Did a Shitty Workplace Kill Elvis?
I recently went to see EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert on the big screen. Not because I'm an Elvis super fan — but because the man was a genuine music trailblazer and when was I going to get another chance to experience that voice at full volume, larger than life?
So there I was. Me and a dozen senior citizens, living our best lives.
And somewhere between the sequins, the gospel, the hips, and that voice — I started thinking about his working conditions.
We have a narrative about Elvis. Drugs. Excess. The bloated Vegas years. We shake our heads and decide it’s sad—but ultimately, he brought it on himself.
But let’s look at what was actually happening to Elvis.
In one month, Elvis once did 63 shows, or on average 14 shows a week. To put that in perspective, Taylor Swift during her two-year Eras Tour did 149 shows, or on average 1.5 shows a week. At this point Elvis is just pimped out as a work horse.
In the 60s he was releasing an average of three movies a year. Formulaic films he hated. Compare this to Leonardo DiCaprio … who at his most prolific appeared to do one or two movies a year and then take the following year off. When Elvis said I’m not doing these movies anymore, he was told (threatened?) by his manager, music label and movie studio he'd never work again.
He had a manager stealing taking up to 50% of his earnings. No autonomy. No meaningful creative control. No recovery. No voice. Reasons that have seen musical greats such as George Michael and Prince legally try and break contracts with their own music labels.
Elvis was a man working in a system optimised to extract value from his talent until there was nothing left for him to give. If he was heard saying he felt frustrated, stressed, undervalued we would understand it.
Run his working conditions through a ‘shitty workplace’ filter and here's what we might find:
High demands — 63 shows in one month. A human body and mind with no meaningful recovery time.
Low control — creative decisions made for him, not with him. His opinion on his own career? Irrelevant.
Effort-reward imbalance — giving everything, receiving a fraction. The psychological equivalent of working your hardest and being told it still isn't enough.
Low job security — "push back and you'll never work again." That's not management. That's a threat.
Poor manager support — the Colonel was extracting, not supporting. There's a difference between someone who manages you and someone who monetises you.
Low voice — his wants, needs and limits were irrelevant to the machine around him.
That's not a personality problem. That's a workplace problem. And like many people trapped in toxic working conditions — he found a way to cope. Prescription drugs, initially prescribed by doctors, became a tool he used to keep performing when his body and mind were screaming at him to stop.
We've all seen versions of this. Maybe we've even lived versions of this ourselves. The glass of wine that became two that became a bottle. The medication that started as prescribed and became necessary. The slow disappearance of the person underneath the role.
When the environment is the problem, people find ways to survive it. I hear it in coaching sessions all the time.
Three things Elvis needed and never got.
One: Someone to fix the environment creating the damage.
The Colonel needed to be held accountable. The record label. The movie studios.
63 shows a month isn't ambition — it's exploitation. Creative control isn't a privilege — it's a basic psychological need. Taking 50% of someone's earnings while threatening their career if they object isn't management — it's coercion.
This is the work of psychosocial safety — identifying the conditions that harm people and changing them. Not how-not-to-create-a-shitty-workplace as an afterthought. Changing the conditions.
In Elvis's case this means a humane schedule. Creative autonomy. A fair financial arrangement. The right to say no without career annihilation.
None of this happened. Systems rarely change when they're making the people in charge very, very rich.
Two: Support while the environment stayed broken.
Here's the uncomfortable truth about systemic change — it takes time. Reviews take time. Negotiations take time. Culture change takes time. Legal processes take time. And people don't pause their suffering while the system catches up.
Elvis needed someone in his corner. Not to fix the Colonel overnight — but to help him manage the very real impact of conditions he couldn't yet change. Evidence-based strategies to manage his stress. To recognise what chronic pressure was doing to his body and mind. To find ways to cope that weren't slowly killing him.
Not toxic positivity. Not "have you tried yoga?" Not doctors who prescribed whatever kept him performing. Genuine support and skills building that met him where he actually was — in the messy, exhausting, demoralising middle of a situation that wasn't yet fixed. This is what good wellbeing support looks like. Not a band-aid over a systemic wound. An honest, practical, human response to the reality that sometimes the damage is happening right now and waiting for structural change isn't an option.
Three: Someone to help him understand himself.
This is the one nobody talks about enough. And in my view — it's both the most urgent intervention AND the most preventative one. Psychological self-awareness is knowing how YOU work. Your stress responses — how your body and mind signal that something is wrong before it becomes a crisis. Your limits — where your line actually is, not where you've been told it should be. The conditions under which you thrive versus the conditions that quietly hollow you out. Your patterns. Your blind spots. What you actually want — not what everyone else needs from you.
For Elvis this might have looked like:
What working conditions are actually sustainable for me as a human being? How do I respond to chronic stress — and what are the early warning signs I've been ignoring? What am I willing to tolerate and what crosses a line I cannot keep crossing? What do I actually want? Not the Colonel. Not the label. Not the fans. Me.
It wasn't just Elvis who needed it. The Colonel had his own psychology. His own patterns. His own reasons for building a relationship that extracted rather than protected. His own blind spots about what he was doing and why.
Psychological self-awareness isn't just an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. Used before the ‘shit hits the fan’ — in how we develop leaders, in how we build workplace cultures, in how we decide who gets power over other people's lives and livelihoods — it's how you stop the cliff appearing in the first place.
In my opinion the most dangerous people in any workplace aren't the ones who lack skills. They're the ones who lack self-awareness.
Elvis was 42 when he died.
Lisa Marie grew up without her father. The world lost whatever he might have become next. We call these stories personal tragedies. We locate the problem in the individual — their choices, their excess, their weakness. But Elvis Presley's working conditions were a checklist on what not to do and I see versions of this story every day. In workplace data and the people I coach. In leaders running on empty who wonder why their teams look exactly the same.
The three things Elvis needed aren’t rocket science:
Fix the environment.
Support the people in it.
Build the self-awareness that stops it happening again.
I like to think we can build workplaces where people don’t have to break before they get there. And as Elvis himself sings in If I Can Dream:
“But as long as a man has the strength to dream,
He can redeem his soul and fly.”
Have you ever found yourself coping really well with something that probably shouldn't be happening in the first place?