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Performance Management

Published October 2007

Toxic Success: Managing the Cult of Productivity

 

  Jan Austin

You might know it when you see it in others, but it eludes simple description. "It" is toxic success — success that has crossed some kind of invisible boundary between normal and dysfunctional.

Toxic success is a dysfunctional level of productivity and accomplishment that was once satisfying and energizing, and has become all-consuming, energy-depleting and dissatisfying. Physical and emotional health, interpersonal relationships and organizational performance all might be severely compromised because of the effects of toxic success.

Just about everyone who achieves a high level of accomplishment is at one time or another at risk of toxic success. Why? Because success is seductive, flattering, self-reinforcing — and often lucrative. At some point, however, the costs of excessive productivity can begin to outweigh the rewards, and success can become engulfing.

The slippery slope of toxic success often results from increased responsibility for high-stakes results. This increased responsibility, with the attendant personal status accrued by being in the limelight constantly, might take center stage and eventually overpower your deeply held values of contribution, service and living a fulfilling life.

It really shouldn't come as a surprise — images of success portrayed in the media reinforce a highly mythologized notion of success, one that overvalues material wealth and the sphere of command or "demand" of successful people.

The Cult of Productivity

There's something even more insidious going on. The challenge of finding a balance between making a living and making a life is getting harder for everyone to manage. The skewed logic of the global economy requires people pay more attention to work than their personal lives.

Thanks to rapid and dramatic advances in technology, there have never been so many opportunities to create value in a marketplace with an insatiable hunger for great ideas. But advanced technology is leveling the playing field, thereby increasing competitive pressures. The result: unprecedented demand for accelerated productivity. In a nutshell, the global economy has created a cult of productivity.

Despite dramatic technological advances designed to increase efficiency in every arena, people have less leisure time than ever. Massive and continuous corporate downsizings impose more work on everyone who's left standing, and given the alternative of no job or a different job with the same or similar pressures, who's going to complain?

The result is that there is an overriding and obsessive concern with work, work outcomes and the promise of future work. Is it any wonder people are overworked, dissatisfied and locked into patterns of toxic success?

In a cult of productivity, putting in face time or engaging in image-making work rather than real work might become the norm. By engaging in this symbolic act, people think they are signaling their strong work ethic, personal ambition and loyalty to the organization.
The trouble is that it's not necessarily about real commitment leading to real accomplishment. On the contrary, chronic fatigue as a result of overwork, coupled with an undercurrent of resentment, serve to eclipse real productivity.