Pernod Ricard used four strategies to quell skepticism and convince people of its value.
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At 10:24 p.m., while brushing his teeth, my husband’s phone pings.
It’s not an emergency. No one is bleeding. No building is on fire. It’s an email that begins with the words, “Just circling back.”
In France, this would be illegal. Or at least deeply frowned upon. Since 2017, French workers at companies with more than 50 employees have had a legally protected right to disconnect. That means, employers can’t expect workers to answer emails or messages after hours. Similar policies exist across Europe, including Spain, Belgium, and Greece.
Meanwhile, in America, we’re circling back at bedtime.
The Country That Turned “Always On” Into a Personality Trait
In theory, Americans love freedom. In practice, we seem to love productivity even more.
Historically, we don’t just work, we identify with our work. We humblebrag about being slammed. We apologize for vacations. We wear burnout like a well-earned Miss America crown. The unspoken rule is clear: If you’re not reachable, you’re not serious.
I’ve interviewed hundreds of working parents over the years, and one thing comes up again and again: It’s not just the workload that is crushing them, it’s the anticipation of it. The constant low-grade anxiety that an email could arrive at any moment. That their boss might “just need one thing.” Silence could be interpreted as laziness.
Work doesn’t end anymore. It’s like the constant background noise of our personal lives.
America’s Love Affair with Hustle Culture (and Why We Can’t Quit It)
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: We don’t just tolerate hustle culture, we reward it.
We promote the people who respond fastest. We praise the ones who “go above and beyond.” We quietly penalize the ones who protect their time, especially women and parents. Especially mothers.
Disconnecting in America isn’t seen as healthy; it’s seen as risky.
And that’s the difference between us and Europe. In France, disconnecting is a labor right. In the U.S., it’s a personal boundary you have to negotiate politely without inconveniencing anyone important. Good luck with that.
The Myth That Availability Equals Value
One of the biggest lies of modern work is that responsiveness equals commitment.
But study after study shows the opposite. Constant availability leads to burnout, cognitive fatigue, poorer decision-making, and lower creativity. When your brain never powers down, it doesn’t perform better; it performs worse.
And yet, here we are. Answering emails from the sidelines of the soccer field and Slack-ing during bedtime. We’ve turned the ability to be interrupted into a marketable job skill.
So, Could a Right to Disconnect Ever Work Here?
Legally? Maybe. Culturally? That’s a higher hurdle. Because America’s resistance to disconnecting isn’t just about logistics. It’s about identity. Work isn’t just what we do; it’s who we are. For many of us, especially in an economy as frighteningly precarious as ours, being reachable feels like job protection.
Until we change what we reward, no policy will fully save us.
A right to disconnect would only work in America if we stopped confusing exhaustion with ambition and availability with worth.
What Would Real Progress Actually Look Like?
I’m not sure legislation is enough for a cultural shift. We will need leaders who model boundaries instead of martyrdom. With companies that measure output rather than online status. With workplaces that understand rest isn’t the enemy of success; it’s the fuel.
And maybe, just maybe, it would start with all of us resisting the urge to “circle back” at 10:24 p.m.. The French have a phrase for this: la vie. It’s the part of life that happens after work. In America, we call it being unreachable, and we are still not sure we are allowed to be.
Everybody loves the idea of feedback, defined broadly as information provided to someone about their performance, behavior, or actions.
This makes a great deal of sense.
Indeed, many studies have consistently shown that feedback from others plays an important role in helping us understand who we are, including how we differ from others. It is vital for improving managers’ and leaders’ performance and for helping people evolve and develop, both professionally and personally. Conversely, being feedback-deprived, or having a tendency to ignore it, increases the gap between how good you think you are, and how good you actually are—at times, to painfully delusional levels.
And yet, people often fail to accept and internalize feedback. This is particularly true when the feedback is misaligned with how we view ourselves or at odds with what we think about the situation. Contributing to this failure is often the poor quality of the feedback, due to factors ranging from sender expertise and intention to the politics and bias of subjective character evaluations. Unsurprisingly, meta-analytic evidence suggests that 1/3 of feedback interventions are ineffective, and another 1/3 actually worsen recipients’ performance.
Feedback, in short, has a poor track record. And especially poor for more senior leaders.
High-quality feedback is thus particularly scarce where it is needed the most—for those whose decisions and actions have the most far-reaching impact: in senior leadership. Why is this the case?
The reasons
First, when someone is powerful, others will go to great lengths to avoid upsetting or confronting that person, aware (consciously and not) that leaders have some power over their future, which explains why it is far more common for leaders to hear praise and compliments from subordinates than constructive criticism. A darkly comic illustration appears in Armando Ianucci’s movie The Death of Stalin. When Stalin collapses, his inner circle hesitates, panics, and second-guesses itself, terrified of acting without explicit permission. No one dares to take responsibility, question assumptions, or deliver unwelcome truths. The satire works precisely because it exaggerates a real dynamic: when power is concentrated and fear is high, feedback disappears, initiative dies, and silence becomes the safest strategy.
Second, hierarchical cultures and traditional leadership archetypes conspire against leaders’ ability to create the necessary psychological safety for candor. Unless effort is put into creating these conditions, team members will perceive a negative cost-benefit analysis when it comes to voicing issues—especially with their leader’s decisions or behaviors—versus holding back and staying silent. While this may boost leaders’ egos, fostering self-enhancing and delusional estimates of their own talents—it will severely limit their ability to improve and get better. How can anyone, including a manager or leader, get better if they are unaware of a gap between their self-views and their actual performance? Why would anyone, including a manager or leader, seek to change and evolve if their perception is that everything is fine?
Third, when someone seems devoid of self-awareness, to the point of being not just immune to feedback, but almost un-coachable, people will see no point in providing them with feedback, as it would be wasted on them. Unfortunately, when others are of the opinion that leaders are incompetent, and that, on top of that, they are totally unaware of this fact, they lose respect for that leader and approach their interactions with them as they would with a delusional narcissist or mad person.
What to do
Fortunately, there is a booming industry (at times comprising science-based instruments like evidence-based 360-degree feedback surveys and personality assessments) to tell leaders what they need to hear, especially when that’s not what they want to hear. Even in the absence of such instruments, here are five simple ways leaders can get better at receiving—and ingesting—constructive feedback.
- Ask for disconfirming data, not general impressions
Instead of “Any feedback for me?”, ask narrowly framed questions that invite contradiction, such as “What is one decision I made recently that slowed the team down?” or “Where did my involvement add least value this quarter?” Research on feedback seeking shows that specific, behavior-linked requests increase both the honesty and usefulness of responses, while vague requests elicit politeness and noise rather than signal. - Separate ingestion from reaction, deliberately and visibly
High-status leaders often kill feedback not by rejecting it, but by reacting too fast. A defensive facial expression, explanation, or “contextual clarification” is usually enough to shut people down. Evidence from self-regulation and feedback intervention research shows that feedback is more likely to improve performance when recipients force themselves to pause evaluation and treat feedback as data, not judgment. One practical move is to explicitly say, “Thank you. I won’t respond now, so I can think about what you’ve said, and I’ll come back to you,” and then actually do so. - Triangulate patterns, ignore anecdotes
Single pieces of feedback are typically biased, idiosyncratic, or situational. Leaders should resist reacting to one voice and instead look for recurring themes across sources, time, and contexts. Meta-analytic work on 360-degree feedback consistently shows that behavior change is most likely when leaders focus on convergent signals rather than isolated comments. Treat feedback like data analysis, not testimony. - Outsource truth-telling when power gets in the way
At senior levels, the social cost of honesty becomes prohibitive. This is precisely why structured mechanisms such as anonymous upward feedback, external coaching, or validated personality and derailment assessments outperform informal conversations. Research on power and voice shows that hierarchy systematically suppresses upward dissent unless safeguards are in place. Leaders who believe their “open-door policies” are adequate are usually the least informed. - Publicly act on one small piece of feedback, fast
The strongest signal that feedback is welcome is not just saying “thank you,” but visibly changing something. Even a modest adjustment, communicated explicitly (“Based on your feedback, I’ll stop doing X and start doing Y”), recalibrates the perceived cost-benefit of speaking up. Evidence from psychological safety research shows that follow-through, not receptiveness rhetoric, predicts future voice behavior. Feedback cultures are built behavior by behavior, not intention by intention.
Taken together, these practices treat feedback less as a moral virtue and more as an imperfect but essential data stream. Leaders who learn to filter, metabolize, and act on that data gain something far rarer than praise: a realistic picture of their impact.
On Sunday, the Waymo app showed a notification to some customers saying the service for the Bay Area is paused, affecting at least seven cities.
