Hustle Culture: Five Things Your Employees Think When You Work Long Hours

Hustle culture is a prevalent workplace trend in American society promoting workplace productivity at the cost of employees’ time, health, personal life, and energy for any non-work activities.  Over time, it can make work become a person’s entire identity and leaves workers burnt out, in poor health, and disenchanted with their leadership.  But CEOs, managers, and other workplace leaders continue to subscribe to hustle culture by celebrating excessive work hours and sacrifices outside the workplace.

If you lead anyone and work more than your paid hours, you may not realize what you are signaling to those you lead.  Bosses or managers that subscribe to hustle culture often perceive themselves as having a strong work ethic.  Some believe this makes them superior to those who work for them, while others believe it inspires junior workers to work harder for more hours.

That rarely happens.  There is no prize for remaining constantly in motion, skipping your kid’s little league game, missing your sister’s birthday to make a deadline, forgoing sleep to read a few more emails, or other personal sacrifices.  Maybe there is a small prize—enjoy the additional 2% raise above the person that did not do all that—but you will spend more in medical care and therapy to cope with all you gave up to secure the raise.

On top of hustle culture not serving leaders, their employees are no longer buying it.  When I see my manager work long hours, I do not think, “Wow, what a great work ethic, I should be more like that!”  Quite the opposite.  

Here are five ideas you instill in your team when you subscribe to hustle culture as a leader:

1. You do not know how to prioritize.

I love calendars.  They allow me to enjoy time coaching a rugby team, exercising and playing rugby, seeing my friends and family, traveling, experimenting with a new recipe, reading a book by the pool, hiking a beautiful trail, dedicating time to multiple side hustles, going on a walk to get ice cream on a warm day, and so much more all while averaging eight hours of sleep a night and working my full-time job.  When my supervisor cannot figure out how to fit just their full-time job into the constraints of a calendar without cutting out all of life’s joys and taking away some precious sleep minutes, I lose respect for that person.  That is terrible time management.

That may sound harsh, but I am a subordinate to a manager who subscribes to hustle culture, and I find it a bit sad.  My manager prides themself on project management but cannot fit their work into a work day.  If you cannot manage your own calendar, how can you effectively manage a project?

If you are this type of leader, you have a prioritization problem.  Not every work task is created equally, and you need to figure out which ones require your attention so you can schedule time for those tasks.  Less important tasks are not your problem.  Delete them from your list of priorities or assign them to someone else.

Until you learn how to prioritize, your employees will judge you as an unnecessarily stressed out leader who does not take the time to figure out what matters each day.  Take the time to figure out your priorities, put them on a calendar, and enjoy learning that your work tasks easily fit into your work schedule.

If you learn how to prioritize but still keep all the tasks for yourself, you have a different problem.

2. You do not trust your employees.

“Delegate” was the most important lesson I learned from my teammate who served as president of the Boston University Women’s Rugby Club before I did.  I am glad I learned to delegate early because most leaders seem to struggle with it.  Learning to delegate is crucial as you acknowledge that no one person can accomplish everything.

The Eisenhower Matrix highlights the need to differentiate between what leaders actually need to do themselves versus what tasks they can delegate, decide, or delete from their priority list.  If you are unwilling to delegate, all urgent tasks fall to you regardless of importance, preventing you from adequately focusing on the important tasks.

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	DO Do it now, do it yourself	DECIDE Decide what to do, but delay action
Not Important	DELEGATE Assign to someone else to do now	DELETE Not worth a leader’s brainspace

While some leaders try to handle it all themselves because they do not know how to prioritize, other leaders understand what is urgent and important.  Choosing not to delegate in situations with numerous urgent tasks but a clear important one requiring a leader’s attention signals to subordinates that the leader does not trust them to handle urgent matters.  The leader would rather dedicate less of their attention to the important task than let someone else handle something unimportant.  That is a lack of trust.

From an employee’s perspective, a leader working overtime to personally tend to all urgent tasks does not trust the employee to such a degree that the leader would rather put in extra time and energy than give that employee responsibility.  That is a huge sign of distrust!  And many leaders can get there simply by following a cycle of overwork even when they do trust their employees.

But this cycle leads to even more work because employees that do not feel trusted by their leader do not feel empowered to take initiative, suggest creative solutions, or go the extra mile to accomplish a task before their leader makes a request.  Unempowered employees sit and wait for direction because they fear consequences for completing a task their boss personally wanted to handle.

Over time, this culture creates passive employees waiting for direction from a leader.  Unempowered employees do not remove any tasks from their leader’s list of responsibilities, further drowning the leader who would not delegate.  This does not happen because employees are lazy.  It happens because they spend their energy navigating the preferences of their boss rather than completing work products.

Eventually those employees leave to find a new place of work that empowers them to think creatively, challenge opinions, and take initiative.  Employees thrive with trust, and employers do too because they can delegate their workload.

3. You care more about control than deliverables.

If a manager keeps all tasks to themselves, they are bound to start wondering what their subordinates are working on all day.  Not much because they do not delegate!  This can lead to managers who care more about the hours an employee works than the quality or quantity of deliverables the employee produces.

The point of work is to get tasks done.  If an employee is doing that, they should get paid.  When a leader starts worrying about how many hours an employee is sitting at a desk or whether their Teams status is green at a certain time of day, that leader has lost the plot.

This mindset shows your employees that you care more about controlling them than producing high-quality work.  You care more about them sitting at their desk for eight hours than finishing the report by Tuesday at 3:00 p.m.  To an employee who actually cares about the work rather than the warped priorities of hustle culture, that is crazy.  Am I working harder by sitting here and wiggling my mouse for eight hours than someone who sets aside some deep work time, gets the report done in three hours, and then goes for a walk?

I know this is controversial in a society that seems incapable of assessing employees on their quality of work rather than whether they are at their desk, but the best managers I have had (a) appreciated my work products and (b) understood that after I cranked out a better work product than my colleagues could in half the time, I needed to go to the gym or for a run to unwind.  If you trust your employees to put in the work and then take the time they need to recover, they will produce better work.

4. Your employees are labor, not people.

Some bosses do not let their employees go for that rejuvenating walk or take a break after finishing a big project because they do not see employees as people with lives and personal needs.  Employees are work inputs to getting a job done, nothing more.  

When you see employees as units of labor rather than people, you further lose their trust, but you also lose productivity.  I previously worked in a data-intensive position that used my quantitative skills and challenged me to problem solve each day.  When I had to leave that position, I knew my current position would not give me that same level of fulfillment.  However, when a position recently appeared on the project on which I work that required the data skills I have, leadership would not answer my inquiries into the position because they did not deem a response urgent or important.  I realized I was not valued as a person.  I was just a unit of labor producing whatever products they deemed necessary rather than using my specialized skills to their full potential.

Employees feel unrecognized when employers value only work hours because the skills of individual employees are overlooked.  Time is all that matters, and our talents fall to the side as secondary considerations.  Leaders who instead see employees as people with unique talents and skills can more efficiently allocate personnel resources.  We all work better and accomplish more when we enjoy what we are doing.

Take a page from someone who coaches a sport with different positions.  I could put the right fifteen people onto a rugby pitch in positions that do not play to their skills, and we would lose matches that we would win with players in positions that best utilize their skill sets.  It is not just about covering 80 minutes of rugby—it is about who can best accomplish certain skills within the match.  Covering workplace projects is no different.  The best leaders put people where they can thrive.

5. You are not smart enough to get your job done.

The harsh bottom line is if you lead a team and do not prioritize tasks, delegate to your employees, prioritize high-quality work, and assign employees tasks that match their skill sets but you still work more than 40 hours a week, you are not smart enough to be a leader.  I have never had a job that I could not fit into a 40 hour workweek, and I have been a teacher and held some important positions in the national security field.  None required more than 40 hours of work to accomplish everything.  (Obviously, there are some jobs, like securing a building, that simply require someone to be present, but those jobs are generally not held by managers.)  Leaders that rely on the crutch of working overtime and valuing time over deliverables are missing the qualities that make good leaders.

The best leaders are the smartest leaders rather than the most charismatic.  They know how to empower those around them and also set the example of putting up boundaries between life and work.  They delegate to support employee growth, and they understand that their employees are people with unique work situations.  They honor the skills of individuals and try to allocate work to play to people’s talents because they know that is the most efficient way to accomplish a project, as well as the way to keep their employees happy.

The best leaders take time for themselves.  We all need to take time for ourselves, or we cannot keep learning.  If we do not keep learning, we do not get smarter or more creative.  Working extra hours creates stagnant leaders, and those leaders become intellectually inferior to the people they lead.

In short, if you do not want your employees to pity your foolish work habits that make you an ineffective leader, sign off when your workday has ended.  Live your life, and sign back on when it is time to focus on work.  You will feel better, your employees will respect you, and you will accomplish more.