Copyright Fast Company
Most people still measure performance in hours. They pack their calendars as full as possible, track time down to the minute, and take pride in squeezing more into each day. However, the best performance comes from harnessing rhythm—the alignment of energy, capacity, and focus. It’s what turns effort into flow. In the industrial age, managing time made sense: productivity was tethered to factory shifts and desk schedules. But in today’s BANI—brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible—world, hours spent no longer translate neatly into value created. The leaders who thrive now are those who sense and harness the rhythms of their team. Energy rises and falls across the day. Caregiving cycles alter capacity. Strategies unfold in waves of preparation, concentration, and delivery. When these rhythms reinforce one another, performance compounds; when they diverge, even the most talented teams struggle. The challenge is that most of these clashes remain invisible. We think they’re the result of individual personality traits or bad luck. The reality is that they’re systemic patterns that quietly drain performance. Here are the three invisible problems affecting your team, along with strategies for addressing them. Subscribe to the Daily newsletter.Fast Company's trending stories delivered to you every day Privacy Policy | Fast Company Newsletters 1. Biological misalignment It’s 8:30 a.m. and the leadership team gathers for its weekly meeting. The Early Birds are full of energy and ready to make decisions. The Night Owls are still warming up and contribute less than they could. By midafternoon, the balance shifts, yet decisions have already been made. Every team includes a range of chronotypes. Some people do their clearest thinking before breakfast; others hit their creative peak late in the day. Standard nine-to-five routines privilege one end of that spectrum and leave the rest operating below their best. Chronobiology research highlights the effect. Social jetlag, the mismatch between biological and social clocks, impairs alertness and cognitive function. Teams experience more rework, slower problem-solving, and thinner creativity when the shared schedule maps poorly to people’s natural peaks. AbbVie Norway, part of the global biopharmaceutical company AbbVie, set out to improve low employee satisfaction with work-life balance and strengthen its ability to attract and retain top talent. Leaders restructured work design so employees could align their hours with their natural rhythms, holding meetings only between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and allowing full flexibility as long as results were delivered. The changes paid off—turnover and sick leave dropped sharply, work-life balance satisfaction rose from 58% to 95%, and AbbVie Norway has been named one of Norway’s Best Workplaces multiple times by Great Place to Work. What to do when biology and schedule pull apart Rotate the clock: alternate early and later starts for recurring meetings. Separate information from decisions: share context asynchronously; save live sessions for debate and commitment. Map energy windows: ask people to mark their sharpest 90–120 minute blocks and protect them. Design quiet blocks: build in predictable meeting-free hours each week. Publish your own rhythm: when leaders model their preferred windows, others feel safe to do the same. The payoff comes in the form of increased participation, high-quality ideas, and better decisions. Teams spend more time progressing the work and less time recovering from poorly timed interactions. 2. Life-stage and relationship cycles It’s Wednesday afternoon, three weeks before the launch. A product lead is caring for an aging parent. A colleague is coparenting a toddler with alternate-week custody. Both are very committed and highly skilled. Both have a capacity that ebbs and flows in cycles that their work plan doesn’t account for. As a result, there’s a buildup of unnecessary stress, and cracks start to appear in their relationship. Capacity rarely follows a flat line. Parenting schedules, eldercare demands, study commitments, personal health, and community roles all create repeating patterns. Teams thrive when these patterns are visible and part of planning. Our own work carries this reality. Camilla alternates between weeks of intense caregiving and weeks with greater availability. David structures his day around defined windows of care for his disabled son. These rhythms shape when deep work and collaboration can happen, and they strengthen performance when leaders plan accordingly. advertisement In 2011, the Norwegian Association of Lawyers began a cultural transformation to align work hours with employees’ natural rhythms and personal responsibilities. Led by Secretary General Magne Skram Hegerberg and supported by the Life Navigation framework, the organization symbolically buried its wall-mounted clock-in machine, replacing rigid time-tracking with a focus on outcomes and skills. Employees were encouraged to align their working hours with their chronotypes and caregiving needs, with start times ranging from 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Productivity doubled in some areas, and creativity and problem-solving flourished. To make peak energy hours visible, some employees even used a plush toy frog on their desk to signal “do not disturb.” What to do when life rhythms shape capacity Sequence the load: assign heavier tasks to higher-capacity weeks. Create coverage by design: pair people or build small pools for critical responsibilities. Signal the cycle: encourage sharing of simple, recurring capacity patterns. Match work mode to the week: plan collaboration-heavy activities for higher-capacity periods. Build recovery in public: name decompression phases so rest appears as part of the plan. The payoff comes in the form of higher loyalty, sustained delivery, and less firefighting. People stay, grow, and contribute at a high level across various life stages, rather than stepping away. 3. Strategic mistiming It’s Friday morning at the quarter’s end. Finance is closing the books, sales is finishing a sprint, and HR is finalizing reviews. Then the C-Suite leadership unveils a flagship initiative and asks for all hands on deck. The purpose of the initiative is strong, but its launch comes at the lowest energy point of the team’s cycle. Organizational habits often set the drumbeat: quarter-end pushes, annual summits, weekly status rituals. Strategy, meanwhile, moves in waves that benefit from different kinds of energy—exploration and framing, concentrated build, high-tempo collaboration, delivery, and learning. Peak efforts flourish when the strategic wave and human energy crest together. At GuldBoSund, a nursing home and rehabilitation center in Denmark, staff redesigned daily routines around residents’ preferred rhythms rather than a fixed schedule. One resident enjoys coffee and breakfast at 5:30 a.m., while others sleep until 9:30. Staff also adjusted their own shifts to better match their personal energy cycles, coordinating care so that residents’ needs were always met. The outcome: residents experienced higher quality of life, and staff took fewer than two sick days a year on average—including night-shift workers. The example shows that when human rhythms are respected, well-being and performance strengthen each other. What to do when timing blunts strategy Plot an energy calendar: map recurring highs and lows and overlay strategy waves. Concentrate the peaks: design a few shared surges instead of scattering intensity. Stage the build: use short “rhythm sprints” before high-stakes moments, then cooldowns to consolidate learning. Anchor the why for co-location: mark the specific moments when being in-person creates outsized value. Measure cadence as well as milestones: track rhythm health with metrics such as rework, decision latency, and recovery time. The payoff comes in the form of stronger execution at the moments that matter, with a team resilient enough to repeat success across cycles. Make the invisible visible: a mini-playbook Rhythm becomes central to team performance once it becomes visible. Leaders can set the tone with a few simple practices: Rhythm mapping. Run a short survey or whiteboard session that asks three questions: When does focus feel strongest? When does collaboration feel easiest? Where do we lose flow? Turn the answers into a one-page map for the team. Shared cadence charter. Agree the weekly and monthly rhythm: deep-work spans, meeting windows, response expectations, and decision rituals. Keep it light and visible; update as the work evolves. Quarterly rhythm review. Look back on the past cycle: Where did energy surge or dip? What clashed? What flowed? Adjust the next cycle accordingly. Leader rhythm transparency. Publish your own focus windows, collaboration preferences, and recovery practices. Model the behaviour you want the team to adopt. Recovery as a capability. Teach practical reset rituals, such as after-action reviews that end with gratitude, shorter meetings with clear outcomes, brief meeting-free blocks after launches, and flexible Fridays during lower-demand periods. These moves require little budget and deliver immediate benefits: clearer attention, fewer collisions, and more consistent progress. The leadership edge The three invisible problems—biological misalignment, life-stage and relationship cycles, and strategic mistiming—act as a significant drag on the performance of teams. Rhythm-aware leadership treats energy, capacity, and timing as strategic assets. It sets the conditions for wiser decisions, leaps of innovation, and a sustainable pace of working. Organizations that move in rhythm build trust faster, integrate new technology more smoothly, and retain the people they need for the long run. Managing time sharpens efficiency. Leading with rhythm creates a strategic advantage. The best leaders combine both.
