Why Leaders Must Model Rest - for Their Teams and Themselves
Written By: Josh Feldman and Rachel Zieleniec
In too many workplaces, rest is spoken about as a personal responsibility, and managed like a private indulgence.
But, if you lead people - at any level - your relationship between rest and work is already shaping your team and organization, whether you realize it or not.
Too often, leaders and managers encourage employees to take time off, set boundaries or “avoid burnout” - all while modeling the opposite behavior themselves. Late-night emails, skipped vacations and constant availability become the standard.
Workers notice.
More than 70% of workers have indicated they’ve experienced burnout in the last few years. If we want healthier, more sustainable organizations, rest cannot be an individual side project; it must be a modeled leadership practice.
By kub liz for Unsplash
Organizational culture is shaped when policy meets practice. It’s a good start to have a generous vacation policy on the books, but what happens alongside that policy will determine if it’s used, and how effectively. Managers, especially senior leaders, are the primary signal-setters. When leaders proclaim the age-old notion of ”do what I say, not what I do” - it’s never worked. Leadership requires leading by example.
Even the most generous PTO policies fall flat when leaders never take time off themselves - 46% of Americans don’t take their vacation days. Employees’ relationship to resilience in the workplace changes when they see their manager online at all hours of the day, or connected to email while they are supposed to be on vacation. Over time, exhaustion becomes normalized and overwork masquerades as commitment.
Modeling rest changes that equation. When leaders visibly and unapologetically practice rest, they grant permission for others to do the same. Well-rested workers are able to make better decisions, manage their emotions in the workplace and drive stronger organizational results overall.
This is an equity strategy, too. Caregivers and those from historically resilient backgrounds including LGBTQ+, BIPOC and disabled leaders, often face systemic barriers in workplaces and in society, which makes modeled and normed practices critical to leveling the playing field at work. When workplaces model sustainability from the top down, workers are able to feel the permission to work in more restful and sustainable ways.
Start today: Ways in which leaders must model rest
If modeling rest is a consistent practice, it could look like…
Taking real time off and fully disconnecting from communication platforms while on vacation
Setting (and honoring!) boundaries around evenings and weekends, including reminding teammates not to send emails when the organization is closed
Naming rest explicitly as a leadership and values priority, including instituting organization-wide guardrails in your workplace
Resisting - and calling out - urgency culture when everything can feel like an emergency
Planning realistically for absences so work can continue
Developing accountability practices for managers to have conversations about taking rest as part of their 1:1’s
Establishing norms for a board chair to check in with a leader regarding their ability to access rest as part of their job, with the intention of combating burnout at the highest level of the organization
Being disciplined about what your teams don’t do, which helps norm more capacity-driven workloads and drives sustainability in the workplace
And, as it goes with anything that’s not yet normalized in our society, these aren’t easy tasks to do. But we have to start somewhere.
As a leader, we invite you to ask yourself this: are you ready and willing to be strategic, thoughtful and brave enough to unlearn some of your less effective habits regarding relationships to rest, start practicing healthy ones and then ultimately model them well for your future and the future of your organization?
Rest is infrastructure. We’re here for it, and for you.
Josh and Rachel are future-of-work experts committed to building better workplaces. They fulfill this mission in their roles as CEO and CPO at R&R: the Rest of Lives.