Rather, it was the relentless accumulation of unnoticed small events - in passing moments - that was drastically affecting their well-being. It was never one big thing that led them to feel overwhelmed.

As they fumbled to describe it, patterns emerged.

What we were hearing about was stress, yes, but in a form that neither they - nor we - had the language to articulate. Some even broke down into tears, lamenting that they couldn’t see a path out of barely holding it together.Īfter decades of research on collaboration, and specifically the effects of too much ineffective collaboration, we were familiar with the kinds of stress that high performers typically endure. For some, our interviews were an inflection point, the moment they first recognized just how bad things had gotten. But gradually, usually deep into our interview, they began to acknowledge that they were struggling to keep up with both work and their personal lives. Many of these high performers were powder kegs of stress, and to our surprise, most of them didn’t realize it. In total we interviewed 300 people from 30 global companies, evenly split between women and men, from 2019 to 2021.

The answer intrigued us, so we started asking other high performers if their lives were feeling out of control or had pushed them in directions not aligned with who they set out to be. How had someone who was clearly goal-driven neglected her well-being so drastically? On a whim, we asked her what had thrown her off track in the first place. Prior to being the high performer we interviewed, this woman was a self-described sedentary workaholic who was thriving in neither her personal nor her professional life. In fact, she’d only gotten herself together after a stern warning from her doctor, who said the way she’d been living was jeopardizing her physical health. The executive hadn’t always had such a balanced life. She is also coauthor of three books with Clayton Christensen, including the New York Times best-seller How Will You Measure Your Life? Karen Dillon is a former editor of Harvard Business Review and coauthor of The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems - and What to Do About It (Harvard Business Review Press, 2023).

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