Nobody Peaks Fifty-Two Weeks a Year

Sporting analogies are fab aren't they? The way they help us explain how communities can function well, a team as a system of specialised parts, synchronisation beating individual heroics. Why then do sporting analogies used to frame optimum workplace participation increasingly grate? When I hear them, they sound flawed and immoral. It bothers me that work culture flippantly evaluates an individual's business performance as though we are athletes operating within an elite team environment.

Let's take an elite athlete, perhaps a footballer who plays 90 minutes once or twice a week, trains on the pitch for a few hours a day with additional hours in the gym, the large majority of her working day is preparation and recovery, and competing is the sliver on top. The more we understand sport, the more we respect this as the way to get optimum output.

Work culture inverts this completely. In advertising we loved the words getting pitch fit, which really meant working on intensive projects with largely unrealistic deliverables and timelines, using all the hours available, grinding to get the impossible done and doing it often enough that you started to get good at it. Run that through a sports analogy honestly and you have a lunatic manager pushing a squad to play a final every other week, training flat out in between, never subbing anyone off, then baffled when the team is knackered and injured by the end of the season.

Nobody sane expects an athlete to peak fifty-two weeks a year, because it's physiologically impossible and everyone in sport knows it. So it infuriates me that the sports analogy gets used so loosely in business, taking all the positive outcomes while ignoring the physical conditions that make those outcomes possible.

Here's the morality argument, and this is where most business leaders chuckle at me. In sport, putting an exhausted or injured player on the park is bad management, because you are risking a prized asset and potentially the run up to the finals, and everyone on the ground can see it. We don't hesitate to do precisely the same thing in an office, keep the visibly burnt-out person grinding away at their desk, and we legitimise it as the behaviour that generates great work.

The biology here just isn't complicated. You get stronger after effort. But it's in the recovery that the body rebuilds itself a notch above where it started, and this holds for mental capability as much as physical. Without the recovery there is only fatigue stacking up. Anyone training seriously plans their rest with as much care as their work, which is why the athletes you watch are supported by physios, nutritionists and their own pillows and mattresses on tour, the entire job being to keep the human in peak working order. Business wants the figure at the top of that pile without building the support underneath, not even the basics of an evening to unwind and get eight hours' sleep.

Sport moved on. Business didn't.

The old model, flog them until they snap and sign someone new, hasn't vanished in sport, but the people winning things have largely walked away from it.

Let's start with the marvellous Gareth Southgate. No-one is going to call this guy a slouch. He spent eight years as England manager, reached a World Cup semi and two European finals, and became known for a temperament that treated grown men as whole people, with bodies and minds and even feelings. His results were pretty miraculous for a team that hadn't come close to these outcomes in years. Greater still was his insistence that looking after people and demanding a lot of them are the same thing, not competing outcomes. He gave his players Owen Eastwood's book, Belonging. Eastwood, who has used his approach with Olympic teams and NATO as well as footballers, argues that people perform best when they know they belong, not when they are clinging on for dear life to prove their worth.

Sport hasn't fully cracked it. Emma Hayes won nearly everything over twelve years at Chelsea and then, at the peak of her managerial career, left. The job had made her unwell, her phrasing not mine. Twelve years in a relentless club calendar, then menopause on top, and she could see that she was trading her health for the work. The fix was moving to a completely different structure, where there was a schedule with gaps for rest and recovery. She was the most powerful person in the building and still couldn't stay well in the conditions. I don't think she was the problem.

What these three share is that, having watched the old model up close, none of them believes in it. The business world, meanwhile, still clings to the gospel of the Clive Woodward school, where a driven figure builds an environment so intense and so successful everyone is desperate to be in it. I watched a version of this up close. My agency was, for a few years, genuinely brilliant and genuinely the place to be, right up until the people who built this blazing furnace began to leave, at which point it turned out the whole operation ran on their talent and charisma and a rolling supply of equally brilliant but exhausted others, and it came apart fast. The departed leaders went off to build the same furnace elsewhere, burning through a fresh set of talented staff in precisely the same way.

Who wears the cost? Not business.

That model does win, for a while, which is why it keeps its defenders. But this kind of winning eats its own foundations, and when people break, business never takes the blame. It reframes the collapse as a weakness in the individual rather than an environment that was always going to grind someone down. England is the bleeding obvious case. Even with a Southgate at the helm, this is still a footballing culture that subjects its players to tabloid savagery, racist abuse and feral fan behaviour, then acts genuinely puzzled when the men fall short at the final hurdle, never once considering the system endlessly degrading the people it depends on.

So in my mind, the flippant use of the sporting metaphor doesn't hold. Here's another reason. Sport now passionately protects its players because it knows it can't easily replace them. Business assumes it can always replace you, so it uses you hard now and worries about the consequences never. Even when the consequences are real: people leaving, taking what they know with them, loss of continuity and souring cultures. The company spends months and real money hiring someone to do the job it already had someone for. Business pays all of that, but it never puts those costs against the hours it extracted, because the harm is invisible. A footballer dragged off injured is seen by a full stadium. Your burnout happens on your own, months or years later, where no one connects it to the job that caused it. When you finally break, nobody writes about it in the Sun.

And business can't claim it doesn't know all of this. Decades ago, serious people built out this balanced model by way of the Corporate Athlete programme, run out of Johnson & Johnson. It trained executives to work and recover the way athletes do. A quarter of the Fortune 100 sent people through it. It changed almost nothing, because it focused on the person for a week and then sent them back into the same relentless machine rather than on redesigning the load itself, which is the part no one wants to do.

Business has been handed a support team, for free

And so to the biggest opportunity business has had in years. For the first time it has been handed a support team, the backroom that sport has conscientiously understood and paid for and which business never bothered to build. The grind has been relentlessly defended as unavoidable, the work has to get done and there aren't enough hours, not if we want to stay profitable. That defence is now weakening, because the drudgery that ate our evenings is exactly the work we want the machines to take on. Logically, the hours start to come back. The only question is whether business uses them to encourage their elite athletes to recover, think clearly and finally do fewer things well, or whether it treats every freed hour as licence to demand it back and grind leaner teams harder.

You can learn a lot from sport. Over the last few decades sport worked out that the human in the middle of the performance is the performance, and that you cannot cut out the care of the person and keep the result. Business watched sport reach that conclusion and decided to hold onto some easy vocabulary, the teams and the pitches and the finals, because that language flatters the grind while ignoring the bigger lesson underneath. And now, handed an immense support structure that it never cared to build, business gets to choose all over again. Use it to protect the performers, or keep doing what it has always done and wait for them to break. Nobody peaks fifty-two weeks a year, no matter how many sporting analogies you reach for to convince yourself otherwise.