spa v. sparta: another busted binary good leaders avoid
There’s another binary I’ve seen get people in a pile of trouble. Just like the work v culture binary, it imperils good-hearted, earnest leaders who want to do right by their people.
This second bogeyman is the Spa v Sparta binary.
The wrongheaded, underlying belief of this binary is that work is harmfully hard. Each bit of it is a step toward burnout. At a deep, even ontological level, there’s a sense that people aren’t made for it. We can’t do hard things and we shouldn’t be expected to try.
If this is so, you, the leader, are a bit of a sadist. You’re forcing people to do something harmful to themselves. At the very least, you should apologize. If you’re really good, you’ll minimize the harm. To do that, you minimize exposure to the cause of the harm (by making folks work less) and you cushion people in presence of the harm as much as possible (by satisfying as many of their preferences as possible).
If you have to run a prison, you might as well load it with perks. If you are sending people to die, slowly, in service to Sparta, you should make that death a spa experience.
I’m laying it on thick. But this is the most common orientation I’ve seen among managers, especially new ones, on teams I’ve recently coached or led.
Out of an earnest, righteous desire to see your people as whole people, you tumble into “spa” culture - over time, you optimize for the comfort of your teammates instead of the achievement of your mission. You get caught in a clumsy chase after idiosyncratic teammate preferences.
This is a bummer! Not only because the core attitude itself is cynical. More importantly, this view can cheat people of one of the greatest satisfactions that work can offer - growing, practically and spiritually, in the pursuit of something that matters.
More coarsely put: it trades badassery for bullshit. Oy.
Wiser leaders avoid this with a different assumption and invitation. They recognize that employment is more than a raw time-for-money transaction - there’s a purpose the work is supposed to realize and if someone has opted into that purpose, it may matter to them out of proportion to the cash. Instead of shielding their people from struggle, they seek out opportunities for their people to take on useful challenges. They prompt their people to grow through productive stress (or “eustress”) - the only thing that builds new skill and durable confidence.
You do not escape the binary by grinding away teammates and replacing them in a series of merciless burnouts. On the contrary. The path out is “burn in” behavior. Offer your people the opportunity to test their limits and expand them, while offering ample cash, space, and prompting to take good care of themselves as they do these things.
These leaders set the expectation that their people find and make use of their own “spa” within “Spa-rta” and they model what that looks like.
They tell people to find their own spa, not because they are uninterested in their people and their quirky pursuits of happiness - because they have deep respect for their people’s autonomy and individuality. And they know that the true professionals have woven their own braids of work and rest and make sense of both modes in light of a richly defined purpose, not just at the office, but in life.
-Eric
