Last year, a global trading company with offices in Sydney and Singapore asked Performance Intelligence to help onboard 175 Whoop bands for their employees.
This is now becoming a more common conversation with senior leadership teams when they want to get serious about performance. Part of the brief: wearable technology for members of the leadership team. The devices arrive, everyone is keen, and within a few weeks the data starts flowing.
HRV scores. Resting heart rate. Sleep quality. Exercise minutes and intensity, Daily steps. Recovery percentages. Strain.
For most leaders in that group, it can be genuinely valuable to see how the inputs (exercise, strategic recovery, mindfulness, nutrition, alcohol, stress, etc) influence the outputs (heart rate, HRV, VO2 Max, sleep data, etc) Patterns emerged that were not visible before. A senior leader who thought they were managing stress well discovers their body is telling a completely different story. Sleep data revealing that the late Sunday-night prep ritual is costing more than it contributes.
The data created awareness. Awareness created the opportunity to change.
But that is not always how it plays out.
When the data starts running you
In every senior leadership group I work with that has between 10 and 15 members, there will be 1 or 2 people for whom the data becomes a source of anxiety rather than insight.
I spoke about this recently in The Sunday Telegraph, in a feature on wearable technology and whether Australians are becoming too dependent on the health metrics their devices provide. My view is straightforward: wearables can be a powerful tool. But useful and essential are different things.
The leaders who struggle most with wearables tend to share a common trait. They are already high performers (many with high levels of underlying anxiety) who hold themselves to demanding standards. When a device tells them their recovery score is 52 per cent, they do not just note it. They analyse it, obsess about it, and constantly try to manipulate it through adapting their schedule. And when they wake the next morning, the first thing they do is check their device (rather than checking in on their own internal performance intelligence)
And start another day obsessing over the data.
I have seen leaders with high-functioning anxiety become so focused on the numbers that the data itself becomes a new source of stress. The wearable designed to reduce worry ends up creating a lot more of it.
A qualitative study from the University of Salford [1] found that regular self-tracking sometimes led to a loss of bodily intuition. Participants became so reliant on their devices to interpret how they felt that they lost confidence in their own read of themselves. The researchers identified four themes in their interviews with wearable users: Who knows best? Who is in charge? Who am I without it? And: What is happening to me?
Those are not the questions of people who have found a useful performance tool. Those are the questions of people whose relationship with the tool has become complicated and bordering unhealthy.
When the technology designed to improve self-awareness starts to erode it – that is the tipping point!
The value is real
None of this means wearables are the problem. I wear one myself. I track my HRV, resting heart rate, sleep quality, daily steps and exercise minutes and the data has informed real changes in how I manage my energy across the week.
The leaders I have seen benefit most from wearables use the data the way a good coach uses it: as context, not instruction. They notice a trend over several weeks, ask what might be driving it, and make one or two deliberate adjustments – remembering that inputs (habits and behaviours) lead to changes in the outputs (key wearable tech data). They do not change their day based on a single morning reading.
Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn and Insurance Australia Group CEO Nick Hawkins are among the leaders who have incorporated wearable technology into their performance routines. Neither is tracking metrics obsessively. They leverage the data to ask better questions about how they operate in demanding roles.
Awareness, then judgement
The challenge with wearable technology is not the technology itself. It is that we have been conditioned to believe more data leads directly to better outcomes. In some domains that is true. In human performance, it is more nuanced.
Data creates awareness. Awareness is valuable. But awareness on its own does not change anything.
What changes performance is what happens between the data point and the decision. The reflection. The contextualising. The judgement calls about whether this piece of information requires action or simply acknowledgment.
I have worked with leaders who can recite their HRV trend for the past three months but cannot tell you what their actual energy management strategy is. The data is there. The thinking has not caught up with it.
Data tells you what happened. Judgement decides what happens next.
What intelligent use looks like
When I am doing wearable onboarding with a leadership group, the first conversation is not about how to read the metrics. It is about what questions they are trying to answer.
Are you trying to understand your recovery patterns across a demanding travel schedule? Are you trying to get a clearer read on how alcohol, sleep timing or exercise is affecting your cognitive performance the next day? Are you trying to identify your peak cognitive windows and protect them?
If you can answer those questions, the data becomes useful quickly. If you cannot, you are collecting numbers without a frame.
A few principles I use with the leaders I work with:
Look at trends, not daily scores. A single reading tells you almost nothing. Four weeks of data tells you a great deal.
Pair the data with your own observation. If the device says your recovery is low but you feel sharp, trust your read. The data is one input, not the verdict.
Know when to put it down. If checking your metrics first thing in the morning is creating anxiety rather than informing your day, that is a signal worth paying attention to.
Use it to ask questions. The best use of wearable data is not to confirm what you already know. It is to surface patterns you would otherwise miss.
The future of performance is not less data
The goal is not to ignore the data. The goal is to use it wisely.
The leaders who will benefit most from the current wave of biometric technology are not the ones with the highest recovery scores. They are the ones who can hold data and judgement in the same hand. Who can look at a number, understand its context and decide what, if anything, to do with it.
That takes the same Mental Skills that underpin every other aspect of high performance: attention management, emotional regulation, the ability to distinguish signal from noise.
Technology can surface the data. The leadership work is knowing what it means.
If you are working through how to build a sustainable approach to performance across your leadership team, our corporate programs integrate evidence-based frameworks across the physical, cognitive and emotional dimensions of Leadership Capacity. For organisations looking at wearable onboarding as part of a broader performance programme, it is worth having that conversation.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew May is a high-performance coach, mental skills specialist and the founder of Performance Intelligence. He works with some of Australia’s most senior leaders, elite athletes and sporting organisations, helping them build the physical, cognitive and emotional capacity to perform under pressure and sustain that performance over time. He is the author of MatchFit and The Ripple Effect, and the host of the Performance Intelligence Podcast.
REFERENCES
[1] Humphreys, G., Jensen, S., & Gluchowski, A. (2026). “It’s like a toxic relationship”: Examining internal conflict experienced in wearable activity tracker users. PLOS Digital Health. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pdig.0001136
