When you’re in a leadership position and are responsible for leading a team and making important decisions, you need your brain to be in tip-top shape. Otherwise, your team may fail, and your decisions may turn out to be the wrong choice.
In order to succeed in your work life, you must prioritize sleep in your personal life. With benefits that include improved mental capacity and a better mood, getting enough sleep is your companion for career success.
A Lack of Sleep Does Not Make a Leader
For many people, especially leaders, a lack of sleep is often seen as a badge of honor.
You can hear it in morning conversations everywhere, people seemingly bragging about how little sleep they got the night before. Yet, despite the commonality of sleep deprivation, a lack of sleep does not make a good leader.
While some may view a lack of sleep as a sign that someone is working hard, it instead signifies someone who is no longer working at their peak performance, and often without them realizing just how far they fall short of their best.
Once you get some sleep, you’ll realize just how long you have been slogging through at half-capacity.
Skipping out on sleep may seem like a way to get more hours of work in—and thus get ahead of others—but it instead makes you more prone to a poor mood and poor judgment—two qualities that can be detrimental for someone in a position of leadership.
How Sleep Can Help You Be a Better Leader
When you’re taking charge of a project, it’s important to bring your A-game, and getting enough sleep can help you with this.
With sleep’s ability to impact key areas of leadership, including brain power and people skills, the time you spend resting is crucial for your ability to lead a team to success.
The following are some of the ways in which sleep can help you to be a better leader:
Keeps Your Brain Alert
When you’re leading a team, you need your brain to be working with you, not against you.
Studies into sleep deprivation have shown that it can cause both poor memory and low focus. Additionally, not having enough sleep can slow your reaction time. As a leader, being quick on your feet and capable of quickly assessing information to come to the best decision is crucial—sleep deprivation can keep you from doing this.
To keep your brain working at its highest capacity, it’s crucial that you spend enough time sleeping each night.
Improves Your Interpersonal Skills
When you’re a leader, having a good relationship with the members of your team is a must. They must feel comfortable working with you—any stress that you add onto them can decrease their capabilities and generally make you into someone they don’t want to work for. Conversely, the happier your team members are, the more efficiently they’ll work and, typically, the more likely they are to go above and beyond.
Sleep is a big contributor to your mood, with sleep deprivation shown to impair mood regulation and lead to hostility and anxiety, two emotions that can leech into your work relationships. Even more, when sleep-deprived, you likely aren’t aware that you’re acting this way toward your team.
By impacting your physical health, sleep can also indirectly affect your mental state when leading your team—the worse your physical health, the more anxiety you may experience, which can affect your mood when working with others.
Ensures Your Employees Get Enough Sleep
It’s a trickle-down process in which when leaders sleep less, their employees may sleep less, which can lead to negative mental capacity for all members of a team.
Leaders who don’t get enough sleep may become more easily affected by the demands of their position, which can lead to rumination during nonwork times and the sleep consequences that follow. However, this rumination can cause a cascade of effects that leads to employee rumination and employee sleep problems, with one study confirming that leader rumination negatively affects employee sleep quality.
Thus, the less sleep you have, the less resilient you are to the challenges that come from a leadership position, and the worse off your team may be. With sleep deprivation, poor performance and greater mistakes can be expected, which may then increase your leadership challenges, as well.
The key to being a good leader is to support your team members, and one way in which you can do this is by getting enough sleep so that you can be in the best possible headspace for your team—the more sleep you get, the more well-rested your team will be.
Keeps You from Making Risky Decisions
Risky decisions on their own aren’t necessarily a bad thing—sometimes you need to take the jump to see the rewards—but they nevertheless open the door for failure, which can be detrimental to a company.
One study found that those who were sleep-deprived changed their decisions to those with greater risk and were less concerned with monetary risk. This comes alongside the knowledge that the decisions we make when sleep-deprived can be poorer, meaning these risky decisions may make less sense—and may not be made—if you were to have a full amount of sleep.
Sleep Challenges Leaders Face
While you may already know the importance of sleep, that doesn’t mean that getting enough of it is always attainable. In fact, despite work being one of the reasons why sleep is so important, many leaders experience sleep barriers that primarily center around work and their inability to stop thinking about it.
Additionally, many are made to believe that sleeping a lot is lazy and that those who are successful must also sacrifice sleep in order to get more done. Commonly believed myths such as this can lead to a negative association with sleep and a cycle that’s hard to break.
However, we now know that sleep is crucial for those in leadership positions to see the greatest productivity from themselves and their team, and here are some tips for bypassing your sleep challenges:
- Set a routine. Just like your workday has a start and end time, set one for your sleep as well. This way, you can ensure you’re setting aside enough time each day to sleep. As a bonus, regularity can help out your circadian rhythm, which can make falling asleep easier.
- Step away from the computer. It’s all too easy to let your work drift into your personal hours, but to preserve your mind, prevent burnout, and make sleep easier to come by, cut off your emails while you’re off the clock—this way, you won’t spend the night wondering if there’s something else coming through that needs to be looked at.
- Create a relaxing environment. Ensure that your bedroom helps to promote sleep by making it cool, dark, and quiet.
- Exercise during the day. Exercise has been shown to boost leadership skills by increasing cognitive functioning, and it can also help you fall asleep.
- Skip the nighttime coffee. Drinking coffee too close to bedtime can keep you awake, so bypass a nighttime cup of coffee in favor of a non-caffeinated beverage.
Getting enough sleep can help your brain be in the best position to lead your team, whether you need to make quick and difficult decisions or communicate with the team and maintain a good, uplifting attitude. Once you have enough sleep, you’ll be in a better position to be the leader your team needs.
