Humans are psychologically hard-wired to want to do a good job and work too much.
For employees, this means overworking.
For managers, this means saying yes to too much.
For leaders, this means creating generating as much work as can be done.
Can you spot any potential issues here?
Poor health, stress, burnout - things we're witnessing on epidemic levels.
It's not happening out of malice or stupidity.
It's happening because it's in our developed psyche to do so.
So what to do about it?
We have to be aware of our propensity to naturally do these things that create issues.
We have to be aware of the long term implications of us doing these things.
We have to work together and plan to stop our future selves from doing these things at an unhealthy level.
If we ignore these things, if we just go with the flow, we're always going to revert to our natural behaviour that has been developed over millions of years.
The result of which is a crappy culture where everyone is overworked, managers promoted for saying yes not for driving sustainable high performance and businesses achieve sub-optimal results and profits.
Mike Jones