful. We'll talk to you again next time. In the meantime, keep scaling.
