How to overcome work addiction
17 March 2009
Read by 2176 persons
Attention, half of managers are workaholics! Risks of over-investment in one's profession? Always stress, sometimes depression.
Bruno, a young business manager in the IT sector, remembers how his new job started at breakneck speed: "Hyper-ambitious objectives, total autonomy, increased pressure due to largely variable remuneration, all of this galvanized me." Caught up in the game, he became more royalist than the king: "During the day I ran from one client to another, spending my evenings on files that I systematically took home for the weekend. The day a client unfairly called me an amateur, I collapsed in tears."
Alarmed, his employer sent Bruno to Jean-Marc Santi, a specialist in supporting executives at Homme et Entreprise. Official reason: to restore the client relationship. "I quickly understood that Bruno had a deeper problem of work addiction," says Jean-Marc Santi. A form of addiction that affects one in two managers, according to the CFE-CGC stress observatory. Here are the warning signs and ways to help those who have gone astray.
1 Realizing that you are not well
Over-investment in one's profession, hypersensitivity to the judgment of one's peers, disinterest in one's loved ones... No need to dwell on the psychological symptoms of work addiction: "The employees most threatened by addiction believe they are normally committed," assures Jean-Marc Santi. More tangible are the physical symptoms, "these colds, flu episodes, repeated lumbago or waves of depression that regularly lead the employee to feign illness, the body crying out for help between two phases of intense work," details the doctor Patrick Fouilland, president of the Federation of Actors of Alcohology and Addictologie (F3A). If these signals are accompanied by regular alcohol, tobacco, drug or medication use, there is cause for alarm, adds Patrick Fouilland, who is very concerned about the increasing use of cocaine among young executives.
2 Measuring your addiction
If these so-called "compensatory" addictive behaviors are accompanied by an ambivalent attitude of minimization ("I can stop whenever I want!") and a desire to stop this endless race during phases of depression, which are also moments of lucidity, it is necessary to react immediately. "First, do a self-diagnosis to measure your degree of work addiction," recommends psychotherapist and coach Pascal Raymond, associated with the human resources firm Holsen. How? By answering the twenty-five questions of the translated Work Addiction Risk Test by the American psychologist Bryan Robinson, recommends Pascal Raymond. This test is available free of charge at www.doctissimo.fr/test-psychologie-TRAVAIL_ADDICTION.htm. "If the results reveal a tendency to use work as a drug, talk to your close circle," continues Pascal Raymond. If he formulates the same diagnosis, it is time to break this addiction.
3 Reorganizing your way of working
Often, the main problem of the workaholic lies in calamitous personal organization: "The work addict is the first victim of a permanent alert system that he has forged and which transforms him into a machine responding to demand," confirms Nicolas Dufourcq, financial director of Capgemini. Having to control his "workaholic" tendencies, he himself regularly redefines with his team the files that require immediate action and the partners to whom he must or must not respond immediately. As for emails, SMS and other BlackBerry systems, he sets times for consultation: 9:30 am, 11:30 am, 3 pm or 5 pm. "As for the famous last email of the day or week, the one that makes you come home "late" and take work home, I don't open it," he says. Work addiction is a mixture of suffering and pleasure: "An attitude of moderation presupposes that one renounces the pleasure, which is akin to the intoxication of power, that one experiences in jumping from one decision to another," warns Nicolas Dufourcq.
4 Don't hesitate to seek help
"If one feels incapable of freeing oneself alone from this ambivalent relationship with work, one must turn to a specialist," warns Yves Blanchard, manager of CAA, a management consulting firm. With his fifteen hours of work per day, his morbid need to be connected to work including weekends, he admits to being a potential workaholic. "To understand this irrepressible need for hyperactivity that I have always had and not to fall into one of these pathological attitudes (harasser or harassed) that I often spot in the seriously work-ill, I have been accompanied for years by a psychotherapist," he confides. To tame his tendency to hyperactivity at key moments in his professional life (change of sector, position, etc.), Yves Blanchard occasionally calls on a coach specializing in change management: "His outside perspective and his power of moderation help me avoid the over-investment that would lead to burnout."
5 Knowing when to stop
"When the situation seems blocked, it is sometimes necessary to know how to uncouple the wagons in time," recommends Marc Fakhouri, from personal experience. Bombarded for months at the head of a business unit in Saudi Arabia by his company operating in the highly competitive IT consulting sector, this young forty-something decided to throw in the towel to find his wife and son, who remained in France: "Overwhelmed with work, I constantly postponed the moment to stop, with the idea that by withdrawing from the game, I was going to lose everything," he remembers. Today, Marc Fakhouri congratulates himself on his decision: "What I lost in vain excitement, I gained in serenity. My personal and professional lives have found their balance." The guarantee of a well-understood career management...
Posted on March 16, 2009
nouvelobs.com
Bruno, a young business manager in the IT sector, remembers how his new job started at breakneck speed: "Hyper-ambitious objectives, total autonomy, increased pressure due to largely variable remuneration, all of this galvanized me." Caught up in the game, he became more royalist than the king: "During the day I ran from one client to another, spending my evenings on files that I systematically took home for the weekend. The day a client unfairly called me an amateur, I collapsed in tears."
Alarmed, his employer sent Bruno to Jean-Marc Santi, a specialist in supporting executives at Homme et Entreprise. Official reason: to restore the client relationship. "I quickly understood that Bruno had a deeper problem of work addiction," says Jean-Marc Santi. A form of addiction that affects one in two managers, according to the CFE-CGC stress observatory. Here are the warning signs and ways to help those who have gone astray.
1 Realizing that you are not well
Over-investment in one's profession, hypersensitivity to the judgment of one's peers, disinterest in one's loved ones... No need to dwell on the psychological symptoms of work addiction: "The employees most threatened by addiction believe they are normally committed," assures Jean-Marc Santi. More tangible are the physical symptoms, "these colds, flu episodes, repeated lumbago or waves of depression that regularly lead the employee to feign illness, the body crying out for help between two phases of intense work," details the doctor Patrick Fouilland, president of the Federation of Actors of Alcohology and Addictologie (F3A). If these signals are accompanied by regular alcohol, tobacco, drug or medication use, there is cause for alarm, adds Patrick Fouilland, who is very concerned about the increasing use of cocaine among young executives.
2 Measuring your addiction
If these so-called "compensatory" addictive behaviors are accompanied by an ambivalent attitude of minimization ("I can stop whenever I want!") and a desire to stop this endless race during phases of depression, which are also moments of lucidity, it is necessary to react immediately. "First, do a self-diagnosis to measure your degree of work addiction," recommends psychotherapist and coach Pascal Raymond, associated with the human resources firm Holsen. How? By answering the twenty-five questions of the translated Work Addiction Risk Test by the American psychologist Bryan Robinson, recommends Pascal Raymond. This test is available free of charge at www.doctissimo.fr/test-psychologie-TRAVAIL_ADDICTION.htm. "If the results reveal a tendency to use work as a drug, talk to your close circle," continues Pascal Raymond. If he formulates the same diagnosis, it is time to break this addiction.
3 Reorganizing your way of working
Often, the main problem of the workaholic lies in calamitous personal organization: "The work addict is the first victim of a permanent alert system that he has forged and which transforms him into a machine responding to demand," confirms Nicolas Dufourcq, financial director of Capgemini. Having to control his "workaholic" tendencies, he himself regularly redefines with his team the files that require immediate action and the partners to whom he must or must not respond immediately. As for emails, SMS and other BlackBerry systems, he sets times for consultation: 9:30 am, 11:30 am, 3 pm or 5 pm. "As for the famous last email of the day or week, the one that makes you come home "late" and take work home, I don't open it," he says. Work addiction is a mixture of suffering and pleasure: "An attitude of moderation presupposes that one renounces the pleasure, which is akin to the intoxication of power, that one experiences in jumping from one decision to another," warns Nicolas Dufourcq.
4 Don't hesitate to seek help
"If one feels incapable of freeing oneself alone from this ambivalent relationship with work, one must turn to a specialist," warns Yves Blanchard, manager of CAA, a management consulting firm. With his fifteen hours of work per day, his morbid need to be connected to work including weekends, he admits to being a potential workaholic. "To understand this irrepressible need for hyperactivity that I have always had and not to fall into one of these pathological attitudes (harasser or harassed) that I often spot in the seriously work-ill, I have been accompanied for years by a psychotherapist," he confides. To tame his tendency to hyperactivity at key moments in his professional life (change of sector, position, etc.), Yves Blanchard occasionally calls on a coach specializing in change management: "His outside perspective and his power of moderation help me avoid the over-investment that would lead to burnout."
5 Knowing when to stop
"When the situation seems blocked, it is sometimes necessary to know how to uncouple the wagons in time," recommends Marc Fakhouri, from personal experience. Bombarded for months at the head of a business unit in Saudi Arabia by his company operating in the highly competitive IT consulting sector, this young forty-something decided to throw in the towel to find his wife and son, who remained in France: "Overwhelmed with work, I constantly postponed the moment to stop, with the idea that by withdrawing from the game, I was going to lose everything," he remembers. Today, Marc Fakhouri congratulates himself on his decision: "What I lost in vain excitement, I gained in serenity. My personal and professional lives have found their balance." The guarantee of a well-understood career management...
Posted on March 16, 2009
nouvelobs.com
