UpTrajectory Review

Els van der Helm, a sleep researcher writing for Harvard Business Review, argues that sleep deprivation among leaders is not merely a private wellness issue but an organizational liability. The available excerpt is thin — a single statistic noting that nearly 40% of leaders report insufficient sleep at least four nights a week — but the headline signals the full argument: exhausted leaders degrade team performance, decision quality, and workplace culture in ways that cascade far beyond their own calendars. Van der Helm's framing pushes against the long-standing narrative that burning the candle at both ends is the price of ambition, a narrative that remains stubbornly embedded in how small-business owners especially tend to evaluate their own productivity.

For a small-business operator, this is not an abstract HR concern. When the person at the top is running on four hours of sleep, the consequences land directly on payroll decisions, client relationships, and the emotional temperature of the entire operation. Unlike a Fortune 500 executive with layers of senior management to absorb their bad days, a small-business owner who snaps at a key employee, miscalculates a bid, or misses a regulatory deadline because they are exhausted has no buffer. The business absorbs the cost immediately and often silently, because the owner rarely connects the poor outcome to the sleep debt that caused it.

What is genuinely useful here is the reframing itself. Most sleep coverage in business media focuses on individual optimization — morning routines, sleep trackers, melatonin protocols — which quietly reinforces the idea that sleep is a personal failing to be engineered away. Van der Helm's argument, at least as signaled by the headline, shifts the burden to the organizational level: leaders who model sleep deprivation normalize it for their teams, and teams that normalize it make worse decisions collectively. We are skeptical only of the implication that awareness alone changes behavior. Every small-business owner already knows they should sleep more; the harder question is what structural changes actually make that possible when cash flow and staffing are the real sources of the insomnia.

The second-order effects deserve more attention than the excerpt provides. Sleep-deprived leaders are measurably worse at reading emotional cues, which means they misjudge morale, miss early signs of employee burnout, and respond to conflict with less patience. In a small business, where the owner may be the direct supervisor of every employee, that erosion of interpersonal judgment compounds quickly. There is also a hiring and retention dimension: younger workers increasingly evaluate employers on sustainability and wellbeing, and a founder who brags about all-nighters is signaling something unattractive to the talent pool they are trying to attract.

What to watch next is whether van der Helm's full piece offers anything beyond diagnosis — specific organizational interventions, policy changes, or accountability structures that treat sleep as a leadership competency rather than a lifestyle preference. For readers who want to act now, the practical starting point is unglamorous: audit your own sleep debt the way you would audit a budget shortfall, identify which business processes genuinely require your late-night attention and which ones you have simply never delegated, and then treat the delegation gap as the operational problem it actually is. The sleep problem in most small businesses is really a systems problem wearing a wellness costume.

“Nearly 40% of leaders report insufficient sleep four or more nights a week.” — Harvard Business Review

Takeaway: Treat chronic sleep deprivation as an operational systems failure — audit which late-night tasks you have never delegated rather than just buying a better sleep tracker.