In Chapter Two, we described how current organizational realities affect the availability of leadership opportunities, the demands on leaders, views on leadership, and the costs of leading. In this chapter, we look at personal realities and expectations that surround and influence your work as a leader. Roles, responsibilities, and experiences from your personal life inform what kind of leader you want to be, how much time and energy you dedicate to leadership, and what roles you might accept or decline. Many lessons you learn in your personal life can transfer to your work as a leader. However, conflict between the priorities of work and home can often lead to drift or prevent you from taking action to get out of drift.
In this chapter, we examine the interdependencies of work and personal life and see how each arena shapes and influences the other. We also present some strategies for managing the various priorities in your life. The ultimate aim of the chapter is to help you resolve any conflicts so that you achieve the right amount of focus, energy, and time among the areas of your life in order to be a more effective leader.
As complex work demands more hours and more energy, as technology has allowed twenty-four-hour connectivity wherever you are, as plane, briefcase, home office, or temporary work space all become your "place of work," and as you change jobs, organizations, and industries throughout your career, work life can easily infiltrate more of your personal life. When this happens, it becomes difficult to distinguish between your time and effort at work and at home. (Indeed, we wrote most of this book while at home.)
With fewer boundaries between work and home, multitasking rises, and the stress of trying to achieve work-life balance increases. In addition, work stress and its health care costs have risen drastically. When we talk to executives, we increasingly hear them lament the loss of quality family or personal time and the difficulty disconnecting from work due to the electronic gadgets they carry with them wherever they are and whatever they are doing.
Here's a typical pattern. Driven by the normal rewards and expectations of work life (for example, to become more financially secure or gain greater recognition), you give more time and energy to work. The return is often greater financial rewards, greater responsibility, and more pressure to work even longer hours. Soon work spirals beyond control. Locked in this cycle, you too easily neglect family commitments or other aspects of your personal life, especially if they do not provide as much positive affirmation as your job does. Quite often leaders don't see this pattern developing until the situation explodes.
At the same time, economic pressures, layoffs, mergers, acquisitions, and other stressors cause the organization to demand more work from fewer people. So people works longer hours to keep their jobs or frantically try to reinvent their careers for higher pay when their spouses are laid off. This too takes a toll on personal lives.
A leader's own values, needs, wants, and drives also can contribute to the impact that work has on one's personal life. This comment from a senior executive illustrates the point:
In the summertime, there have been times when my husband has called me at 8:30 or 9:00 [in the evening], saying, "Are you going to come home?" I just completely lose track of time because I actually enjoy what I do; I get into it, and it's fun for me. [But] when I hear my son tell his friends that the only way he can reach me is to text me, then I know that I'm going overboard and really have to back off. That's been a hard lesson.
Before we move further into the content of the chapter, step back and consider the following questions. Be completely honest with yourself as you reflect on each one:
How has work affected your life outside work over the past year?
What have been the benefits of work to your development as a leader and as a human being outside work?
What have been the downsides?
What is your biggest challenge in finding time for other roles outside work?
What satisfies and dissatisfies you about the impact of work on your personal life? Have these factors contributed to your feeling a sense of drift?
Just as leadership work affects personal lives, the reverse is also true. Our personal lives encompass numerous roles (for example, parent, spouse, son, friend, PTA president, grandparent) that lead us to additional responsibilities (for example, college tuition, home mortgage, retirement savings, school projects, laundry, grocery shopping). Our personal lives can affect how much money we want or need, how we choose to use our time, how much responsibility we seek, and where our energy goes.
Asked, "Are you putting your sights on a particular VP job higher in the organization?" one corporate director responded: "No. And I'll be quite honest. I am not willing to give up my family at this point. I just know what others at the vice president level give up. And I'm just not willing to make that sacrifice."
In addition to personal roles and responsibilities, we all have expectations that stem from our life philosophies and experiences. Our family of origin, generation, nationality, religion, and personal experiences all shape how we act as leaders in the workplace. Whether your father or mother was a traditional breadwinner, a stay-at-home parent, or not present very often, these factors have influenced who you are as a person and as a leader. If you grew up in a multigenerational household and were raised in Norway, you might lead differently from someone from the United States who was raised in a one-parent home.
Family of origin and other factors in your family context are parts of your social identity. Social identity encompasses three general components: given identity, chosen identity, and core identity (Hannum, 2007). Core identity refers to the attributes we believe make us unique as an individual—for example, traits, behaviors, values, and skills (which we discussed in Chapters Four and Five). Given identity is the characteristics we are born with or given to us in childhood or later in life (for example, gender, nationality, skin color, height, birth order). Chosen identity refers to choices around our relationships with others, where we choose to live, and the social groups we choose to join.
Our given identity—where we are born, Asian or European, male or female, short or tall—influences how we lead as well as how others perceive our leadership. Likewise, where we choose to live, the family makeup we choose or experience (for example, divorce, marriage, blended families, single, gay), and our profession (for example, engineering, education, law) shape our lives, our social groups, and our behaviors as leaders. Also, as we highlighted in Chapter Five, these factors, as well as unchosen significant life experiences, can influence our attitude toward work, our beliefs about good health, and our outside interests or passions. All of these in turn can have an impact on our leadership.
Before reading on, take a moment to record some notes on these questions:
What parts of your given identity have influenced you as a leader, and in what ways?
What about the influences of your chosen identity?
What other priorities exist for you outside work? Do they contribute to or get in the way of your effectiveness as a leader?
What life experiences outside work have influenced your behaviors as a leader?
What general views of life have contributed to who you are as a leader?
All things considered, how would you characterize your work-life balance?
Keep these responses near you as you read about some key topics of connection between work and personal lives.
Now that you more fully recognize the influence that work has on personal life and vice versa, let's take a look at a long-standing integral tension: how to effectively balance your personal and work lives. Advice about work-life balance shows up constantly in popular magazines and business periodicals, on television talk shows, and in various other media addressing all kinds of audiences. This issue draws so much attention because it continues to be a vexing problem for many people, and especially for leaders.
Most often, work-life balance refers to tensions of time between work and one's personal life. As individuals have wrestled with this issue, many conclude that achieving balance is an unrealistic goal, while others redefine the dilemma as something other than measuring how to divide time (Hammonds, 2004). In a 2009 speech, Jack Welch told the Society for Human Resource Management, "There's no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences" (Tuna and Lublin, 2009). As one CEO aptly put it to us, "I hate the balance concept because it means that every day I'm going to be a perfect mom and a perfect chief executive. Impossible. Simply impossible."
We agree with these points. Achieving work-life balance is unrealistic if we define it only as an issue of allocating time. Although how and where you spend your time is important, you also need to understand the benefits of the tension between work and home, what activities in either sphere give you energy, and how attending to the right priorities at the right time can increase your leader effectiveness. For each person, the picture looks different. You need to decide what balance is for you and use strategies that fit your own needs.
Before we move to strategies, let's take a deeper look at this topic of the tensions and interdependencies of work lives and personal lives. All senior leaders have days when they feel like a tightrope walker who is juggling multiple plates and trying not to drop any of them. Long hours, tiring travel, needing to get more accomplished with fewer resources, as well as increasing demands of working in a global environment conspire to deny leaders a sense of being in control. Most senior leaders, regardless of age, gender, or race, find themselves grappling with these choices of focus, energy, and time.
For example, in the United States, balance was once viewed as only a working mom's issue. Journalists and surveys still commonly report how working mothers spend their time, suggesting that mothers often still have a tougher time than fathers at finding a healthy balance. For many historical, social, and psychological reasons, mothers are still expected to, want to, or have to shoulder more than half the work of parenting. But this trend is shifting with more dual-income families and as more fathers become stay-at-home dads.
One of life's tensions for both men and women is that the tasks of building a family and building a career often occur simultaneously. These roles come into conflict when energy and time are important to performing well in both roles: leader at work and parent and spouse at home. When male CEOs at CCL's Leadership at the Peak program are asked about their greatest stress, the most frequent answer is loss of time with family versus a challenge they are facing at work. At the end of one CCL course, a senior executive, in a letter to himself, worked the problem through in the following way:
You've known all along it's all about balance. You've had it reinforced this week. That realization came to you over 10 years ago when all you had was your career. That lack of balance in your life was killing you. You had nothing left for yourself. What little you were able to muster for your family was utterly inadequate and almost cost you your marriage.
Over the last ten years you have gained some ground by taking some of the focus off your career and refocusing some of your energy on yourself. You still haven't improved your relationship with your family.
You now probably have a fair balance between your career and yourself, but your relationships with your family, friends and coworkers are a far cry from where they need to be. Your prioritization skills stink. How could you let ten years go by and still not have your relationships in balance with the rest of your life?
You are 52 years old and your kids are in college. You are running out of time. In fact, you don't have another 10 years to work on it. You have to do it now.
So, over the next 6 months I want you to focus on repairing and/or developing the important relationships in your life. Your primary focus needs to be on your family. The kids will be difficult, but I know you can do it. You'll have to pick up the pace with the communication. Next it is a must you develop those critical relationships at work. It was very evident this is the major item to work on at the office. Lastly, please maintain the few close friends you do have. You are going to need them.
Finding time for roles other than work is a problem for men and women alike, not just those who are married and have children. Lack of balance is a challenge for all types of leaders, including heads of house holds, single parents, leaders just starting their careers, and leaders with a few years left before retirement. Imbalance is an equal opportunity player.
Another shift we see is that younger generations aren't buying into the constraints to which older generations submitted. They demand more flexibility, more choices, and fewer trade-offs. If asked, many will say they do not want to work the way their parents did, particularly if they saw their parents sacrifice a lot for an organization that only lengthened the workday or ended up terminating their employment.
So why is imbalance such a big issue? It's an issue because of the stress caused by multiple competing priorities that lead to long days, too little sleep, guilt, worry, and resentment. Without ways to relieve stress, energy fades over the long haul; the stamina isn't there to overcome real obstacles; and ambitions fall prey to ill health. These problems all contribute to the challenge of drift. As one executive wrote:
I was involved in so many different things that I really didn't have any time for myself. I lost sight of who I was. I got to a point where I was just getting up every day, and people would wind me up and I'd just go. I didn't know what day it was, where I was supposed to be. It was like I was driven by an appointment book. So I had to shut down. I actually shut down for about six months before I started getting reenergized and back into activities.
When you are rightly focused and attending appropriately to the multiple parts of work and personal life, you see ways to achieve your ends, and energy can flow more freely. Thus, your effectiveness as a leader depends in part on your ability to balance or integrate your career and family obligations, your community and social lives, the pursuit of learning, and whatever other priorities you have in your life. Each part of life makes legitimate demands, and each offers important nourishment. Achieving some semblance of the right focus lets you lead with a fuller heart and soul. Effective use of your whole self allows you to go beyond tactical leadership and into strategic or transformational leadership. This is not just opinion but is grounded in research.
Two of CCL's multirater (360 degree) assessment instruments include items for comparing effectiveness with balance. The Skillscope questionnaire (Kaplan, 1997, p. 3) asks raters whether the person being assessed "strikes a reasonable balance between his/her work life and private life." The Benchmarks assessment (Lombardo and McCauley, 2000, p. 26) asks for responses on the following items: "Acts as if there is more to life than just having a career; has activities and interests outside of career; does not take career so seriously that his/her personal life suffers; and does not let job demands cause family problems."
In administering these instruments to hundreds of thousands of leaders and their raters, we have found that when executives received high marks from their coworkers on these specific items, the high marks on balance were not associated with lower marks on overall leader performance. The executives were considered productive, proactive leaders of the organization despite the time they carved out for their family, community, or other external endeavors. In one study using 360-degree data, managers who were rated higher in work/life balance were also rated higher in career advancement potential (less likely to show signs of career derailment) than managers who were rated lower in work/life balance (Lyness and Judiesch, 2008).
CCL research on women found that multiple roles nourished rather than hindered careers. One study of 222 high-achieving managerial women showed that commitment to four key roles—home care, parental, marital, and occupational—contributed to better work performance and to life satisfaction and higher self-esteem (Ruderman, Ohlott, Panzer, and King, 2002). Also, women committed to multiple roles were rated higher by bosses, peers, and direct reports on organizational skills, interpersonal skills, and personal awareness than women committed to single roles. Moreover, women single-mindedly devoted to work were rated lower as collaborators and were viewed as unduly pressuring coworkers. A subsequent study of 346 male and female managers found that commitment to family roles and spousal or life partner roles had a positive impact on job performance (Ruderman, Graves, and Ohlott, 2007).
Delving further into balance as defined by having "interests and activities outside of work," we find a slew of articles on exercise, nutrition, energy, and stress and their connection to effective leadership. Sharon McDowell-Larsen (2009), CCL's resident exercise physiologist, found that senior executives who exercised were rated significantly higher on overall leadership effectiveness in multirater assessments than their nonexercising peers.
David Rock (2009) demonstrates that stress-filled situations interfere with the brain's ability to function well. When we are under stress, we have less oxygen and glucose available, our memory gets cloudy, we have trouble thinking nonlinearly, and we have less capacity to solve complex problems. Essentially stress can reduce one's memory and performance and interfere with the ability to fully engage in the activities at hand, whether at work or at home. Finding ways to reduce or deal with stress is thus essential to leadership performance.
Tony Schwartz (2007) argues against managing one's time to fit in exercise, relaxation, or stress reduction activities. He suggests that organizations should focus instead on helping individuals sustain their capacity or energy because "greater capacity makes it possible to get more done in less time at a higher level of engagement and with more sustainability" (p. 64). Schwartz employs a variety of strategies for boosting energy and is able to measure positive bottom-line business impact for a financial services organization with these strategies.
Thus, studies point to potential positive results for both leaders and their organizations from interdependencies between our work and personal lives and from spending time outside of work on other priorities.
Further study of the interdependencies between work and personal lives shows additional connections and benefits. For example, important lessons are learned in each arena of life that can benefit the other.
Research at CCL examined how interactions among roles can contribute to a high-achieving woman's professional and personal development. From the women's personal lives, six significant skills and benefits were identified as increasing effectiveness at work (Ruderman, Ohlott, Panzer, and King, 1999):
Interpersonal skills. Women gained experience in understanding, motivating, and respecting others.
Handling multiple tasks. As a result of juggling personal tasks, setting family goals, and so forth, women were able to multitask effectively.
Leadership skills. Leadership opportunities in community or volunteer settings provided lessons about leadership in the workplace.
Psychological benefits. Increased self-esteem and confidence developed in the women's personal lives helped them feel confident professionally.
Emotional support and advice. Getting support from family and friends helped women succeed at work.
Personal interests and background. Pursuit of personal interests and cross-cultural experiences or background brought value to women's work.
Often more value is placed on the learning that one does at work, but clearly lessons in personal life are valuable and transferable. The trick is to become aware of these important lessons and then capitalize on them. One executive described the learning and interactions between herself and her husband that had implications for a more flexible leadership style at work:
In the partnership that I have with my husband, I think we trade off on leadership roles. We balance each other very well, to the point where we have somehow adapted to and adopted some of the personality traits of one another. I've typically been more of an extrovert, my husband a little less so, but over the years I've seen the benefits of not being quite so extroverted and I think my husband has done the same in just the opposite [direction].
Reversing perspective, we hear many executives describe positive effects of work life on their personal lives. They mention the financial rewards of individual advancement: access to the good things in their personal lives—the kind of home they want, children's education, and flexibility to spend long weekends with their family. For some, this includes opportunities to travel to interesting parts of the world, the chance to integrate business trips with family vacations in special places, opportunities to have lots of interesting friends and acquaintances, and the ability to call on a broad array of networks when needed.
Patrick Lencioni (2008) notes the discrepancy between the proactive time and energy we put into running our organizations and the reactive, chaotic mode in which we often handle our family lives. He provides lessons on how to take what we learn from work and apply these lessons to our families.
In recognition of the vexing problem about balance and wanting to retain talent, some organizations have changed their policies to embrace leaders as more complex, more integrated persons. One large management consulting firm that we've worked with has started a program that allows employees to "dial up" or "dial down" their career if they need less travel or client service, want to move laterally into a new role, or want to ease toward retirement.
As organizations compete for talent, many are looking at the benefits they offer to recruit and retain high-caliber leaders in whom they invest time and money. These benefits include gym memberships, on-site day care, and flexible work arrangements, all of which help employees manage complexities in their lives. Of course, the idea is that productivity will increase as well. Google's flexible benefits are renowned for their flexibility and enticement:
Up to eight thousand dollars a year in tuition reimbursement
On-site medical and dental facilities, oil change and bike repair, valet parking, free washers and dryers, and free daily breakfast, lunch, and dinner at eleven gourmet restaurants
Unlimited sick leave
Twenty-seven days of paid time off after one year of employment
The Global Education Leave program that allows employees a leave of absence to pursue further education for up to five years and $150,000 in reimbursement
Free shuttles equipped with Wi-Fi from locations around the Bay Area to headquarter offices
Classes on subjects ranging from estate planning and home purchasing to foreign language (French, Spanish, Japanese, and Mandarin)
For some organizations, the purpose of additional benefits is to reduce the organization's health care costs, which are driven up by stress and by time away from work due to illness. Gym memberships, on-site fitness rooms, and incentives for physicals to reduce insurance costs are intended to help reduce medical bills for the organization. The good news is that these efforts benefit the employee as well.
Now look at your viewpoint on leadership and balance:
How does an interdependent perspective on your work and personal life play out for you? Do you see connections to leadership? In what ways?
Is work-life balance a topic of conversation in your organization?
What have you seen change in individuals and organizations over the past five years as they address the impact between work and personal lives?
Our goal is to help you achieve the right amount of focus, energy, and time among the various areas of your life so that it benefits you as a leader and those you lead. Begin this process by examining your thoughts and assumptions:
Is balance about having enough time across all of the areas of your life?
Is it about analyzing how you spend time and adjusting allocations?
Does a solution lie in reframing how you think about work-life balance?
Do you define "work" as your formal, paying job and not consider your stints on a school committee, at church, or on a community board as work?
Another assumption we all make is that working harder and faster and multitasking make us more effective leaders. True? As noted earlier, Tony Schwartz (2007) helps challenge the assumptions, rules, and norms that govern our personal and work lives. For example, is it productive to respond to every e-mail? Schwartz says that the switching time in multitasking undermines productivity: constantly shifting attention from one task to another lengthens the time to finish each task by 25 percent. Challenging our assumptions and looking at information from different points of view can be helpful in solving or at least minimizing the turbulence we feel.
Also ask related questions. What puts your life out of balance? What is missing from your life? Is it that you need to spend more time with your kids, to read a book for pleasure, to travel, to finish a major work project, to read business books, or to exercise? Asking what is missing might point you to something you can change to improve your work satisfaction, and in doing so, you find more energy and benefit to your life more generally.
If you haven't already figured this out, the answers to the questions we pose above are core to the process of discovering the leader in you. Each reader of this book faces a different context and thus will answer these questions differently. One CEO we met summed up his answers in a poignant letter to himself:
You are . . . standing at the threshold of an introspective crunch. You have a choice as to whether you find joy or not in your time ahead.
You have had a successful career and have achieved more than what was expected academically and in your jobs, but the same methods and practices that have ensured your success [up to now will not work any more].
Your "babies" are now 6 and 10. How many days do you spend real time with them? How do you want them to remember you? Are you a source of nurturance at all times to both of them and their mother? Where will you find the time? You have a choice.
Your work life is packed from sunup to sundown. You complete all the paperwork, reports, requests, return calls and emails, but did you move the company somewhere new today? Did you simply go down your list of items with each supervisee or did you ask them a single question that just might open up their thinking?
Has life received a return on its investment in you? Maybe your company takes care of the needy, but what have you done for free and not because it was part of an operational plan? Do you have a sense of spirituality or joy in your life? You have a choice.
There is much you can do about what is missing. You stand at the threshold of opportunity for real change.
You may choose to calm down and be more at peace. You are running to win a race which [will end only when you step] off the track. You must start this evaluation by centering yourself. This means pausing to enjoy the subtle elements of life: a sunset, a cup of coffee, a movie with your spouse. Taking care of yourself can be a higher priority—you can take time to meditate and breathe. Trusting yourself and allowing others to connect with you will be therapeutic.
But beware. Don't make this another hard driven, list-oriented goal you must accomplish. You must relax in order to relax.
You can also reprioritize. You can put your family first and ensure uninterrupted time each day with each person. You can value "achieving" this more than you may value tangible or career-related outcomes. You can choose to parcel out time to a wider circle of friends and a greater community involvement. You can parcel out time at the office to create the vision of where you're going and steer the organization in that direction. You will accomplish more in 30 minutes of reflection at work than 4 hours of returning emails.
Finally, if you do not become more challenging of your employees, more decisive, more risk-taking, more connected with people you know less well, more empowering of others you will never have the time you need for everything else. You need to be a stronger and clearer voice in your own life. And if your voice is based on a heartfelt sense of priority and connectedness, people will follow you.
Do you think you are spending the right amounts of focus, energy, and time among the various areas of your life? Reflect on the following questions:
As you try to achieve balance among the many roles and priorities of your life, what is working and what is not?
What do you wish to have more of in your life? Less of?
How has your role as a leader benefited by what you do outside work and vice versa?
How have the priorities outside work contributed to drift at work?
What is one thing you could do to achieve more focus and energy in your life?
Now revisit and dive a bit deeper into a topic touched on in other chapters: the costs and benefits of leading.
Taking time to look at the costs and benefits of leading is important for answering the question, "Is being a leader worth the time and effort?" As you come up with responses to this question, think across all arenas of your life, including the impact it has on your extended family and friends and the networks in which you are involved in your community. See if this reflection doesn't give you further insight. Perhaps you had not recognized or articulated a particular benefit that gives you more resolve to continue your leadership journey. Perhaps you had not been able to name a specific cost but will find the language for it here.
Here is one example. Suppose you are in a global leadership role and gain pleasure from it because it lets you experience different countries and cultures. The perceived benefit here is global travel, which might include your family at times. But global travel can also entail a cost insofar as it takes you away from family or leads to bodily wear and tear. Another benefit of your global role might be that you meet colleagues across disciplines, interests, and nationalities. That expansive network may serve both your work (when you contemplate your next professional move) and your personal life (when you need to help a friend or family member find a job). Other benefits (or costs) might be financial ones. These rewards would extend beyond your work life to your personal life because they allow you to purchase goods and services such as tennis lessons, gym membership, or a new car.
Exhibit 6.1 lists many possible costs and benefits of leadership. With the list as a stimulus, make your own list of costs and benefits in your current situation. Modify or add items according to your own lights.
Of course, the sheer number of items on either side of your column will not determine whether costs outweigh benefits or vice versa. You will need to compare the lists and assign a level of importance to each item to determine which way the scale leans. Also, examine the list in a qualitative way. What stands out for you? Write your reactions to your cost-benefit list. Overall, how do the benefits of being a leader stack up against the costs?
Does your current situation meet your needs? Or does this process further clarify why you are adrift? If the latter, are there changes in your leadership role or setting that could set you on course again? Are there changes you want to make outside work? Might it help to change how you view some aspect of the situation? Discuss this list with a friend or significant other to gain additional clarification.
The five strategies explored in this section can help you better focus energy and time across the various arenas of your life. All are ways to align important aspects of your life—work, family, community, health, volunteering, and learning.
In What Happy Women Know (2008), Dan Baker, Cathy Greenberg, and Ina Yalof advise: "Clearly, there is no one right way to combine work and family life, only the way that's right for you. Ask yourself which combination does the best job of meeting most of your needs" (p. 146). Ellen Kossek and Brenda Lautsch (2008) reflect the same view with their notion of "flexstyles." You have to find your unique approach to managing the flexibility between work and life to help them fit better together.
We believe this is about finding within yourself your center of gravity—a holistic place where things come together, where the world is right for you now. This insight can emerge from a combination of your competencies, values, relationships, and experiences. It's also an insight you need to revisit and reconsider regularly as changes call for future adjustments.
Start by asking, "What isn't working, or what is missing in my life?" One executive we worked with said she was missing structure and organization (specifically in her client files). With many clients to manage, she was losing track of things that needed her attention. We set up an electronic update sheet for her to update electronic client records. The sheet has made updates routine, a single change she credits with reducing her overall stress.
Reflect on the following areas of your life: career, family, self, community, and spirituality. What is missing? What isn't working? Then use these tactics (and others) as starting points for ways to achieve more balance:
Integrate. Identify what you want and create a life space to accommodate it.
Narrow. Choose what's important, and eliminate the nonessential.
Moderate. Set limits on the time and energy you give to tasks and roles.
Sequence. Set priorities. Don't do everything at once.
Add resources. Get the people, systems, and money you need to take the pressure off you.
You may find that using one tactic is all you need. Alternatively, you may find that a combination of tactics works best. As you will see, each has many variations.
Integration is perhaps the most comprehensive approach to achieving relative balance. Its premise is that different needs and activities of your life can be interwoven into a synergistic whole. The idea is to identify what you really want in each area of your life and then design a life space in which you can accomplish your goals in an integrated way.
The antithesis of integration is partitioning, or creating or maintaining artificial barriers between areas of life. One person described trying to compartmentalize and the frustrating results that ensued:
What I tend to do is try to order my life—very, very structured. At 10:05 it's time to hug the wife. I find myself giving up spontaneity, trying to juggle conflicting needs. I get pretty creative: "Well, if I do this, if I schedule this meeting here and I rush over, and everything is right and I hit all the lights, then I can be at the dance recital." And so there's always tension and stress.
Integrating might initially sound like the opposite of balancing, since balance is often viewed as drawing lines among work, family, and personal life. When you begin to integrate, the lines become blurred. In our view, the blurring can be helpful for balance. Rigidly compartmentalizing is often counterproductive. Integration can help ease boundaries that you set. For example, you can work at home with your family nearby instead of at the office. Bring the kids to work one day. Make personal phone calls at work during lunch hour, or combine paid work trips with personal vacations. Other ideas include doing community service with your family, asking your family to join you on your morning run, or sitting by a pool while you work.
Employees and employers are now knocking down these false barriers. Boundaries can be flexible, and one can choose when to overlap. It may make sense to bring your family along on a business trip and take small excursions in your free time. We know of some women who travel with a small child and a caregiver so that they can have evenings with the child and not agonize about being away.
Of course, integration is not without problems. In trying to meet two needs with one solution, we may not meet both or even either to anyone's satisfaction. Bringing a child on a business trip may work better for a parent who works outside the home than for a child accustomed to receiving a parent's undivided attention during the day.
Consider these questions as you reflect on using an integrating strategy:
Which boundaries would you like to soften or blend?
Where do you partition your life?
What types of integration have you already tried, and what have been the results?
Are there any areas of your life that could become more integrated?
How might this contribute to your life satisfaction?
How might both sides be given more benefit?
We can do only so much at any point in time. Who among us doesn't know someone who is trying to do too much or who has felt overwhelmed by all those top-level commitments we view as nonnegotiable? Narrowing the range of what's important may be the key to better balance.
Narrowing means deciding to offload a bunch of tasks, goals, relationships, and expectations. We all need to clean our mental closets once in a while. We do this most often at major transitions (for example, key birthdays, relocations, promotions) and at times of serious difficulty (for example, severe criticism or failure, family trouble, illness). The commitments that survive the cleaning then become more important, more manageable, and easier to integrate.
Narrowing can happen at deeper levels too. Some people stay single partly so that they can devote more of their life to their work. Some marry but elect not to have children. In many marriages, one partner forgoes personal ambitions and a full-time career so that the other partner can take on bigger work challenges.
Choices can be made in other areas as well. It may be important to attend religious services, but that doesn't mean you have to accept a lay leadership position. Perhaps it's ideal to get to the gym five times a week, but a treadmill workout at home two or three times a week may have to do. A promotion to vice president of international sales might be nice, but it may not fit with everything else that's going on in your life.
One executive explained to us how he has managed to narrow his commitments: "I've tried to cut down on a lot of things in my life, try to spend time on the things that are most important to me, and consciously try to say, 'Well, gee, is that really that big a deal?' If it's not, I just say no, refuse to do it, and that allows me to have enough time to do the things that are most important to me."
The narrowing strategy focuses on making only commitments that you can keep. Doing things well may be more important than taking on work that pushes you to your limits.
As you think about narrowing, consider these questions:
What are your most important commitments?
What commitments do you maintain beyond their real degree of importance to you?
Which of your tasks, goals, relationships, and expectations, and those of others in your purview, can you set aside or even discard?
Where can you commit more fully by spreading yourself over fewer tasks?
Moderating expectations is another way of honoring commitments, especially when you can't drop any of them. "Everything in moderation" in this case means spending the right amount of time in each area of life, not looking for perfection. Must the report be perfect? Must your child's birthday party have clowns and storytellers?? Must you take the lead on every project?
The same executive we quoted previously about narrowing had this to say about moderating:
I have an agreement with my wife that I will not work later than 6:00 in the evening, and I live by that 99.9 percent of the time. I do come in [to work] early in the morning, but we're OK with that because it doesn't take away from the family. As early as I get out, I usually go to bed fairly early. But I seldom take work home. When I have a project I need to work on over the weekend—which is very, very rare—I'll come in the office early Saturday or Sunday and plug away and get home midmorning or by lunch time. Then the rest of the day is committed to the family. I think that has had a tremendous effect on the home life.
Some people unfortunately assume that those who seem to balance work and nonwork activities successfully are not fully committed, dedicated members of the corporate team—and perhaps they are even freeloaders who are milking more from the organization than they are giving back. But as you now know from research we have cited, managers and leaders who maintain good roles outside work often perform better on the job than those who maniacally work, work, work.
We suggest that you identify and invest in the specific combination of roles that enhances your psychological well-being, self-awareness, and work effectiveness. And as you invest in these roles, don't assume that you have to fulfill every one at the same level. Think about what is good enough.
As you reflect on moderating, consider these questions:
Do you have too many salient commitments?
Can you scale back on the time you devote to each?
Are your or others' expectations about you too high in some areas right now?
What might be more realistic?
How might you change your expectations of all that has to be accomplished?
This strategy says, "Yes, you can have it all [or almost all], but not all at once!" Sequencing doesn't mean entirely giving up on options but rather deciding which things to do first. One executive we talked with takes a seasonal perspective: "I've always said that September and October are bad family months because I'm so busy at work. November and December are great family months because I'm not so busy at work. So the family understands what's going on."
If you take a proactive approach to planning how you will attend to your priorities across weeks and months, you will recognize that not everything has to be done at once. However, sequencing carries some risks. Putting something off until later may mean you'll never get to it. It may be superseded by a new stream of high priorities, illness, or something else. It's also possible that what looks so important today will look less so later on.
Many organizations start each year's budget discussion with a long wish list of new ventures, capital projects, staffing additions, and other desired goals. As they get down to discussing strategy and reality, the list gets a lot shorter (a narrowing strategy). Then the priorities that are left can be sequenced throughout the year so that limited resources can be applied at the right time.
As you turn to the role of sequencing in your life, reflecting on these questions will point you in the right direction:
What work and personal goals would you put on your list of top priorities?
Which few goals really require the most thought and effort now, ahead of all the others?
In what order would you tackle these priorities?
Which ones must be done first in order to be able to accomplish the others?
What will be the benefits to you and others from sequencing these tasks?
If the commitments are important and can't realistically be dropped, moderated, or postponed, add resources—for example:
Get a bigger budget.
Add staff—permanent or temporary, perfect or otherwise—at work.
Align with people who have what you need.
Share resources with colleagues.
Get rid of impediments and obstacles.
Free up underused resources.
Hire others to assist with personal tasks: cleaning the house, babysitting, mowing the lawn, and so on.
If some of these are unavailable, look to others. If times are lean, think about trading services or resources rather than buying. This might not only help you free up your own time but also provide benefits to others. The real question is how you use resources to help you in all areas and not just to do a better job at work:
What additional resources could relieve your stress or help you accomplish your work faster? Where would you apply them, and why?
Which resources in the list above have you used recently? Did they work?
What other means could you use to improve how you juggle your multiple priorities?
We know that using the right strategies to deal with the conflicts and tensions of a busy life is no easy task. Circumstances are constantly changing, and thus adjustments will need to be made on a regular basis. In order to increase your effectiveness as a leader, continue to try different strategies to find the right combination or recipe that works for you.
This chapter drew connections between the worlds of work and personal life. It also looked at five basic strategies for achieving balance: integrating, narrowing, moderating, sequencing, and adding resources. We hope these strategies help you better manage the work of leadership, get you out of drift, or even help you to take on more leadership in your life.
Think about your responses to the questions posed throughout this chapter. Now reflect on the following questions to see what else you might uncover about reducing the stress that comes as you seek to balance work and personal life:
How would you fully describe your own tensions and conflicts of balance?
If you were able to lead your life in an ideal way, what would it look like?
What assumptions are preventing you from making progress?
Who do you know who has found a way to manage balance effectively? What could that person share that might help you?
What tactics will you try? Is there anything standing in the way of starting to use these tactics today or tomorrow?
The final chapter of this book will help you synthesize and consolidate your work from earlier chapters in the book. It will also help you consider the implications for future decisions you make as a leader.