Scott -- really profound results that you've gotten with your team. Your employees are lucky.
I think your LeBron analogy is a great one, but I take away something very different: LeBron doesn't make a roster if he doesn't voluntarily do all those things above and beyond the minimum expectations for an NBA player. Unless you're G-d's gift to athletic ability, I suspect that no one on an NBA roster gets there and stays there without going well beyond the equivalent of the minimum 40-hour work week. I don't think there's anything wrong with the owner of the auto body shop or the local accounting firm holding his or her employees to the same relative standards. Obviously, there are market forces at play that naturally set boundaries on the expectations of owners / managers -- and these market forces depend on how competitive the labor forces are for the given industry. But fundamentally, I don't see anything wrong with selecting a team from the best performers in a given pool of employees, noting that the best performers are often (but, admittedly, not always) those who are willing to commit above and beyond the minimum requirements.
I take your point about burnout and whether ambitiousness at the junior levels can have negative consequences when they become managers. I suppose we are products of our own professional development. My old bosses used to work insane hours to meet deadlines. So when they asked me to join them to help out, they had credibility. They weren't asking me to do anything they hadn't done themselves. More importantly, when they asked me to work hard and late, it felt like I was joining the club. Maybe you're right in that we are at the stage where you can have perfect work life balance and still get promoted and paid well and, therefore, you don't need managers who have the experience of grinding it out.
But there's another side to that also. I've been through four massive layoffs at various points in my career -- survived some of them. I'm sure many others on this forum have been through that as well. My experience is that when times are tough, the warm fuzziness evaporates, and seats on lifeboats go fast. During those times, work is life, and life is work. Especially if you have a young family. When I look back at the best bosses I had, they weren't the nice guys.
They were the guys who had the biggest P&Ls with the fewest number of people. Pure and simple. Because when times got tough -- and they sometimes do -- they have the stick internally to fight for seats on the lifeboats for their teams. How do you get on those teams in the first place? It's usually by demonstrating that you have a track record of going above and beyond.
I feel that I'd be remiss as a manager to not at least try to teach grit. I'm not saying I'm the grittiest guy or the best guy, but I try my best to offer what I can to the next generation.
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