I used to think some people weren't really ill
Readtime: 3.5 minutes
I used to think that if you were ill but not properly ill, you could still work.
And that some of the people who said they couldn't work were just taking the opportunity not to. Especially when working from the sofa for a couple of hours would have been easy enough. I don't think I ever said it out loud. But I thought it.
I've just had norovirus. It wiped me out, completely, for two days. I couldn't work, couldn't read, couldn't do much beyond lie there. The worst I've felt since a couple of bouts of Covid.
Which is what got me thinking about all this.
When I was 30 I got chicken pox. Not shingles, actual chicken pox. I'd never had it as a child, and it's a lot worse if you get it as an adult.
I was a Senior Manager at KPMG at the time, and we were in the middle of US reporting for one of our biggest clients.
And I asked for the files to be couriered to my flat.
(Yes, they were physical files back then.)
Nobody made me do it. Nobody rang up and applied pressure. I requested them, so I could keep working, from my flat, covered in chicken pox.
I told that story for years as though it were a good one.
Where your Limit Scale comes from
Something I've been thinking about this week is that I barely got ill at all in 22 years at KPMG. Or at least that's how I remember it.
But now I'm not so sure how true it is. I was a lot younger, which probably explains some of it. But I also wonder whether working through something means it never gets filed as "being ill" in the first place. If you didn't stop, you weren't ill.
Either way, I came out of it with a very short Limit Scale.
By that I mean the range you have to judge from. The worst I'd ever been was chicken pox, and I'd worked through chicken pox. So that became the top of my scale.
And then I measured everyone else against it.
Not deliberately. But when somebody told me they were too ill to work, I was running it against the only measure I had, which was mine. A sample of one, with years of judgements built on top of it.
What I was teaching people
This is the part I like least.
I was a Senior Manager. I had a team. And what they saw was somebody who got chicken pox and asked for the files.
I thought I was being committed. What I was doing was setting a price, and everyone junior to me could see exactly what it was.
The story you tell about yourself is one thing. But when you're senior, it's also a rule you're writing for other people.
There's an uncomfortable flip-side to this, too. Somewhere out there is someone whose Limit Scale runs a lot further than mine. Someone who's worked through things that would have flattened me, and who'd hear "two days off with norovirus" and think that sounded soft.
They'd be using exactly the same logic I was using. And they'd be just as wrong.
Where else this shows up
The same Limit Scale gets applied to all sorts of things. How much pressure somebody should be able to absorb. How quickly they should be back after a bereavement. What's reasonable to manage alongside a new baby, or a parent who's becoming unwell, or anxiety that doesn't show up on the outside.
"I coped, so you can" feels like a fair standard. Most of the time it's just you, describing yourself.
What I'd rather be wrong about
I don't have a neat answer to this one.
When somebody tells you they're too ill to work, you have no real way of knowing, and you're not going to get one.
So the only thing I think you can decide in advance is which mistake you'd rather make.
Would you rather occasionally be taken advantage of by someone who was fine? Or occasionally make someone work who genuinely couldn't?
I don't know which of the people I was judging back then were genuinely too ill to work.
But back then I was sure I could tell. I just hadn't been ill enough to know that I didn’t.
Maybe your Limit Scale is shorter than you think it is too.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn