What happens when you have reached your upper limit, your capacity, your outer edge? How do great leaders prevent their people’s brains from pixelating?
Cia Verschelden’s book Bandwidth Recovery explores this very topic. Verschelden aimed her book at college instructors and administrators, but it has universal application. It describes college students’ psychoemotional needs by using the analogy of bandwidth — the range of frequencies that dictate data transfer amount and speed. If you have ever paid for internet service, you are likely well aware of the concept, but it is worth reviewing.
Internet bandwidth is a limit that cannot be exceeded. Think of how a highway can handle only a certain number of vehicles at one time. Just one too many, and traffic grinds to a halt. I know you have had this experience.
The trouble begins even before you reach fullness, though. On a highway, as the number of vehicles approaches the upper limits of capacity, everything starts slowing down long before it stops. So not only is there a maximum limit, but the closer you get to that limit, the harder it is to proceed. Traffic moves, yes, but only at a crawl. If there is an accident blocking a lane, then highway capacity itself drops and exacerbates the delay. The same is true for data bandwidth. As you approach the upper capacity, its speed tapers off. You have no doubt dealt with frozen and pixelated Zoom calls. Welcome to the rush hour of bandwidth capacity!
Similarly, there is an upward capacity for what we can deal with mentally and emotionally, and as we approach it, our capabilities begin to collapse. It’s like your brain, just like that Zoom call, becomes pixelated.
I want to expand on Verschelden’s take and on her focus on students. Our bandwidth usage consists of our entire psychoemotional spectrum on top of the time and other resources required for our work.
Still seething from that big argument with your spouse? That takes up bandwidth. Worried about your credit card debt? There goes some more bandwidth. Boss breathing down your neck? Oh, you know that will be burning up some bandwidth. Day-dreaming about your weekend getaway? That requires bandwidth too. Suffering longterm PTSD? That is like losing a permanent chunk of your bandwidth. Or, how about this one? Have a strong sense that your co-workers and/or bosses judge you based on your race, gender identity, sexuality, disability, religious choices, etc.? That eats away at your bandwidth capacity like five Zoom calls on a single DSL line.
Going further, even physical phenomena consume bandwidth, ranging from the slight and momentary to the momentous. Are you hungry? Are you hangry? Does your back ache badly? Chronically sleep deprived? Have a migraine? Hungover? Feeling under the weather? Suffering from debilitating allergies? Find your chair horribly uncomfortable? Have been staring at the computer too long? Enduring a chronic ailment? Driven to distraction by the fact that your co-worker absently hums “Baby Shark” whenever he uses the copier? Bandwidth, bandwidth, and more bandwidth!
Each of these matters — the trivial and the awful, takes us away from our focus on our work, but notice how so many are outside our immediate control. Sure, there are things you can do to alleviate the pressure. Mindfulness exercises — meditation or even just a few deep breaths — can help clear your mind and settle your emotions. Scheduling breaks is a tried and true method for freeing up some bandwidth. Naps are like rebooting your internet connection and can be an amazing aid for eliminating mental and physical exhaustion and increasing productivity, but just try taking a ten- to twenty-minute nap on the job in our closely monitored and workaholic workspaces!
And therein lies much of the challenge. Most of the work humans do for a living is not designed for humans as they are but for humans as bosses want them to be.
And it’s not just the work of the mind. It’s similar if you work with your hands. I have done both, so let me speak to that. Your physical and psychoemotional states will also affect your ability to perform whether you are toiling away in an office tower or toiling away to build an office tower. In fact, just as with mental capacity, people pushed to their physical capacity for too long suffer serious consequences.
The simple fact is that workers — mental or physical — are people, and as people they have three-dimensional lives. One can compartmentalize life’s dimensions to an extent, cordoning off the pieces of your day by, say, suppressing the demands of home life while at work. But that is not sustainable and is, let’s be fair, deceptive if only to the self. Like all suppression, it will lash back with gusto.
The television series Severance plays off this concept. In it, employees have had their work minds physically separated from their non-work minds through some newfangled biotech. When they go to work, they have no memory of their outside life and no idea who they are in the wider world. The reverse is true for their non-work selves. Of course, the working selves (called innies) become more and more curious and then obsessed with their other halves (called outies), but the outies tend to view their innie selves with some contempt. Plot complications ensue.
The point is that people remain people whether they are at work or are at home. We imagine that we can push ourselves to the limit at work and just recoup at home, but home life has its own challenges of course. Worse still, our bosses too often expect us to perform to assumed levels of capacity at work and don’t care much how or where or whether we recover in the off hours. Burnout is inevitable — the permanently pixelated brain.
Ironically, bosses think the answer to too much is to add some more. Some employers compensate by emphasizing wellness and even offering healthful benefits, which while a positive trend, is ameliorative rather than preventative. Offering Zumba classes an hour before opening will do little to alter the bandwidth equation.
Instead, bosses could throttle back the work demands, taking into account the inviolable limits of mental bandwidth and the deleterious effects of pushing people too hard. Great leaders know that productivity tends to increase when workers’ needs are honored and met. Great leaders treat bandwidth as the precious resource it is. If you think your people’s complaints are just unreasonable, perhaps it is so. Or perhaps it is you.
As with that highway traffic or your broadband internet, people have their limits. The question is how do we manage mental and physical capacity so we don’t all end up pixelating our brains? The first trick is to remember that pushing too much runs afoul of the law of diminishing returns. Therefore minding workplace bandwidth has twin goals: improved productivity and wellbeing. No matter how many bland platitudes we imbibe on the virtues of more effort, the reality is that workers are just as much people as their bosses and have similar capacity and limitations. Great leaders start with that truth.
Do you know your own bandwidth capacity? Do you know the bandwidth capacity of those who work with and/or for you?
To be a great leader you must carefully monitor and manage, bandwidth as a limited and precious resource, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation and gift.
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