Lucy Kellaway e numele publicistei mele favorite; de multa vreme am vrut sa lipesc pe blog una dintre notele ei din FT, o fac acum (credits go to ft.com).
First it was the booze. Then the drugs. In the end, though, it was the addiction to work that destroyed Don Serratt. The first two habits he kicked long ago, but his M&A habit, pursued over years as an investment banker, eventually took his health, his wife and his children. Mr Serratt has now made a career out of his recovery and has founded Life Works, an addiction specialist consultancy which this week is holding a conference in London called Treating the Impaired Professional.
As a professional who sometimes feels impaired and who has many addictions, I nevertheless felt puzzled by this. Is work really addictive, and if so should we worry about it? Lots of people work silly hours, but it is a matter of personal choice. If they do not want to, surely they can stop.
Curious, I rang Mr Serratt. He told me that when he first became an investment banker he worked very hard and did very well. By 34 he was head of mergers and acquisitions at a big bank. He was waking up at 5am in airport hotels, visiting four or five countries a week, sleeping four hours a night. Every day he had business breakfasts and business dinners. After three years his life had caved in.
Working this hard is extreme. It is damaging. It is mad. But is it widespread enough to deserve a label like “work addiction” and to have conferences for human resources experts about it?
Mr Serratt claims that “a high percentage” of investment bankers are addicted to work. The addictions take hold because excessive work is rewarded: no one in an investment bank ever tells you to stop working, and you do not question what you are doing because everyone else is working hard too.
Eventually work becomes a drug because it stops you feeling. Work, he says, masks depression. To me, this is one of the beauties of it. If you try to drown depression in booze you behave badly, throw up, get a hangover and become more depressed. But if you escape it through work, you earn some money and get a sense of purpose which might help the depression a bit. For me, hard work is not just rewarded – it can be rewarding too.
In fact, most of the seriously depressed people I know have the other problem – they cannot work at all, which seems altogether more alarming. Mr Serratt defines addiction as something that you go on doing despite the consequences. He says work addiction is different as the people it harms first are the families.
I am not so sure about this either. The families I have seen where the father is a 70-hour-a-week investment banker look rather less dysfunctional than most. I got to know a few of them a couple of years ago when one of my children went to a school where most of the fathers were successful bankers and lawyers. There was never any sign of the men themselves, but plenty of signs of their cash – seen in their cars and in their wives, who had exceptionally high-maintenance hairdos and some very fancy handbags.
If these family lives were in tatters I certainly could not see it. Some marriages thrive on partners seeing very little of each other. Almost all the children seemed to live with both parents. And the wives, to judge from our conversations at the school gate, were a lot jollier than I was. They had passed a nice day playing a gentle game of tennis, having a light lunch with a girlfriend, and a bit of recreational shopping in Harvey Nichols. Life seemed good.
I am not saying that hard work is never damaging – it clearly was for Mr Serratt and his family. Yet for most investment bankers who work silly hours there is a deal. They do nothing but work and earn a king’s ransom. That is the deal and I imagine they all understand it.
Mr Serratt believes the work addict is driven on by shame at not being very good and fear of being found out.
He is not alone in thinking this syndrome causes serious problems in modern workplaces. The latest issue of the Harvard Business Review contains an article called The Dangers of Feeling like a Fake, which claims that managers who fear getting found out are a danger to themselves and their companies. The author, Manfred Kets de Vries, argues that the “neurotic imposter” drives himself so hard and is so punishing to both himself and others that his company or team becomes a sort of gulag.
Again, I find myself struggling to feel alarmed by all these workplace psychos. I wonder if Prof Kets de Vries feels like a fake himself. I do, most of the time. From the morning I walked into the Financial Times for the first time 20 years ago I have been waiting to get found out. I am still waiting. This, I think, is perfectly healthy. Feeling a fraud is part of what makes me try.
The people I worry about are those who do not have enough shame or fear, who never worry about being found out, because it has never occurred to them that they are anything less than just the ticket.
In the end we have a choice. We can see all driven, successful people as psychopaths: a potential liability to themselves and their families. There is something to be said for this. Most successful people are pretty suspect if you scratch the surface. The most balanced people I know have never got very far and never wanted to.
But so what? If hard-working high-fliers get from one end of the day to the other, surely the best thing for the rest of us is to keep our labels to ourselves and politely look the other way.
