Working ourselves to exhaustion
You’re doing no one any favours if you slog until you drop
Last June, Hillary Clinton broke the record as the most travelled secretary of state in U.S. history, having visited 100 countries in 3-1/2 years on the job.
In six months since then, she has added 12 countries to that gruelling tally, racking up more than 1,500,000 kilometres on the job. Notably, in a single day earlier in her tenure, she managed to visit Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan — “a Central Asian hat trick,” one journalist dubbed it. And then she made it to Bahrain before nightfall.
This month Clinton finally managed to get some time off. Unfortunately, she had to pass out and hit her head (sustaining a concussion) in order to do so.
Is this the real glass ceiling — exhaustion? As secretary of state of the U.S., Clinton has been one of the most powerful women in the world. At a time when female political role models are in the minority in North America and around the world, it is a shame to see her apparently intent on working herself into exhaustion. (Her fainting spell, for the record, came after a bout of flu that left her dehydrated.)
Clinton knows about glass ceilings. When she was taunted by protesters shouting: “Iron my shirt” while campaigning against her current boss Barack Obama to make it onto the 2008 Democratic presidential ticket, she elegantly brushed them off and told the crowd she was “running to break through the highest and hardest glass ceiling.”
She’s not there — yet. But it would be a shame if what she ended up with was a giant headache. Being ambitious and accomplished — even when your job deals in global crises and putting out geopolitical fires — should not mean having to work yourself to death.
Hillary Clinton is not the only high-profile workaholic out there. It is almost an epidemic, worsened by the weak economy, and more or less demanded of those in the highest positions of power. And secretary of state is one of the most demanding jobs in the U.S. government (which makes Canada’s system of parliamentary secretaries to share some of the travel burden with ministers look humane and rational).
It is notable that the last three secretaries of state have been women and, until Clinton surpassed her record, her predecessor Condoleezza Rice was the most-travelled secretary of state. Even by those standards, Clinton’s schedule has been punishing. And it shouldn’t have to be.
In fact the more crucial you are to your job — whether that involves contributing to global stability or, in the world the rest of us live in, finishing a delicate project and contributing to your work team — the more important it is to work at a sustainable, not suicidal, rate. Working until you drop means acknowledging that you are both disposable and easily replaceable. It takes confidence, and generally produces better work, to know how to pace yourself.
Nor should successful women feel they have to become the living embodiment of former Ottawa mayor Charlotte’s Whitton’s quip: “Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.”
Clearly doing twice as much as others is difficult, no matter how easy it is made to look. Clinton talked to interviewer Barbara Walters recently about being exhausted. “To be honest, I am. When I do something I really want to do it, I want to do it to the best of my ability. That means I pretty much work all the time.”
The only problem is, you can only do that for so long until something — exhaustion, mainly — trips you up.
It is not only those in positions of political power who work themselves to exhaustion. Many of us do.
I recently had an eye-opening conversation with a group of women — all successful professionals with busy lives. When the subject of a woman who had undergone minor surgery came up, there was a general sigh, not of sympathy, but envy. “That’s what I want,” I heard one say to another, “not major surgery, just enough to spend a few weeks in bed.”
Sales of the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey might have gone through the roof in recent months, but don’t read too much into that. What do middle-aged working women really fantasize about? A few days of bed rest.