Are You a Zone 3 Leader? What You Need to STOP Right Away.

Don't Confuse Effort For Value

In cardio, a rule of thumb around exercise is to break up heart rates into five zones.

Zone 1 is where you are most of the day, at rest.

Zone 2 is exertion, but not above the rate at which you can metabolize fat. You haven’t switched to burning your fast fuel, carbs.

Zone 3 is a mix of fat and carb burning. Zone 4 is nearly all carbohydrates, and zone 5 is near your max heart rate. It’s an all-out sprint, and the maximum effort you can put forward.

Zone 5 Leadership

We can use the same model for management and leadership. Zone 5 is an all-out effort. It’s late-night fire fighting, it’s a sprint before the board slides are due, it’s running out of runway. You push as hard as you can, and you push your team as hard as you can, because you’re in a survival situation.

Just like with Zone 5 training, if you did this every day, you’d want to quit quickly. Zone 5 training is effective, and it raises your VO2 max (the primary indicator of cardio health) better than anything else. But it isn’t sustainable. You need significant rest periods between Zone 5 training sessions. If you ignore that, you’ll get injured, depressed, and burned out.

Remember, muscles aren’t built in the gym. They’re built in bed. Muscles grow, including your cardio capacity, when you rest after exercise. More exercise does not necessarily beget more improvement! There’s a rate at which exercise and effort will actively hurt you, because you’re tearing your body down faster than it can rebuild.

The same is true on your teams and in your firm. Often, you don’t need to seek zone 5 leadership opportunities; they will find you. But you need to remember that immediately after, you need to hit the next part of the OODA loop — observe and orient yourself to what just happened. Rest inside the company, focusing on what could improve and what could get better. Zone 5 situations help you identify where your peak performance bottlenecks lie. It’s a sonar ping; it tells you where they are, but it does not fix them.

You have to fix them during the “rest period.”

Zone 2 Leadership

Zone 2 is your body’s peak performance that’s sustainable forever. Fat burning is a slow fuel; you could potentially “exercise all day” in Zone 2. It doesn’t feel very hard.

However, Zone 2 training has key benefits that even Zone 5 can’t reach — mitochondrial biogenesis. Or, the growing of new mitochondria. Remember, mitochondria are the “powerhouse” of the cell. (What’s a powerhouse, you ask? No one knows; it’s an archaic term. But it’s probably something like the mitochondria of a city.)

Zone 2 training increases the amount of effort you can give sustainably. It’s also not something that will burn you out, injure you, or make you depressed. You can do zone 2 training every day.

A Zone 2 manager is looking for peak, sustainable performance. What is a way of working we can do every day that gets the most output for the most input?

Remember, muscles grow at rest. So even in Zone 2, there needs to be regular check-ins about what the bottlenecks are and how to fix them. But you don’t need to make a big deal out of making time for that activity since you won’t have an exhausted staff to worry about. You can just fit it in.

Zone 2 management and process improvement of your team’s zone 2 system is so much more important than zone 5 management. Zone 5 tells you where your team falls down when survival is on the line. Zone 2 tells you where your team falls down when there’s nothing but money on the table.

In other words, Zone 5 leadership keeps you alive, in downturns or startup mode, in pandemics and other weird “once in a century” macro conditions that seem to happen more and more.

It’s very useful. But Zone 2 is how much you thrive. Zone 2 management is what separates billion-dollar companies from million-dollar companies. Zone 2 is about scale, growing fast and sustainably. Zone 2 represents where about 90% of your efforts go in bad times, and about 99% of your efforts in good times. It is responsible for roughly those same proportions of revenue and growth.

Zone 3 Leadership

Where does that leave Zone 3?

Zone 3 is just beyond your body’s ability to burn only fat for fuel. You won’t be able to maintain a conversation easily at this pace or breathe through your nose. Percieved effort is pretty high. It’s beyond the sustainable limit, meaning you can stay in Zone 3 for a finite amount of time before you’re too tired to move on.

What is Zone 3 training good at, cardio-wise?

Well, not much.

It doesn’t cause as much mitochondrial biogenesis as Zone 2. And it doesn’t increase VO2 max as well as Zone 5. It’s not really good at anything. But what’s wild is that if you walk into any gym in America right now, most people are working in Zone 3.

Check out the cardio machines the next time you’re there. Are people on them putting in their maximum effort? Maybe like one guy. Are people on them doing max sustained effort? A few, but you can tell they feel guilty about it. Where are most people working? They’re working up a sweat, panting, and nowhere near max effort. They’re Zone 3 training.

Why?

These folks have stumbled into an all-too-American problem: they’ve confused how tired they are with how much good they did.

(Confusing effort with value is called the “labor-theory-of-value,” or LTV. And you know who else was a huge proponent of the LTV? Karl Marx. That’s right, confusing effort with value is communist!)

To reiterate, Zone 3 isn’t as good as Zone 2 at building up your mitochondria. It’s not as good as Zone 5 in building your VO2 max. It’s not good at anything other than making you feel tired. And people have confused feelings of fatigue for value.

Think of it this way. There’s an RPM on your car where you’ll get the best fuel economy. There’s an RPM on your car that represents its maximum output. There’s also an RPM on your car that, if you were to average that, would wear out the goddamned car fastest.

That’s what Zone 3 training is!

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Zone 3 management is similar. Zone 2 is sustainable results oriented. How can we get more for the same, sustainable effort? Zone 5 is max focus oriented. How much effort can we put into a single problem in the shortest amount of time?

Zone 3 management is about how tired I can make my staff.

Zone 3 is about working more hours than maximizing revenue.

It’s about useless busy work rather than value-added activities.

It’s about constantly shifting priorities rather than laser-driven focus.

It’s about making sure every individual is occupied rather than keeping teams on task.

It’s about micromanaging, filling every nook and cranny with something rather than asking what does the customer actually want.

And it sneaks in insidiously.

The Scenario

Your boss comes to you with a project. He says it needs to get started. Your team is already on something else.

You might respond as a Zone 5 leader: “Boss, is this an emergency? If so, I’ll stop everything and get everyone on this right away.”

He says no, we need to do those other projects too.

You might respond as a Zone 2 leader: “Boss, I’ll put this next in the queue if you want. I expect we’ll get started on it in the next two weeks, as soon as we’ve cleared out our current tasks.”

He says no, we have to get started now.

(But it’s not an emergency?)

He’s frustrated. You’ve given him two options, and he didn’t like either. He pitches the third idea, “Say, what’s Nathan doing?”

He’s now micromanaging. You’re squarely in Zone 3.

The Consequences

At this point, you know the rest of the scenario. You know that the project, when you look at it, won’t be that important. It’s often a higher-up’s pet project that lacks expected revenue and has been delayed for months, if not years, at this point.

You know it was probably greenlit to finally make that guy happy, not because there’s a market need for it. You know it probably has a bad definition-of-done, that none of the stakeholders actually want it, and it will be impossible to get requirements for, and that it likely is full of ambiguities.

It’s a nightmare project. And because your boss has already started trying to peel it apart to give it to individuals rather than a team, you know it will take months rather than weeks, interfere with every other priority, and constantly be stuck “waiting” for the next skill level to be available to push it forward.

Don’t worry, though, your boss will have other ideas on how to keep those folks “waiting” busy with more Zone 3 projects.

These projects are there to make someone happy in the organization, but that person is never the customer. They’re some bone to toss—and not even a results-oriented bone. No one wants the project to be finished, because no one agrees on what the project even is. They just want the project to be started, so they can say, “Yeah, we started on that.”

Zone 3 In the Casino

Zone 5 is being told that you can place one bet, with all your money. You find the card game you’re best at, and play the best game you can. It’s intense.

Zone 2 is being told that one of these slot machines actually pays out more than the others. It’s carefully watching others, making small bets to experiment, to find that slot machine.

Zone 3 is entering the casino with the sole goal of spending money as fast as you can. It’s not thinking about outcomes, because those are hard! It’s thinking about inputs and trying to shove as many inputs in as possible, like the money is on fire.

What Do You Do?

Whenever you find yourself in Zone 3, realize it’s performative, it’s virtue signaling. It’s often the result of leadership that doesn’t know what it’s doing, so it just wants to look as tired and busy as possible.

If you’re in Zone 3, you rarely need to shift into Zone 5. First of all, your staff will likely be too tired to do that effectively anyway. So your only option is to shift into Zone 2.

This is often seen as “slowing down,” even though it isn’t.

It’s limiting WIP; it’s asking for the actual top priority. It’s making sure teams can take on any project. It’s keeping teams together rather than breaking them up after every task, it’s teaching teams the OODA loop, and making time for continuous improvement.

It is saying no to various pet projects. It is putting in less “effort” in the moment. It is “spending” less money. But it’s doing so to put that effort and that money towards things that are actually expected to generate revenue, sustainably over time.

Zone 2 management will always outperform Zone 3, because Zone 2 is specifically about optimizing performance! Zone 3 is about optimizing your appearance; it’s about ensuring you don’t get the blame when things go south. After all, your team was working nights and weekends!

Zone 2 is about ensuring things don’t go south in the first place.