The bit of my programme I apologise for

Jeff Bezos. Tim Cook. Barack Obama. Angela Merkel. Satya Nadella. Indra Nooyi. Richard Branson. Winston Churchill.

Ask most people what that lot have in common and you get something about all achieving great things, they've got drive, or something about working harder than the rest of us.

It's none of that.

Bezos has been public for years about protecting eight hours of sleep, because he reckons it's what makes him good at his actual job. Tim Cook was in the gym by five (not a recommendation). Obama did forty-five minutes six days a week through the whole presidency and said it was the thing that made the rest of his time work. Merkel cycled in, put exercise in her afternoons, and ate the same way every day for sixteen years so she never had to spend a decision on lunch. Nooyi ran PepsiCo off four am starts and wouldn't give up family dinners. Churchill built his whole day around a two-hour nap.

Different countries, different decades, politics you couldn't get in the same room. Every one of them treats their body and their attention as leadership infrastructure rather than as wellness, because it's what decides the quality of the work.

Which brings me to the bit of my own programmes I get almost apologetic about teaching.

It comes near the start. People have signed up for delegation and difficult conversations, standards, what to do about the one who won't step up. Then before any of that they get this little northern bloke telling them to sort their sleep out and drink more water. You can see it on their faces.

One of my cohort told me I shouldn't apologise for it, because it's important and some people need to hear it.

She was right. So no apology this time.

You're the most contagious person in the room

There's a thing in the leadership research called emotional contagion. Sigal Barsade at Wharton did the work on it back in 2002 and the finding is blunt. The mood of the most senior person in the room becomes the mood of the room.

Yours reaches the people you manage in minutes whether you want it to or not. Your energy, your patience, how short your fuse is. And it goes wider than the people who report to you, because everyone else in the business is watching how you turn up too.

Then there's the work itself. Bezos has said that what a senior executive actually gets paid for is a small number of high-quality decisions, not the volume of stuff they get through. And the quality of those decisions isn't really about intelligence, because you've already got that. It comes down to how well your brain is working at the moment you make the call, which comes down to whether you slept, whether you ate, whether you've been outside this week.

Contagion is the symptom. How you run yourself is the cause.

I ignored this for years

I went through a rough patch at work and I had a list of reasons why things were hard. The tech was rubbish. Leadership didn't care what we did. Good people weren't getting promoted or rewarded. We were hiring on salaries that were never going to get us the right people.

All true. None of it me.

Then I overheard someone from another business talking about how people in mine were showing up, and it wasn't complimentary. A few of those things landed squarely on me. I wasn't happy in the role, things weren't great at home, and I wasn't looking after myself. I'd been telling myself that it didn't really matter, that I could still do the job, that nobody noticed what I was carrying in every day.

They noticed, I was part of the problem.

The permission bit

Arthur Brooks at Harvard puts it in a way I keep coming back to. The number one predictor of being a good boss is whether you're working on your own happiness. And if you're in any position of leadership, you have an ethical responsibility to work on it, because it's your gift to the people you're a steward of.

That's what stops it being self-indulgent. What Brooks is really handing you is permission.

Permission to do the forty-five minute workout on a Tuesday morning instead of clearing the inbox. To shut the laptop at a time that means you get a good night's sleep. To go out on Thursday and see the friends you haven't seen properly since June, which is the one most managers I work with have quietly let go of without ever deciding to, and then they wonder why they feel flat by March.

The patience you'll have for your worst-performing employee on Wednesday was decided by how well you slept on Tuesday.

The bit where good intentions die

Everyone reading this has good intentions. Good intentions do not survive Monday morning.

The eight names at the top aren't prioritising this harder than you are. They've built the week around it first, before anything else gets to move in.

Merkel is the clean example. Sixteen years in the most demanding job in Europe, and she didn't have more hours in the day than you do. She had a calendar built to remove every friction point that might steal her attention from the decisions that mattered.

So not "I'll prioritise sleep," but "Tuesday's dinner ends at nine so I'm in bed by ten." The exercise version is "Tuesday and Thursday lunchtimes are gone and my middays have moved," which is a much less comfortable thing to type into a shared calendar. Do it anyway.

What managers can take from this

Give yourself a score on the five fundamentals out of five. Circle the worst one and schedule something that will help. Just a small step. Don't go from nothing to hour-long workouts on Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning.

Your team will thank you for it (well probably not, but they'll notice).

Arran Russell Founder, Set The Tone

Ps: To see what else I cover in my Foundations Programme, click here.

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