Help! I’m married to a workaholic

FOR MANY FAMILIES, there is a distinct difference between having a husband and father or wife and mother who works hard to provide for their family, and having one that’s a workaholic.

One of the key failures in the thinking of a workaholic is that business is all about busyness and that there isn’t anything they can do to reduce their working hours.

While it’s commonly understood that working smarter, rather than harder, is most time efficient, many entrepreneurs fail to turn this theory into practice.  

When people start a business, they often begin with excitement and energy about being able to work for themselves and getting their dream off the ground. At this early stage, new business owners have to work hard because there’s nobody else to do the work if they don’t. And this can become the root of future workaholic problems.

Business owners tend to run on high amounts of adrenaline, which they use during their long working hours and when overcoming significant challenges. Every achievement reaffirms their thinking that success is inextricably linked to working hard.

As with alcoholism, workaholic business owners keep doing what they know is bad for them. The last person to realise what is happening is the person with the problem, but the people around them, like their families, suffer most. Families get neglected, friends become acquaintances and staff members are often driven away if they aren’t willing to also become workaholics.

So if your loved one is a workaholic, what do you do?

The process is similar to addressing any addiction. The first step is making them aware that they are a workaholic. The signs are often clear, but if you, or they, need help identifying the signs, some of them include:

•    Persistent difficulty in sleeping at night
•    Stress and a short temper with relatively minor things
•    Constantly starting things and not finishing them
•    Frequent late at night and weekend work
•    Being accused of not listening to other people

Once the person is aware that there’s a problem, they have to take ownership of the situation and acknowledge the need for change.

This means realising that if they keep doing what they have always done, they will get the same results.

The first thing they need to establish is a new goal for the type of life they want to lead: how many hours per week and days per year do they want to work, what would they rather be doing than working all the time? Creating goals is an important tool for making a change because if they don’t have something to look forward to, the motivation to stop their current behaviour will wane.

They then need to decide the time frame for achieving this new lifestyle and what needs to happen in order to reduce their work hours.

One of the ways to do this is by learning to appoint trustworthy people where additional staff is needed, and delegating work to them.

Entrepreneurs are often at risk of becoming workaholics because they don’t recognise when the intense, founding stage of the business is complete and the company has matured enough for responsibility and implementation tasks to be delegated to staff beyond the owner themselves. Loved ones can keep an eye out for the signs of workaholism and help entrepreneurs navigate a solution towards a healthier work lifestyle.

* Harry Welby-Cooke is a leading business and executive coach and South Africa’s master licensee for global franchise company ActionCOACH.