Most leaders I know have a boundary. No email after seven. No calls on Sundays. Laptop stays shut on holiday.
Almost none of their teams know about it.
So the boundary lives in one head. It bends the first time a client panics or a board member pings at nine at night. Nobody notices it bending, because nobody knew it existed. The leader sends the email, writes "no rush" at the top, and goes to bed feeling considerate.
The team reads the email at 9:04pm. They don't feel considered. They feel on call.
A Private Boundary Is a Wish
Kelly Swingler works with burnt-out leaders for a living, and one of her ideas has stuck with me for weeks. Leaders should pledge their boundaries in public, to their team, and then invite the team to hold them to it. I've started calling it a burnout pact.
I like this idea because it fixes the flaw in how most of us set boundaries. We treat them as personal discipline. Willpower. A promise to ourselves. And promises to ourselves are the easiest ones to break, because the only witness is the person breaking them.
A boundary your team knows about works differently. Break it and somebody sees. Better still, somebody has permission to say so.
Your Team Doesn't Read Your Hours. They Read Your Expectations.
Here's the part leaders miss. The damage from out-of-hours email doesn't come from the time spent on it. It comes from the expectation.
William Becker, Liuba Belkin and colleagues ran three studies on this, published in the Journal of Management under the title "Killing Me Softly." They measured organisational expectations to monitor email during non-work time. They tracked 108 working adults day by day, then 138 employee and partner pairs, then a further 162 adults. The pattern held each time. The expectation to watch email triggered anxiety. The anxiety hurt employee health and caused conflict at home. And it crossed over... partners of those employees reported worse health and lower relationship satisfaction too.
Read the findings again. Nobody had to answer a single email for the harm to land. Knowing an email might arrive did the damage.
This is why your quiet personal rule fixes nothing for your team. You log off at seven every night? Fine. If your team believes you expect them to watch their inbox, they watch their inbox. The expectation sits in their heads, not in your calendar.
The only way to change an expectation is to say the new one out loud.
Hand Them the Whistle
Saying it out loud is half the job. The other half is handing over enforcement.
Here's how I'd write a burnout pact if I led a team today:
- Name the boundary in plain words. "I don't send work messages after 7pm or at weekends." Not "I try to respect work-life balance." Nobody enforces a vibe.
- Name what you expect from them. "If something lands from me out of hours, I don't expect a reply until the next working day." This line kills the anxiety Becker found.
- Name the exception. "If production is down or a customer is in trouble, I'll phone. A phone call means urgent. An email never means urgent." One clear rule beats a hundred judgement calls.
- Give them the whistle. "If you see me break this, tell me. In the team channel, in standup, wherever. I won't argue."
- Review it. Once a month, ask how the pact is holding up. Where did it bend? Why?
Step four is the scary one. It hands your team a small piece of authority over your behaviour. Good. Your behaviour already has authority over their evenings. Fair's fair.
Somebody Already Ran This Experiment
Leslie Perlow at Harvard Business School tested something close to this at the Boston Consulting Group, a firm famous for its hours.
Before the experiment, her surveys of 1,600 managers and professionals found 92% worked 50 hours or more a week. On top of those hours, they spent 20 to 25 hours a week monitoring work while away from it, according to Knowledge at Wharton's review of her book Sleeping with Your Smartphone.
Her intervention was simple. One six-person team. A shared goal: each person gets one planned night off per week. A shared method: a weekly team meeting to talk about how to make it happen.
Look at the design. The night off was public. Everyone knew whose night it was. The team owned the problem together, covering for each other and shifting work around. Nobody kept it as a private resolution.
Over the 29-week project, the team kept 98% of their scheduled nights off. Members reported higher job satisfaction and a greater likelihood of staying with the firm. Client satisfaction held level or rose. Perlow and Jessica Porter wrote it up in Harvard Business Review, and one of their lessons was to "encourage lots of talk about what's working and what isn't." BCG went on to roll Predictable Time Off out to 32 offices in 14 countries, NBC News reported.
Talk is the enforcement mechanism. A boundary nobody discusses decays. A boundary the team reviews every week survives.
Why Leaders Resist This
I've watched leaders nod along to all of this and then refuse to do it. The reasons fall into three buckets.
"It makes me look less committed." You worry the board, or your own boss, will read a public boundary as a lack of drive. Perlow's data says otherwise. A team with planned rest delivers better than one running on fumes.
"What if I need to break it?" Then break it, and say so. "I'm emailing tonight because the investor call moved. This is the exception, not the new rule." Owning the breach in public keeps the pact alive. Pretending it didn't happen kills it.
"I don't want my team policing me." I understand this one. It feels like giving up control. But look at what you hand them today: a guessing game about whether your 10pm message needs a reply. A colleague calling out your late email costs you ten seconds of embarrassment. The guessing game costs them their evening.
I've sent plenty of late-night emails with "no rush" in the subject line. I meant it every time. It didn't matter. The words "no rush" sit in an inbox at 10pm and the inbox wins.
The Bad Boss Nobody Means to Be
My own research found 99.5% of survey respondents said they had worked for one or more types of bad boss. Plenty of those bosses never set out to cause harm. They worked hard, stayed late, and answered messages at midnight. Their teams copied them, because copying the boss is the safest career move in any office.
I wrote about this in Are You a Burnout Spreader? The burnout pact is the fix I wish I'd included. You stop spreading burnout by making the boundary visible and giving other people the right to defend it.
Write Yours This Week
Pick one boundary. Only one. The one you break most often.
Write it in a sentence your team would understand without context. Add what you expect from them. Add the single exception. Then say it at your next team meeting and finish with, "If you see me break this, tell me."
Then watch what happens the first time somebody does.
If you laugh, thank them, and close the laptop, your team learns the pact is real. If you get defensive, they learn it was theatre, and you've made things worse than before you started.
Your team already knows your boundaries. They learned them from what you do at 10pm, not from what you tell yourself at 6pm. So which boundary will you hand them the whistle for this week?
For more conversations with people who think about leadership and burnout for a living, listen to Corey-osity Unleashed.