Success Is Not Measured In Hours

The term suggests an addiction, but the tone usually conveys admiration.

That hard-charging football coach, who watches game films until 1 a.m. then sleeps on his office couch - he’s a “workaholic” with Super Bowl written all over him.

That fast-rising young executive with the mania for detail, the surgically implanted cellular phone, the stack of work that follows her to the pool on vacation - she’s survived in the corporate jungle by being a bit more “workaholic” than the other guy.

The message bubbles up from dozens of sources - adoring profiles in Forbes, the spiels of motivational gurus, beer commercials: To get ahead in this life, to win the glittering prizes, the trophies and promotions, you’ve got to work just a little harder than the next person. The problem is the next person has absorbed the same message and is deadset on working harder than you.

For decades, American workers got used to being told they were, by comparison with their energetic Japanese counterparts, a bunch of unproductive, sybaritic slugs.

Now, there are signs - from that famed autoworkers strike over too much overtime in Flint, Mich., to the hot sales of a book called “The Overworked American” to the peppery gibes about yuppies who parade their cellular phones in public - that the American work force is saying: “Wait just a doggone minute. If anything, work is too much with us.”

Some facts support the notion. U.S. productivity was up for the fifth straight year in 1994 while businesses held labor costs to the smallest gain in 30 years. In 1993, the number of overtime hours worked was the highest since the feds started charting the figure.

Research by Linda A. Bell, a Haverford College professor, shows that American workers put in 5 percent more hours a week than workers in Europe. And Juliet Schor, author of “The Overworked American,” maintains (not without skeptics) that the average worker puts in 163 more hours a year than in 1969.

But nowhere, except on “Friends” and “Seinfeld,” does it seem that people are actually backing off work and claiming more leisure.

The reasons for this are myriad: the fear bred by years of avid corporate cost-cutting; the money demands of consumer culture; the happier fact that many people actually do love their jobs.

But certainly the often-uncritical willingness of the media to celebrate workaholism plays a role. Oh sure, news outlets run pieces periodically on the dangers of job stress. But that coverage pales next to the volume of stories about winners in the business world who owe it all to a bottomless zest for work.

Rarely do these worshipful pieces examine what kinds of activity this work actually entails. Ever wonder how many of those “14-hour” days include an expense-account lunch and a round of golf with customers in the grueling total? But even granting that some folks really do put in titanic time, how often do the media question whether this avalanche of hours is really integral to success?

Students of workaholism point out that workaholics put in the amazing hours they do not because the job needs them, but because they need the job - to assuage insecurity, to fill an empty life or to duck the emotional demands of home and family. Since basing your self-esteem on the number of hours you work is like diving into a bottomless pit, workaholics often end up wreaking psychic damage on themselves.

But less visible is the damage that the workaholic can do to co-workers and the workplace. Workaholics hate to delegate. They tell themselves it’s because of their high standards; really, it stems from their raging need for work as a sedative and escape. Hoarding work, they unwittingly block others from challenge, growth and success - and set themselves up for failure as they pile on burdens. Their need for control, to center their operation’s success around their own person, distorts organizational structures and ensures that whatever successes their mania produces won’t endure after their departure.

How do I know all this? Been there, done that.

As the freshly minted metro editor of a middling newspaper a decade ago, I can recall gazing at the metro page every night in satisfaction and murmuring, “Wow, I rewrote every story on that page; I did it all.” It was years before I figured out that was a mark of failure, not success. Every hastily rewritten paragraph was a triumph of ego and a failure of teaching; behind every story revamped on deadline was a young reporter who had learned nothing except perhaps to distrust his editor.

Am I so much older and wiser now? Not really. As much progress toward balance as I’ve made, avoiding the pitfalls of work for work’s sake remains a daily struggle.

Wouldn’t it help occasionally to see critical profiles of the self-importantly workaholic?: “He makes constant sly allusions to his 70-hour workweeks, but close analysis shows that five hours consist of showily arriving early, only to eat a bagel at his desk while reading the paper; six are spent writing long, hectoring memos that demoralize subordinates; 15 are spent on tasks that should be delegated, and eight are devoted to naked self-aggrandizement.”

Or, even better, stories that hold up a different ideal: “She has figured out how to make her operation purr while working an eight-hour day, by setting clear goals, delegating gobs of authority, insistently celebrating creativity, and convincing everyone down to the night watchman of the intrinsic worth of the work they do.”

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