In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, Brene Brown shares her 10 Guideposts of Wholehearted Living. Number 7 on that list is “Cultivating Play and Rest: Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol and Productivity as Self-Worth”. It’s time we start recognizing the damage we are doing to ourselves, or teams, and our organization when we are competing for the “Most Tired” award.  

Work-life balance is a buzzword we like to throw around, but how often does the culture of an organization support the exact opposite? Here culture is rewarded, and our output is viewed as a measure of our worth on performance reviews. That type of hamster wheel mentality has an impact on us physically, mentally, and spiritually, and subsequently, has an impact on our products.  

In this keynote, we will explore the dangers of exhaustion as a status symbol – for our organization culture, our teams, and ourselves. We will discuss the specific risks of inadvertently creating a competitive exhausted culture within an agile transformation, and the ways in which we can leverage the agile values and principles in order to mitigate those risks. Lastly, we will take a look inward to assess our own attitudes and views about work life balance.