The Conversation
It’s nine in the morning. The boss enters the meeting and announces that he has slept four hours. He finished a presentation at dawn and before breakfast he was already answering emails. He tells it with pride. Someone comments that they don’t know how it holds up, but no one asks how the others are going to hold up.
For years, business culture has admired that figure: that of the manager who doesn’t seem to need a break. Your tiredness works like a credential. The implicit message is clear: you have too many responsibilities to allow yourself to stop. Thus, sleeping little stops being a circumstance and becomes a professional virtue. We confuse availability with commitment and awake hours with the ability to lead. But having responsibilities over other people makes it especially important in what conditions we come to exercise them.
Even in the international political environment, in July of this year the news hit the front pages of all the media in the world that Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi claims to sleep “between 0 and 3 hours” daily.
Sleep may be a private experience, but its consequences can reach an entire team. They appear in the tone of a response, in the willingness to listen, or in the way a mistake is corrected. Rest is part of the biological infrastructure of leadership: it helps sustain the capabilities that allow it to be exercised. Leading well can start on the pillow, long before entering a meeting.
Stay away from your boss if you’ve had a bad night
We tend to conceive of leadership as a stable quality. There are close bosses, others authoritarian, others inspiring. However, the same person can listen patiently on a Tuesday and react with hostility on Wednesday. Your experience has not changed. What may have changed is how you slept.
Scientific research helps understand this variability, and indicates that sleep deprivation reduces positive emotions and can increase anxiety levels. Fatigue is not neutral: it alters the emotional filter from which we interpret what happens around us and conditions our responses.
This matters because a big part of directing is managing uncomfortable situations. Listening to a disagreement, containing a reaction, or choosing the right words requires more than knowing leadership techniques. Between feeling irritation and taking it out on someone, there is a margin of control that rest can help maintain.
A bad night for the boss can turn into a bad day for your team. American researcher Christopher Barnes and his collaborators found that, after sleeping worse, superiors tended to show more hostile behavior towards their workers. That treatment was related to less team involvement.
When fatigue dulls charisma
Burnout also undermines a more intangible but crucial quality for team management: the ability to inspire. You can master the technical subject and have solid arguments to defend a project, but transmitting enthusiasm requires emotional energy that cannot be improvised.
Tiredness can also take away charisma. Research shows that those who have slept less are less charismatic and have more difficulty generating the emotions they are trying to convey. But the effect also appears on the other side: those who have little rest tend to perceive the leader as less charismatic. The ability to inspire depends, therefore, on the rest of the speaker but also of the listener.
These findings reveal that the ability to inspire does not depend solely on the brilliance of the leader, but on the state of rest of both parties. An organization that subjects its staff to exhausting days is destroying, in two ways, the emotional connection that it then demands from its management teams.
When disconnecting seems like a lack of commitment
The problem does not end at the end of the workday. Anyone who boasts of sleeping little sends a signal about what sacrifices are valued in their company.
When a superior explicitly conveys that sleep is dispensable compared to work, his subordinates tend to report a poorer quality of rest. It is not necessary to require in writing to answer emails at dawn: publicly praising the person who does so can transform exceptional behavior into an implicit expectation. If nighttime availability is evaluated as a sign of loyalty, disconnecting begins to be perceived as a risk for one’s professional career.
At this point, rest stops being a purely individual choice and becomes a factor conditioned by corporate culture. A workshop on sleep hygiene or a wellness talk loses credibility if the deadlines set by management force the day to be systematically extended. Workers receive both messages, but the one that determines their professional future probably ends up weighing more.
The REM leader: rest and let rest
Faced with this exhausted model, it is worth reclaiming the figure of the “REM leader”: someone who understands that rest sustains the ability to work well and protects both his own and that of his team. You demonstrate this by handing out tasks, negotiating deadlines, and making it clear that an after-hours message can wait.
Someone who allows the day to have an end and disconnecting is not interpreted as a lack of commitment.
That coherence matters more than any declaration of intent. Scheduling an email for eight in the morning is of little use if fulfilling the order requires you to work until three in the morning. Protecting sleep requires reviewing how much work is required and what time is allowed to do it.
Improve everyone’s rest
Initiatives that help improve rest can be added to these measures. There are already sleep programs in the workplace with promising results. In a study by our team, we observed that, after participating in one of these programs, workers slept longer and had fewer symptoms of insomnia and anxiety. Protecting rest also means offering tools to improve it.
Sleeping well does not in itself guarantee being a good manager. However, glorifying lack of sleep ignores that the more complex cognitive and emotional capabilities we demand from management require a rested brain to sustain them.
Before admiring a leader because he boasts of sleeping four hours, it would be advisable to analyze how he works during the remaining twenty and what psychological cost the people who depend on him are paying. Because the fatigue may be yours, but the cost is shared among everyone.
