Prevent Burnout: The Huffington Post Way

It’s an amazing time for women leaders. What is important for women is not just to aim for the top jobs, but to also change the nature of work and to change the workplace because it hasn’t really worked – the way it has been designed. We see so many successful leaders with heart attacks and high blood pressure in their forties and fifties and there’s no reason for that. Leadership needs to be sustainable and women need to be role models for that.

Obviously culture is key to success as an entrepreneur because once you start building a team it’s important that everybody is moving in the same direction and people are feeling taken care of and that they are not just robotically adding value, but that they are really engaged and that’s what it takes to continue to innovate… And that’s why we have two nap rooms at The Huffington Post, we have weekly yoga classes and meditation classes and breathing classes and healthy snacks and all sorts of things that encourage everybody who works there to take care of themselves and to not drive themselves to the ground to the expense both of their own lives and really of their work product.

Leaders have to see the icebergs before they hit the Titanic and in order to do that, in order to be innovative and creative and not reactive it’s very important that they also take care of themselves. Burnout has been a real, major problem with modern leaders. We see many smart leaders in politics, in media, in business making terrible decisions, not because they’re not smart, they’re not wise, but because they are burnt out. They are operating on sleep deprivation and exhaustion and so it is very important to redefine what success is in leadership and to prioritize one’s human capital.