Are you measuring what matters now, or just what used to matter?

In my early twenties, I thought I knew what commitment looked like.

I was a young manager, working six and a half days a week and regularly putting in more than 70 hours. I worked hard, I was ambitious, and I expected other people to work the way I worked. I was dominant, sometimes aggressive, and too quick to use my own behaviour as the benchmark for everybody else.

Ten years later, my thinking had changed.

Around 2010, after taking on a regional director role, one of my area managers asked whether it would still be okay for her to take Thursday afternoons off to ride her horse.

My response was immediate: I don’t care if you take every Thursday afternoon off to ride your horse if the results are there.

If she could deliver what was required in fewer hours, and the business and her team were performing, why would I make time at a desk the measure of her value?

At 25, the answer would simply have been no.

That shift has stayed with me because it illustrates something I increasingly see in 2026: sometimes the problem is not that people are failing. It is that we are still measuring them against a definition of success created for a different world.

Measures Carry the Memory of the World That Created Them

Leadership 40 years ago operated differently. Authority was more hierarchical. Presence mattered. Leaders were expected to be decisive, tough, visible and in control.

The pace was different too.

I coach a CEO in their seventies who remembers driving to London as a managing director with no expectation that anybody could contact them during the journey. Their secretary would have the important messages waiting when they arrived. They would have meetings, get back in the car and drive home.

Those hours created thinking space almost by accident. Then came fax machines, pagers and car phones; later email, smartphones, Teams, messaging platforms and now AI. Each wave removed another gap in which the leader was unreachable.

Harvard Business Review has examined how high-performing professional-services firms can become locked into cultures of extreme hours even when those hours damage health, relationships and wellbeing. More recent research argues that attempts to fix overwork often fail when the underlying organisational rhythms remain unchanged.

When Effort Becomes the Measure Instead of the Outcome

I have sat in boardrooms where senior directors questioned people who were delivering excellent results because they were not putting in enough hours.

The logic was simple: if they can achieve that in 40 hours, imagine what they could achieve in 50.

But that creates a strange incentive. Efficiency is rewarded with more work, while visible busyness becomes confused with commitment.

Harvard Business Review has previously summarised research showing that long hours can backfire for both people and organisations rather than producing endlessly increasing performance. A joint World Health Organization and International Labour Organization analysis also found that working 55 hours or more a week was associated with increased risks of stroke and death from ischaemic heart disease compared with working 35–40 hours.

That does not make 35 or 40 hours right for every senior role. It means hours are not a neutral measure.

I explored something similar in The Hidden Cost of Being Too Capable. Highly capable people are often given more precisely because they keep delivering. Eventually capability can become the justification for an unsustainable load.

Medicine and Law Make the Question Harder

This becomes more complicated in traditional professions.

Doctors and lawyers work long hours. In many environments those hours are systemic, not simply personal choice.

In law, the billable hour remains deeply embedded. The Financial Times reported in 2025 on firms offering increased bonuses as associates crossed higher billable-hour thresholds, with some schemes stretching beyond 1,800 and 2,000 hours.

The billable hour is not useless. It provides a commercial measure. The question is whether it should also become shorthand for commitment, potential and leadership quality.

Medicine has its own version of this tension. A BMJ Open multicentre study found that physicians’ perceptions of leadership behaviour were related to burnout, professional fulfilment and intention to leave. More recent work in The Lancet Regional Health – Europe describes a healthcare workforce facing staff shortages, turnover and psychological distress.

So I would not walk into either profession and say, “Stop measuring hours.”

I would ask: what is the measure trying to tell you, and is it still the best way of telling you?

Tradition is not evidence that something is wrong. But neither is it evidence that something is still right.

“They Don’t Have the Work Ethic”

This is probably the generational friction I hear most often.

Most of my coaching work is with senior doctors, lawyers, CEOs and founders, and I frequently hear that younger professionals want the salary, promotion or partnership without putting in the hours previous generations did.

Achievement requires effort. Expertise takes time.

But I also hear the other side.

Why wait 20 years to become a law-firm partner? Why remortgage your house to buy into partnership if you can build your own practice? In medicine, why not develop private work and create a different route?

The Financial Times has reported on how Gen Z employees often place greater weight on flexibility, autonomy, purpose and development than traditional markers of career success, while also cautioning against simplistic generational stereotypes.

The better question is whether a leader can distinguish genuine lack of application from refusal to accept an inherited bargain.

Retention Is Leadership Feedback

One measure I have valued throughout my career is recruitment and retention.

Strong retention is one of the things I am proudest of in my leadership career. I remember the resignations because there were relatively few, and every one bothered me.

My immediate question was not: what is wrong with them?

It was: what could I have done better?

Not every resignation is the leader’s fault. But repeated unwanted loss of good people is information.

I have worked alongside senior directors whose response to a resignation was, “They were rubbish anyway.” Yet the same leaders repeatedly struggled to recruit and retain.

Eventually, the leader has to be willing to appear in their own analysis.

Harvard Business Review has argued that organisations wanting to retain their best people need to invest in the quality of their managers.

Retention is not just an HR metric. It is leadership feedback.

It also connects with The Quiet Risk of Unchallenged Leadership. Seniority can make it easy to explain poor signals away when fewer people are prepared to challenge your interpretation of them.

A Wider Leadership Scorecard

We do not need to throw away every old measure. Revenue, productivity, client service, patient outcomes and commercial performance still matter.

But the scorecard needs to get wider.

What outcomes are we creating? Not simply how busy did everybody look while creating them?

Is the performance sustainable? Mental wellbeing is not separate from performance. Stress and exhaustion eventually affect judgement and energy.

Can we attract and retain good people? If talented people repeatedly leave, what is that telling us?

Are we creating capability or dependency? A leader who must personally solve everything may look indispensable while quietly preventing the organisation from developing.

Do we still have enough space to think clearly? The modern working environment rarely creates that space. We have to protect it deliberately. I have written before about the hidden cost of constant availability.

This is where coaching becomes valuable at senior level: not to give the leader another set of metrics, but to challenge the assumptions underneath the scorecard.

Why does that measure matter? What behaviour is it driving? What might you be rewarding accidentally?

And if you designed the measure today, would you design it the same way?

The Measure Has to Move When the World Moves

The leadership behaviours that helped somebody rise through an organisation in 1990 are not automatically the behaviours that will make them effective in 2026.

Equally, everything labelled “modern” is not automatically better.

The task is adaptation without abandoning judgement.

I learned that personally. At 25, I measured commitment partly by whether somebody was prepared to work like me. By 35, I was beginning to understand that my job as a leader was not to create replicas of myself.

It was to create the conditions in which good people could deliver excellent outcomes.

The old measures only become dangerous when we stop asking what they are actually measuring.

Are you measuring what matters now — or just what used to matter?

References

1. Harvard Business Review (2025). New Research on Why Teams Overwork—and What Leaders Can Do About It. Ioana Lupu and Shanming Liu, 9 July 2025.
2. Harvard Business Review (2015). The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies. Sarah Green Carmichael, 19 August 2015.
3. World Health Organization / International Labour Organization (2021). Long Working Hours Increasing Deaths from Heart Disease and Stroke: WHO, ILO. 17 May 2021.
4. Financial Times (2025). Mid-tier Law Firms Increase Bonuses for Juniors Working Long Hours. 9 May 2025.
5. BMJ Open (2022). Impact of Leadership Behaviour on Physician Well-being, Burnout, Professional Fulfilment and Intent to Leave: A Multicentre Cross-sectional Survey Study. Volume 12, Issue 6.
6. The Lancet Regional Health – Europe (2025). Futureproofing the Healthcare Workforce in Europe.
7. Financial Times (2025). How Do You Manage Gen Z? 8 September 2025.
8. Harvard Business Review (2022). To Retain Your Best Employees, Invest in Your Best Managers. Erica Keswin, 1 December 2022.

About Laurence Loxam

I’m Laurence Loxam and I’ve pushed limits in business, on mountains, and at the finish line. Now I help elite professionals do the same, pushing past the point most people stop. I coach doctors, lawyers, CEOs and founders who’ve hit success, but still feel there’s more. Together, we unlock clarity, sharpen confidence, and lead with conviction.

Ready for your next leadership breakthrough? Let’s connect.