Rest is a leadership discipline, not a wellness perk. Leaders who can genuinely put the day down protect the judgement, patience, and steadiness their teams depend on the following morning, while leaders who carry the day into the night spend those qualities before the day begins.
That conclusion came out of a RISEUP conversation between Joseph Wong, Executive Coach at RISEUP Global, and Lyn Lee, Head of Group Legal at OCBC. This article sets out what Lyn said, what it means in practice, and a protocol leaders and HR teams can actually use.
It also does something leadership articles rarely do: it separates what came from the conversation from what is practitioner observation, so you can judge each claim on its own basis.
About This Conversation
The RISEUP Conversation with Leaders series records discussions with senior leaders across the region about what they are actually learning, rather than what leadership content says they should be learning.
Lyn Lee leads the Group Legal function at OCBC, one of the largest banking groups in Southeast Asia. That context matters for reading what follows. This is not advice from someone with light responsibility recommending balance in the abstract. It is how a leader carrying regulatory, reputational, and organisational risk describes sustaining herself.
Four points from that conversation are attributable to Lyn directly. Everything else in this article is Joseph’s interpretation, drawn from coaching leaders through the same pressure, and it is labelled as such.
A shorter version of these reflections was first shared in Joseph’s original LinkedIn post. This article expands that post into the practical protocol below.
What Lyn Lee Said
These four insights are the source material. They are recorded here as close to how they were expressed as possible, with the practical implication drawn out beside each one.
| The insight, as Lyn expressed it | What it means in practice |
| The ability to sleep well at night is closely tied to performance. | Sleep is treated as a performance indicator, not a wellness metric. How you sleep reports on how you are leading. |
| She keeps a deliberate ritual to release the day and rest well. | Recovery is planned rather than hoped for. It has a defined trigger and a defined end to the working day. |
| Leaders need to take care of ourselves too. | Self-care is treated as part of the role’s responsibilities, not as time taken away from them. |
| Leadership requires the boldness and curiosity to try something new rather than accept the status quo. | Sustaining yourself is not the goal in itself. It preserves the capacity to question, explore, and change things. |
The fourth point is the one that reframes the other three. Rest is not being recommended here as comfort. It is being recommended as the precondition for the kind of leadership that changes something.
Note on completeness: the specific content of Lyn’s evening ritual is not reproduced in this article, because the source conversation records that she keeps one without detailing its steps. Rather than invent a plausible version, the protocol below is RISEUP’s own, built from coaching practice.
Joseph’s Reading: The Night Load
What follows is practitioner observation rather than research. In coaching senior leaders, the same pattern recurs often enough to be worth naming: what keeps leaders awake is rarely the volume of work. It is the accumulation of things left in an unresolved state.
Each part of that load has a cost that surfaces the next day in a different form, which is why it is so rarely traced back to its source.
| What gets carried into the night | How it usually shows up next day | What releasing it requires |
| Unfinished work | Fragmented attention and slower decisions. | Deciding what genuinely cannot wait, and accepting the rest can. |
| Unresolved conversations | Irritability the team reads as disapproval. | Scheduling the conversation instead of rehearsing it. |
| Silent pressure | Narrowed thinking and defensive responses. | Naming the pressure to someone rather than absorbing it alone. |
| The weight of expectations | Loss of perspective on what actually matters. | Trusting that the organisation does not rest on you alone. |
| Responsibility for other people | Depleted empathy exactly when the team needs it. | Separating caring for people from controlling outcomes. |
Read the middle column carefully. None of those symptoms announce themselves as a rest problem. They present as performance problems, character problems, or team problems, which is precisely why organisations address them with the wrong intervention.
The Night Load Audit: A Practice You Can Run This Week
This is the training component of the article. It is a RISEUP practice, not something Lyn prescribed. It takes about ten minutes at the end of the working day and is designed to move items off the night load rather than to help you tolerate carrying them.
Step 1 – Write Down What Is Still Open
Before leaving the desk, list everything still unresolved. Not a task list: an open-loop list. Include the conversation you avoided, the decision you postponed, the message you have not answered, and the concern you have not voiced.
Most leaders find between six and twelve items. The act of writing them is not the point. Seeing the size of what you were about to carry silently is the point.
Step 2 – Sort Each Item Into One of Three Categories
- Decide: it needs a decision from you, and you can make it now in under two minutes.
- Schedule: it needs more than two minutes, so it gets a specific time in the calendar rather than a place in your head.
- Release: it is not yours, not now, or not real. Name it as such deliberately.
The third category is the one leaders resist. Releasing feels like negligence. In practice, an item you have consciously released is handled better than one you carry unexamined for three weeks and then act on in a rush.
Step 3 – Name the One Thing You Are Actually Carrying
Under most night loads sits a single item doing the real work. Usually it is a conversation, a decision, or a risk you have not told anyone about. Write that one down separately.
If the same item appears three days running, it is not a scheduling problem. It is the thing to deal with, and it will keep costing you mornings until you do.
Step 4 – Close the Day Deliberately
Pick a consistent action that marks the end of the working day. The specific action matters far less than its consistency, because the function is to signal a boundary rather than to relax you. Leaders who skip this step tend to find the day never formally ends, and so never formally releases.
Run the full audit for two weeks before judging it. The first few days usually surface more than they resolve, which is uncomfortable and also the point.
How HR and L&D Teams Can Use This
Individual practice helps individuals. If the same night load appears across a leadership population, the cause is usually organisational, and the fix is not a resilience workshop.
- Ask leaders to run the audit for two weeks, then collect only the Step 3 items, anonymised.
- Look for repetition across people. Three leaders carrying the same unresolved decision indicates unclear decision rights, not three tired individuals.
- Where deferred conversations dominate, the capability gap is conversational rather than restorative.
- Where silent pressure dominates, examine whether the culture allows problems to be raised before they become failures.
- Re-run the audit after any intervention. The Step 3 list is a better measure of change than an engagement score.
This turns a personal habit into organisational diagnostic data, which is what makes it defensible as a use of leadership time. Where the pattern points to deferred conversations, Managing Difficult Conversations Training removes the item being carried rather than helping leaders carry it more comfortably.
Why Sleep Works as a Leadership Signal
Lyn’s first point is the most useful one operationally, because it gives leaders a signal they already have access to and currently ignore.
Most organisations file sleep under wellbeing, alongside step counts and gym subsidies. Filed there, it generates advice. Filed under performance, it generates questions: what am I holding, why has it not been resolved, and who else needs to know about it.
That reframing connects directly to how RISEUP describes resilience in what makes a resilient person. Resilience is frequently imagined as the capacity to absorb more. In practice it depends just as much on the capacity to set things down and recover, which is why the leaders who last are rarely the ones carrying the most.
Self-Care Is Not Self-Centred
Lyn’s second point was that leaders need to take care of themselves too. Framed correctly, this is a strategic argument rather than a soft one.
When leaders run depleted, the qualities that erode first are the ones their people most depend on: judgement, patience, empathy, and steadiness. The erosion is not announced. It appears as a shorter fuse in a meeting, a decision made quickly to avoid sitting with ambiguity, or a team member who stops raising problems because the response has become unpredictable.
A depleted leader is not a more committed leader. They are a less useful one, and the people around them absorb the difference long before anyone names it.
Boldness and Curiosity Depend on Capacity
Lyn’s fourth point was that leadership requires the boldness and curiosity to try something new rather than accept the status quo. Progress rarely comes from those who only preserve what already exists. It comes from those willing to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, and explore possibilities before the path is clear.
The connection back to rest is direct, and it is where the four insights resolve into one argument. Curiosity is expensive. A depleted leader defends what exists because defending costs less than exploring. Organisations that want bold thinking from their leaders are, whether they recognise it or not, depending on those leaders having the capacity to think at all.
That capacity is also what makes change survivable rather than merely announced, a theme covered in strategies for adapting to change.
A Closing Note From Joseph
This posture is captured in a verse I return to:
“In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.” – Psalm 4:8
Whatever a leader’s own beliefs, the underlying stance is recognisable. Rest is an act of trust in something beyond your own effort. A leader who can trust nothing except their own vigilance will find that an exhausting position to hold across a full career.
If rest reveals what we truly trust, what does your night tell you about your leadership?
What This Article Claims, and On What Basis
So you can weigh each claim appropriately:
- Attributed to Lyn Lee: the four insights in the source table, drawn from the RISEUP conversation.
- Practitioner observation: the Night Load pattern and the Night Load Audit, developed from Joseph’s coaching work with senior leaders. These are field-tested rather than research-derived.
- Not claimed: this article makes no clinical or physiological claims about sleep. Where a reader has a genuine sleep disorder, that is a medical matter rather than a leadership one.
There is a substantial research literature on sleep and executive function that supports the general direction of this argument. It is deliberately not cited here, because the argument stands on the conversation and on practice, and half-remembered statistics do more harm to a leadership article than they do good.
Where This Fits in RISEUP’s Training Approach
RISEUP works with leaders and teams on performing under pressure without quietly depleting the people doing the performing. That includes the daytime half of the problem, judgement under load, covered in leadership decision-making, and the recovery half, where most leadership programmes stop short.
Building this across a leadership population takes more than a single session, because the behaviours are habits rather than knowledge. Leadership resilience training and Continuous Leadership Development are built for that longer arc, and the Night Load Audit above is one of the practices used within them.
This article is part of the RISEUP Conversation with Leaders series. Our thanks to Lyn Lee for the conversation and for permission to share these reflections. The original short-form version is on LinkedIn, where the discussion continues in the comments.
FAQs
Why is rest important for leadership performance?
Because the qualities leadership consumes, including judgement, patience, empathy, and steadiness, are depleted by what a leader carries into the night. As Lyn Lee, Head of Group Legal at OCBC, put it in conversation with RISEUP, the ability to sleep well at night is closely tied to performance.
Is self-care for leaders a soft or strategic issue?
Strategic. When leaders neglect their wellbeing they lose the qualities their people most depend on, and the loss appears as shorter tempers, rushed decisions, and teams that stop raising problems. Self-care is part of responsible leadership rather than an exception to it.
What does poor sleep tell a leader about their leadership?
Often that they are holding something unresolved: a decision being avoided, a conversation deferred, a risk carried privately, or a belief that everything depends on their vigilance. Treated as a signal rather than a personal failing, it becomes useful diagnostic information.
What is the Night Load Audit?
A ten-minute end-of-day practice developed by RISEUP. You list every open loop, sort each into decide, schedule, or release, name the single item you are actually carrying, then close the day deliberately. Run it for two weeks before judging whether it works.
How can HR teams use this across a leadership team?
Have leaders run the audit for two weeks, then collect the anonymised single items. Repetition across people points to an organisational cause such as unclear decision rights or deferred conversations, which needs an organisational fix rather than a resilience workshop.
Build Leaders Who Sustain Their Performance
Help your leaders perform under pressure without quietly depleting the judgement their teams depend on. Contact RISEUP Global to discuss leadership resilience training customised for your organisation.
𝗝𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗽𝗵@𝗥𝗜𝗦𝗘𝗨𝗣 ـــــــــــــــــــہ٨ـ
Mobilising Resilient Performance
|| 𝖠𝖼𝗍𝗂𝗏𝖺𝗍𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝖢𝗈𝗎𝗋𝖺𝗀𝖾𝗈𝗎𝗌 𝖫𝖾𝖺𝖽𝖾𝗋𝗌, 𝖠𝖽𝖺𝗉𝗍𝗂𝗏𝖾 𝖳𝖾𝖺𝗆𝗌, 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝖳𝗁𝗋𝗂𝗏𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝖢𝗎𝗅𝗍𝗎𝗋𝖾𝗌 𝖴𝗇𝖽𝖾𝗋 𝖯𝗋𝖾𝗌𝗌𝗎𝗋𝖾
A trailblazer in humanising leadership and building high-resilience teams. As a former United Nations Peacekeeper, he leverages his high-stakes experience to redefine leadership dynamics. With a career distinguished by numerous accolades, Joseph now helps organizations thrive through a human-centric approach, enhancing performance, productivity, and workplace culture.
