7

Let Go of the Idea of Balance

An HBR IdeaCast Interview with Stewart D. Friedman and Alyssa F. Westring

Quick Takes

CURT NICKISCH: This is HBR IdeaCast. I’m Curt Nickisch. When you try to balance the needs of a partner, children, a demanding boss—and even your own high bar of achievement—it can feel like you are always disappointing someone.

Work and parenting, say today’s guests, don’t need to be that way. In fact, making key decisions in your career, as a leader at work, can also guide you in the way you parent—and those choices can strengthen all aspects of your life.

Our guests are Stewart Friedman, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School, and Alyssa Westring, a management professor at the Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University. Together they wrote the book Parents Who Lead: The Leadership Approach You Need to Parent with Purpose, Fuel Your Career, and Create a Richer Life.

Stewart and Alyssa, both of you, despite being at different places in your careers and parenting lives, look at parenting as a source of power—that parenting can actually enhance your leadership abilities at work and the other way around. Why do you think of it that way?

ALYSSA WESTRING: I think it’s important to see being a parent as an asset that you can bring to work and as something that makes you more fully you, through which you can live your values and bring them to all parts of your life. Feeling proactive is another way of feeling powerful, in that you’re not just at the mercy of your situation, that you have the ability to make choices for yourself, and to think about things and to talk about things in a way that doesn’t just leave you responding to whichever person—boss, spouse, or child—who puts the most pressure on you.

I think a lot of us want to get out of that space where we’re just putting out fires and whichever fire that is burning the brightest is the one we deal with. Our approach invites people to take a step back and to say, “What do I want this to look like? I’m not just reacting to the world that I’m in. How do I take that power that’s available to me and use it?” People don’t really see that they have that power.

CN: How do you get that power when you are in a place that you feel like you just have to keep up with everything? Or are there times when you’re going to have to give your children more and work less—a lean-out type of job, maybe—and other times when you really have to lean in and maybe get some support from others because you just can’t do both? How do you step back from that?

STEWART FRIEDMAN: Well, it’s not easy. Most people go through the daily grind without having anyone to help them take a moment to step back and reflect on who they are and what their purpose is and what their values are and what they stand for and the kind of world that they’re trying to create.

What we have found in our work together is that when you help people articulate their values to craft a vision that is shared within the partnership, as well as with others, they feel a greater sense of control because they have a sense of direction and purpose.

CN: Do you find that they make very different choices once they do that?

AW: Yeah, we’ve seen everything ranging from really large changes in life to tiny tweaks.

SF: Some people do make some big changes. But most of the work that people undertake in our program is in smaller steps. Those can be really big in terms of how they affect your mindset, how you feel. What we hear when we talk to people about what’s it like being a working parent, they say, overwhelmed, out of control . . .

AW: Stuck, exhausted . . .

SF: . . . isolated, and without enough of a sense of peace and harmony in their lives. So by stepping back—and it’s work, it doesn’t come free, you’ve got to take the time to reflect, to talk, to write—you gain a greater sense of control.

CN: You talk about harmony more than balance, and you even call work-life balance a myth. Explain the difference.

AW: What it really comes down to is that the idea of balance puts people in this mindset where they can only see the trade-offs and that to be better at work they have to do worse as a parent or give up something in their community life or sleep less. There’s nothing inherently wrong with thinking about trade-offs, but when you’re stuck in that mindset you fail to see other opportunities to make things better.

SF: When you think win-lose, then somebody is going to lose. And what we help people do is to see the possibility of four-way wins for your family, which means making a change that’s within your scope, something that you have control over, that you can do together that’s going to make things better for you, for your kids, for your careers, and for your community.

CN: What are some specific ways you can interact with your children that mirror how you interact with people at work?

AW: I like to use the example of a micromanager at work who’s overseeing every single thing that you do, watching how you spend your time, how you spend your energy, and correcting every little mistake. I think as parents we often default to that same behavior at home—you have to get up, you have to do your homework, you have to do this, you have to do that—and we forget about the why.

At work, a great leader would say: Here’s our vision, Here are our values. Here’s why this strategic change is important. As parents, we forget all of that, and we just say: Get this done. Get this done. Get this done. It takes away the fun, but also, for our children, it fails to explain why we’re asking these things of them. Why is it important to do your homework? Why, as parents specifically, do we care about the investment that you’re making in your community or volunteering? So, it’s not just: Do this; do that. It’s act like a leader as a parent.

To root your interactions with all the people who matter to you, including and especially your children, in what you stand for, what you care about, what your values are, the vision of the world you’re trying to create: That’s what effective leaders do. That’s what parents as leaders do.

CN: How do you align the goals you have as a parent with the goals you might have at work? It might seem like getting a promotion is totally different from helping your child get over an emotional hurdle.

SF: One of the families we write about in the book decided to do what they called a “Hike and Pick” experiment, that is, taking some time together, hiking through their neighborhood, and picking up trash. Because the parents had decided that part of what they wanted to convey to their kids—the values that they wanted to transmit through how they were living together and the things they were doing together—was to care for the environment. So they decided to do this on a regular basis, and they felt really good about spending quality time together out there in the world, exercising by walking but also doing something to make their world a little bit better.

CN: The same way a good leader would not just cut a check to some corporate social responsibility program but actually do something, find out what is meaningful to people in the company, and get more people involved.

SF: The dad in this case worked in land management, so he knew something about the community and was able to speak to that as part of his experience with his family.

Sometimes it’s a matter of simply seeing what you do in a fresh light by shifting the frame on how you think about your work. There was one pharmaceutical executive who came to the realization that what he was doing with his work was creating health. That was something he wanted his family, as well as the people in his organization, to have more top of mind to understand who he was and what he was doing with his work. By conveying this message, creating health for other people became a source of inspiration not just for his organization but also to his family, and that shifted how his kids saw him.

CN: What do people struggle with as they try to think about leading at home the same way they lead at work?

AW: I think they struggle the same way people trying to create change at work struggle, which is with a fear of change. If I shift things, they think, they might get worse. People feel like they have to be perfect, like they have to do everything 100%, like they need to be the best employee and the perfect parent. Letting go of those things or trying to rethink them—it’s scary. People grip their old habits more tightly when they think something bad could happen.

When we’re working with parents, we’re constantly practicing getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. The changes they’re making don’t have to be permanent. You can try something and it might not work, and you can always go back. Getting people comfortable with taking some calculated, intelligent risks with how they live their lives is a constant in the work that we do.

CN: Do you have a favorite first step? Or small step? I realize everybody’s family and work situation is different, but do you have something that you like to suggest to people if they’re just trying to get a sense of where to start?

AW: One is the idea of being present, being where you are. When you’re at work, take a small step to be more focused on what you need to be accomplishing rather than dealing with a hundred different things at once or putting out fires.

Same thing at home. Parents are really worried about how much screen time their kids are getting, but when we ask parents to talk to their kids, the kids are really upset about how much screen time the parents are getting. Think about why you are always on your phone. Could you put it away for even a few minutes to be really in that moment with your kids? You don’t need to spend five hours a day having time with your kids if you have 20 minutes of real quality conversation or read them a book, really connecting on a deeper level.

CN: The same way somebody might go into the office and spend a half hour just thinking to themselves what they need to do to make this a successful week applies to home life. That same kind of good-practice business thinking can be used, where every Sunday night they’re just mapping out: What do I need to do for a successful week with the family? Just applying good business lessons at home can yield big results.

AW: Exactly. We have worked with couples who have a logistics planning meeting on Sunday night, when they go through the calendar and they say: Here’s what’s happening. Who is going to do what? What are our responsibilities? It takes the pressure of coordinating everything in the midst of the rest of the week. Just like you would do if you were leading a team, you wouldn’t just wait till the moment to lead. You would do it in advance.

CN: I know families that have used planning and project management software to take care of home stuff. Sometimes people feel sheepish about it because they’re like, I’m running my family like a business.

AW: If you say I’m running my family like a leader who has a tool, maybe that’s a slightly different way of thinking about it. It’s less cold.

SF: Picking up on the idea of the Sunday night conversation, one family simply did a round with each member of the family talking about the biggest challenge they were facing that week and what help they needed to meet that challenge. Just a 20-, 25-minute conversation over the weekend was a way to create more connection, more love, and support, but also more effectiveness in the different parts of the family members’ lives.

Adapted from HBR IdeaCast episode 734, “Working Parents, Let Go of the Idea of Balance,” March 31, 2020.