Sleep, Leadership, and the Performance Advantage

Sleep neuroscientist Els van der Helm, PhD, has spent more than two decades working on the link between sleep, performance, and well-being. She conducted her research at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and Harvard Medical School, earned her PhD in psychology at UC Berkeley as a Fulbright scholar, and worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. She is an adjunct professor at IE University and lectures at St. Gallen and IMD. Her upcoming book, “Sleep Intelligence: The High-Performance Blueprint for Sharper Thinking” (Penguin Random House, January 2027) translates sleep science into practical strategies for decision-making, leadership, resilience, and recovery. 

In this interview, van der Helm explains why sleep should be viewed as a foundation for performance, how leaders influence the energy of their teams, and why the future of high performance may depend as much on recovery as execution. 

This was quite early for me. I was 16 years old when I read a book by Stanford professor William Dement called The Promise of Sleep. What really stuck with me was how he described the science behind sleep and what it does to your brain and your body. When you read that, there's only one conclusion you can draw:

Yet you look around and see that we associate sleep with laziness, a waste of time, or even hear things like "you can sleep when you're dead." 

It sounds cheesy, but that book really hit home for me. There is so much suffering in the world because people aren't getting good sleep, or don't have the opportunity to get good sleep, or don't understand why sleep is so important. I felt this was something that needed to change.

When people speak about sleep, they immediately focus on the first dimension: quantity, how many hours you get. But equally important is the second, quality: how deep and restorative that sleep actually is. The third is chronotiming, aligning your sleep with your own biological clock, since we all have a natural rhythm that dictates when sleep does us the most good. The fourth dimension is consistency: are you generally going to bed and waking at the same times, or are your sleep times all over the place? 

I then add two more dimensions. The fifth is routines. You can understand all these elements of sleep and have all the knowledge in the world, but how do you actually change behavior? There's a lot of science behind behavior change that isn't always connected to sleep advice. 

The sixth dimension is resilience. You can have the perfect sleep framework, but life is never perfect. Children wake us up in the middle of the night, flights get delayed, neighbors are noisy, deadlines pile up. We need to think about how to build resilience both for demanding periods ahead and for those moments when things don't go according to plan. 

I call it the QQCCRR model: quantity, quality, chronotiming, consistency, routines, and resilience. That's the comprehensive way I think we should look at sleep and how we can improve it, and it is something I explore in my upcoming book, Sleep Intelligence.  

We now see many more leaders speaking about sleep and recovery. Often, that's because they're wearing a fitness tracker that may have started as a fitness device but also happens to measure sleep. Now they're getting sleep scores and becoming much more aware of their sleep. 

What's still missing, unfortunately, is ownership. By that, I mean they're increasingly leading themselves when it comes to sleep, but they're not yet leading others. We're talking more about empathy and psychological safety, but we don't yet talk much about how leaders manage their own energy and the energy of their teams, including the role sleep plays in that. 

This is such a missed opportunity because it isn't rocket science. The U.S. military, for example, developed a sleep leadership training years ago. Leaders received just one hour of training, and the soldiers who reported to them became more than twice as likely to get more than seven hours of sleep per night. We need to consider how leaders in all organizations can create the conditions for better sleep and better performance.  

Right now, people are collecting a lot of data, not just about sleep but about all sorts of things. Often those devices simply give you a score. What we really need is for these technologies not just to measure, but to intervene. I often compare sleep trackers to a scale. If you want to improve your health, you can step on a scale and get a number. But measuring your weight doesn't change your weight. 

It's the same with sleep. The challenge is behavior change, and that's the part humans often struggle with. What excites me about AI is that we now have the opportunity to take much more data from an individual and provide much more personalized interventions. Instead of telling everyone they need eight hours of sleep, we can better understand what an individual needs and coach them accordingly within the context of their life. 

I've always believed we need to show how sleep leads to performance, and how poor sleep leads to decreases in performance. When people get good sleep, we see improvements in what I call IQ: attention, memory, problem-solving, creativity, and pattern recognition. We also see improvements in EQ. People are more emotionally stable, less anxious, less depressed, and generally in a better mood. 

Then there's social intelligence (SQ). People become more social when they get good sleep. In fact, we even pick up on it when someone hasn't slept well, and studies show we may be less inclined to interact with them. 

The fourth area is leadership quality (LQ). We have many studies showing that when people don't get good sleep, they show up the next day as more abusive and more aggressive leaders. That immediately translates into lower engagement within teams.  

That's why I often frame sleep through these different dimensions of intelligence and leadership. This directly impacts individual performance, team performance, and leadership performance. We even see this in larger economic data sets. A RAND study estimated that poor sleep costs the U.S. economy up to $411 billion a year, about 2.3% of GDP. The opportunity is enormous if we start taking sleep more seriously in the workplace.  

I see well-being as a pyramid. Exercise, nutrition, stress management, relationships, and a sense of belonging are all important. But sleep sits at the bottom of that pyramid. The reason is that once sleep isn't good, the entire pyramid starts to crumble. At the same time, when people improve their sleep, all the other puzzle pieces tend to fall into place more easily. 

For example, when people sleep an hour less than they're used to, they eat more calories the next day and crave sugar and fat much more strongly. We also see that when people are well rested, they're more likely to exercise, exercise more intensely, recover faster, experience less stress, and feel less anxious. 

You can get into a positive spiral, but you can also get into a negative spiral. Once poor sleep enters the mix, all the other pieces become much harder to fix. 

That's why I often say: focus on sleep for two weeks and see what happens. Forget about everything else for a moment. People generally start feeling more energetic, happier, more social, and more balanced, and those benefits then spill into other areas of life.  

A lot of organizations focus on what's above the waterline. They'll point to a sleep training program, a wellness initiative, yoga classes, or sleep tips. That's great, but we know from the research that these efforts have very little impact if you don't change what's below the waterline: culture, norms, workloads, and leadership behaviors. 

This has to start with leaders because whatever leaders do gets magnified throughout the organization. I've developed a framework for this, which I detail in Sleep Intelligence. It comes down to four things: leading by example, educating your teams, asking the right questions, and directing how work gets done. Sleep leadership is ultimately about creating an environment where people can perform well because recovery is possible.  

One of the most common beliefs I see among high performers is that they think they can get away with less sleep than they actually need, and that it isn't really affecting them very much. 

The research is very clear that we are impacted when we're not getting enough sleep. What matters is often not a single bad night, but the accumulation of sleep loss over time. Our brains are effectively keeping track of weeks of sleep history, and that influences how we perform. 

What's particularly tricky is that people are actually quite poor at recognizing their own impairment. If you pull an all-nighter, you know you're not yourself the next day. But with chronic sleep deprivation, you can reach similar levels of impairment without feeling especially sleepy. People assess their performance based on how sleepy they feel, and that's often misleading. 

The second belief I'd challenge is that sleep deprivation only affects the individual. It doesn't. Research shows that when people are tired, others pick up on it. People are less likely to want to interact or cooperate with someone who is sleep deprived. 

A lot of this comes from the belief that we need to work really hard before we've earned rest and recovery. I would argue it's the opposite.

Els van der Helm, PhD, is a sleep neuroscientist who works with global organizations to improve performance through sleep. She conducted her research at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and at Harvard Medical School, where she studied the effect of sleep on cognitive performance. As a Fulbright scholar, she also studied the impact of sleep on the brain and performance while pursuing her PhD in psychology at UC Berkeley, before becoming a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. Van der Helm's work has been covered in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, TIME, Forbes, and BBC. She is a frequent keynote speaker for organizations such as Meta, Novartis, Booking.com, L'Oréal, and PwC. Her book, Sleep Intelligence, is available for preorder here.