Overwork is not ambition

One of the worst company values I have ever seen was this: give it your 110%.

It sounds energetic. It sounds committed. It sounds like the kind of thing a leadership team puts on a slide when it wants to signal drive.

It is also a terrible value.

Because the message underneath it is not subtle. Your real 100% is insufficient. Rest is suspicious. Recovery looks soft. Boundaries are interpreted as a lack of hunger. The only morally acceptable posture is permanent overextension.

That is not ambition. It is a burnout culture with better branding.

The science on long working hours does not support the fantasy that more time automatically produces better outcomes. John Pencavel's work at Stanford shows a non-linear relationship between hours and output: below a threshold, output rises roughly in line with hours, but above that threshold, additional hours produce diminishing returns. The WHO and ILO have also reported that working 55 hours or more a week is associated with a 17% higher risk of ischaemic heart disease and a 35% higher risk of stroke, compared with working 35–40 hours a week.

That should already be enough to retire the mythology.

More hours do not equal better judgement

Many leaders still behave as though time is the master variable. More time means more commitment. More commitment means better outcomes. Therefore, the hardest-working team must be the best-performing one.

That logic is emotionally satisfying and operationally weak.

The problem is that knowledge work is not a factory line. It depends on judgement, synthesis, restraint, prioritisation, creativity and decision quality. Those things do not improve indefinitely as fatigue rises. Pencavel's findings are useful precisely because they show the relationship is not linear: once hours pass a certain point, extra time yields less and less output. In some settings, the longer hours are simply a more expensive way of producing tired work.

This is one reason overwork is so dangerous in product, strategy and leadership roles. The cost is not only health. It is judgement. A depleted team may still look busy. It may still answer messages quickly and sit in more meetings and appear highly committed. What usually deteriorates first is not visible effort, but quality of thought.

And that is a far more expensive loss.

"Give it your 110%" is not a performance value. It is a burnout instruction.

"110%" breaks the contract between a company and its people

A good culture sets a demanding but intelligible standard. It says: this is what excellence looks like, this is what matters most, and this is how we will help you do your best work.

A bad culture does something else. It turns excess into virtue.

That is what "give it your 110%" does. It recasts overextension as character. It teaches people that sustainable effort is morally mediocre. It erodes the possibility of enough.

Once a culture loses the concept of enough, people stop managing energy and start performing devotion. They work not because the work requires it, but because the culture signals that visible sacrifice is proof of seriousness.

That is one of the reasons these cultures can be so seductive. They allow leaders to mistake depletion for dedication.

But the body keeps score, even when the values deck does not. If a company value requires people to become less well in order to look more committed, the problem is not with the people.

It is with the value.

Once a culture loses the concept of enough, people stop managing energy and start performing devotion.

Hobbies are a better management metric than many leaders realise

One of the most important questions I ask my direct reports is very simple:

How often are you getting to do your hobbies?

Not because hobbies are trivial. Quite the opposite. They are often an excellent litmus test for whether somebody still has access to themselves outside work.

People who are coping reasonably well usually still have some energy for life beyond the office. They still read, run, paint, climb, cook, sew, play music, see friends, go to Pilates, sit with a book, take photographs, do something with no KPI attached to it. When that starts to disappear, it often tells you something before the more formal performance indicators do.

There is good evidence behind that instinct. A widely cited study found that enjoyable leisure activities were associated with better psychological and physiological functioning, including lower blood pressure, lower cortisol and better overall mood. More recent research found that leisure participation weakened the relationship between workaholism and work stress. In other words, leisure is not the opposite of performance; it is one of the things that protects people from becoming consumed by work in ways that eventually degrade performance.

That is why I think hobbies matter so much as a managerial signal. They are not merely "nice to have". They help reveal whether a person is recovering, whether they still have room to think, and whether work has started colonising the whole of their inner life.

A team with no hobbies is often a team being overtaxed.

Recovery is not indulgence. It is part of performance

High standards and recovery are not opposites. They are partners.

This is the part many leaders still resist. They imagine that rest, hobbies and clear boundaries sit in tension with excellence. In reality, sustainable high performance depends on recovery. Fatigue narrows thinking. It reduces patience, perspective and discernment. It makes people more brittle, more reactive and less elegant in the choices they make.

The research on leisure and work stress points in the same direction. Leisure activities can buffer stress, support recovery and improve well-being. Pencavel's work likewise implies that the productivity cost of long hours is not merely moral or medical; it is economic. People need time away from work because output quality is not separable from recovery quality.

A leader who ignores that is not being tough-minded. They are misreading the machinery.

Because the goal is not to extract the greatest number of hours from a team. The goal is to create the conditions under which a team can think clearly, decide well and sustain quality over time.

Those are not the same thing.

The cost of overwork is not only health. It is judgement.

Overworked teams do not become exceptional. They become brittle.

This is the mistake at the heart of many "high-performance" cultures. They assume that if they keep stretching people, excellence will eventually emerge as a by-product.

Usually something else emerges first: irritability, shallower thinking, poor prioritisation, lower creativity, defensive behaviour, weaker collaboration and a quiet narrowing of life outside work. The team may still hit some short-term deadlines. It may even look heroic while doing so. But over time, brittleness replaces strength.

That is why overwork should be treated as an operating risk, not a badge of honour.

If a team cannot recover, it cannot learn well. If it cannot learn well, it cannot adapt well. If it cannot adapt well, it will eventually stop performing well — no matter how sincere its effort looks from the outside.

The strongest leaders understand this intuitively and structurally. They do not celebrate exhaustion. They do not turn "always on" into a proxy for seriousness. They do not write values that quietly instruct people to abandon themselves in order to belong.

They understand that performance has a metabolic reality, not just a motivational one.

A better standard

The question is not whether people should care deeply about their work. Of course they should.

The question is what the culture asks them to sacrifice in order to prove it.

A better standard is not "give us your 110%". It is something more adult: bring your best judgement, your focus, your honesty, your care for the customer, your willingness to learn, and your capacity to sustain good work over time.

That is harder, not easier.

Because it demands discipline rather than theatre. It demands prioritisation rather than martyrdom. It demands enoughness rather than endless visible sacrifice.

Overwork is not ambition.

It is usually the point at which a company has stopped understanding how performance actually works.

Overworked teams do not become exceptional. They become brittle.