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Workaholics glad to labor while others play

By Shirleen Holt
Seattle Times business reporter

GREG GILBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES Lawyer Bob Manlowe often works out of his car late at night or early in the morning. His car-office has a laptop, BlackBerry handheld, GPS system and, of course, a cellphone.

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We're not talking about the poor shlubs who had to work on Labor Day. We're talking about the people who chose to work.

We're talking about doers.

Every company has them; in fact, it's safe to say most companies were started by them. They're the drivers, the organizers, the directors. They move fast. They multi-task. No time for chitchat. Nothing personal. Just very busy.

Much has been written about the American overwork ethic, but relatively little is said about this important slice of it: Some people work hard because they're simply wired that way.

Seattle lawyer Bob Manlowe is one. He gets by on four to six hours of sleep a night, or even as little as one hour if he's preparing for a trial. He's accessible for clients from 4 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week, via cellphone, airphone, Internet or his cherished BlackBerry attached to his hip.

He says he keeps this schedule because he specializes in crisis management. If a stadium collapses, a factory explodes, a university coach is involved in a gambling scandal, Manlowe, 45, is there with legal advice and sometimes emotional support.

"I tell my client, I'm the guy you hope you never have to call, but if you're in a crisis, I'll help you walk through the firestorm."

But big disasters are fairly uncommon, and Manlowe, who represented University of Washington football coach Rick Neuheisel during the battle to keep his job, is still staggeringly busy.

On a crisis-free day, he gets up at 5 a.m., works a few hours in his Mercer Island home office, then heads for his Seattle office. He works on most family vacations, talking to East Coast clients before his wife and three daughters wake up.

His family, he says, tolerates his obsession to a point. "I think there are probably times where they wish the BlackBerry was left in the refrigerator or something."
 
Especially during meals, when he's been known to pull out the device to check his e-mails.

Long work week

Nearly 10 million Americans worked more than 60 hours a week last year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found. We've outpaced the famously productive Japanese in hours worked. We're the only developed nation without mandatory vacation time. And, according to Expedia.com's annual vacation poll, one in three of us will take no vacation this year.

Some of this is due to economic pressures: We put in longer hours because we need the money or because our boss wants to squeeze more out of us. If we're not the doer driving the schedule, we're the one being driven.

The doer profile shows up in every workplace personality test. The name may change — they can be called drivers, strivers, generals or directors — but the descriptions are the same.

At their best, doers are decisive, persistent, self-motivated, passionate and committed; hence, the long work hours.

Doers built the country and the economy. Thomas Jefferson was a doer, as was Abraham Lincoln. Former General Electric Chief Executive Jack Welch is a doer. Taskmaster Martha Stewart, who boasts that she sleeps as few as four hours a night, would qualify as a doer. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos — doer, doer, doer.

At their worst, doers can be demanding, impatient, intolerant of flaws and emotionally distant — a disturbing trait for co-workers who value collegiality. As the narrative for one personality test, the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, relates, doers need "a goal-directed reason for doing anything, and people's feelings usually are not sufficient reason."

What causes these achievers to work longer and harder than the average person? Are they joyful creators, people so passionate about their work they can't bear to be apart from it? Or are they workaholics with low self-esteem, desperately trying to prove themselves?

They can be either, say experts, even though the increased visibility of job burnout has caused the media to fixate more recently on the negative end.

Sense of pleasure

"Some people just get pleasure from accomplishment, " says Doniella Boaz, a psychotherapist in Seattle. "It's not always a psychopathology."

Indeed, researchers have discovered there is such a thing as a "happy workaholic."

Sharon Lobel, a professor at Seattle University's Albers School of Business and Economics, co-wrote a research paper with that very title.

"There are people who decide that work is truly a source of gratification for them," Lobel says. "When you are doing something that really aligns with who you are, there's a feeling of deep satisfaction. It's not about promotions, glitzy accounts or prestige; it's about a sense of identity and integrity and doing the right thing."

Oprah Winfrey would seem to fall into that category.

"You can tell if you spend significant amount of time with people whether they're motivated by fear or motivated by fun," says Janet Scarborough, a Mercer Island career counselor and coach. "Oprah is having fun. She's incredibly busy, but I think she's having a good time."

Where doers get their bad rep, and deservedly so, is when they impose their frenetic pace onto employees who don't share their slavish devotion to work.

Susan, a 28-year-old former software tester (she asked that her last name be withheld so that her job search isn't jeopardized), worked for a doer whose demands got more and more outlandish as her team prepared a product for market.

Her 10-hour workdays began to stretch to 15 hours. On Fridays came the boss's dreaded e-mail: "Mandatory weekend. Cancel your plans."

"He would come in on Saturdays and write an e-mail saying, 'Where are you?' The crazy thing is that some of us had to come in and work even if we were caught up. We felt we had to be there."

After she started crying for odd reasons, and when she developed tremors, migraines and stomach pains, Susan transferred to a different team and a boss who expected 40-hour work weeks. The stress had taken its toll, though, and she left the company after two years.

"A job is not worth all that," she says. "It's really not. What's important is being happy."

Such workplace horrors multiplied during the technology boom, when 15-hour workdays became a virtue, a symbol of devotion to the cause, and the price that grunts would have to pay for future stock riches.

TechRepublic.com, a Web site for information-technology workers, posted some egregious examples from its users: There was the guy who shaved his head and grew a beard so that it would only take him 10 minutes to get ready for work; the woman who slept in her car and office; the guy who showered at the health club across the street so he wouldn't have to go home.

The excesses of that period created a backlash against the doers' demands. Seattle is the birthplace of Take Back Your Time, a national movement pushing for a mandatory three weeks' paid time off for workers and a cap on required overtime.

But organizers also want a cultural shift away from the doer mentality.

"We have come to a point where we are honoring the warrior archetype a little too much," says Irene Myers, a Seattle life coach involved with the movement. "There will always be doers, but the question is, who do we choose to follow? Do we choose to put those people in the limelight and keep them there, or do we seek other models?"

Lobel, the social scientist who supports the Take Back Your Time initiative, discovered that this may not be necessary. In their research, she and Stewart Friedman of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania found it is possible for driven CEOs who work 15-hour days — the doers — to create an office culture where employees don't feel pressured to emulate their workaholic ways.

Instead of being role models for "balance," some of the executives studied (at Ernst & Young, Allied Signal, Frank Russell and other large companies) were role models for "authenticity." The message: I'm working at this pace because this is who I am; you're expected to negotiate a balance that's right for you — and you won't be punished.

This may come as a relief to doers whose idea of balance is a phone in each ear. For them, being forced to limit their work time would be as cruel as forcing others to adopt their style.

"It's simplistic to say that everyone who spends a great deal of time at work is doing so out of unhealthy motivation," Scarborough, the career counselor, says. "I think it's highly individual. For some people, balance is a value; for others, they have a driving passion to achieve something, and it can't be done in 40 hours a week."

Indeed. This morning, the day celebrating labor with a national holiday, before his wife and daughters wake up, Bob Manlowe will get out of bed, walk to his downstairs office and turn on the computer.

Shirleen Holt: 206-464-8316 or sholt@seattletimes.com