Change Maven Musings: Is Work-Life Balance B.S. for Leaders?
Real stories. Real people. Real change.
I was on a call recently where we were encouraged to share some “real talk” about what was on our minds. I’m always curious to see how honest these discussions get because we all go in with our safe-to-talk-about topics and some idea of the line to which we’ll venture in sharing those topics, depending on who’s in the group and how deep we’re all willing to go.
I decided to bring up the much-talked-about-but-secretly-dreaded-topic of work-life balance. I approached it as more of a “I’m curious to learn the point of view on this,” and what fascinates me is that even after the roller coaster ride of the past three years, there’s still an expectation peeking around the edges about how the demands of the job may call for us to work longer hours than we want to (or can), to not honor our boundaries when the work calls for it (but we don’t actually say that), which shows just how deeply ingrained grind and productivity culture remains within our workplaces. Still.
Even after the large-scale, massive disruption of a global pandemic where the veil was lifted and we saw all of the ugly that was underneath, this is still a common expectation about work that we don’t question as much as we should. Is it just easier to let the veil fall back again and cover up what we saw? To try to make the seen unseen again for comfort, convenience or “old times” sake? For some, I think that answer is a strong “yes.” They also seem to be the ones pushing for a full return to the office, wanting to be done with the hybrid experiment and leave COVID fully in the rearview window. Want to be surrounded by their teams so they have physical evidence that they are leaders. And I get it. We all have muscle memory for that mode of operating. To work without question, to sacrifice our precious time and energy without consciously considering the holistic cost to self, health, family. It’s all many of of have ever known. Yet, it got disrupted in a major way. And we’re not going back to it as readily as some of us may have thought.
For others, the answer is a resounding “no,” as the flexibility, the better balance, and overall acknowledgement of life outside of work have been a welcome respite from what we’ve always known to be the mode of how we “do” work. Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone or to all situations, and we have much work yet to do around improving access, options, support, and the overall conversation around work. And yet, I’m curious to see where these thought leaders, influencers, and younger folk in general take this fresh perspective in the months and years to come. I know I’ve appreciated how it’s brought more harmony to my own mode of working and influenced my decision-making, calling me to more consciously consider how/where I bring better balance into all the domains of my life.
I recently finished a book by the founder of the Nap Ministry, Tricia Hersey, called Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, and it’s disrupting how I view rest, what being “unplugged” truly means, and how unstructured time is necessary not to just survive the grind culture we all live in, but to thrive and embrace our DreamSpace where imagination and creativity can run free a bit. Rest for me doesn’t mean taking a nap in the middle of the day. It means having uninterrupted time first-thing so I can have a cup of coffee (I just joined the Writers’ Hour online writing group!), write some thoughts down that were swirling around in my sleep, and get a sense of how I’d like to focus my energy for the day. Rest means movement: walks, yoga, occasional runs, swinging kettlebells. Rest means connecting with people I love and care about instead of withdrawing into myself and enduring things that are hard on my own. Rest is more books, less social media. Rest is compromising less on what’s important to me so I can people-please and meet someone else’s timelines and expectations instead of my own. Rest is so much more than sleeping or sitting down, although I’m intrigued by the idea - of having the unstructured time - to sit and sip a beverage of my choice slowly on the patio, taking in the banal life scenes of the everyday. Maybe that was the secret to the longevity of my grandparents and great-grandparents: they knew when to be done for the day and sit their asses down and take in the world around them for a bit. People-pace…not machine-pace.
As a leader, I don’t subscribe to the high efficiency and productivity at all costs model of work. That model often has a lot of external carrots dangling around your head, rooted in fears of getting a bad performance review, not getting your smidge of an annual pay increase, or losing your job in a company-wide restructure. I also don’t subscribe to the mode of working where how booked you are on your calendar, how late you’re working/online, or how many projects you’re on at one time makes you any more or less valuable as a leader. I’ve seen too many ill effects of this play out in chronic burnout, excessive negativity/complaining, high resistance to change, breakdowns in mental health, breakups in relationships, including my own.
It just doesn’t seem worth it .
I see this extreme productivity/grind culture mentality as a red flag because even though we may say things like, I promote and support work-life balance/mental health or family-comes-first, our actions undermine those statements. Employees - which is all of us, no matter the role we have at our organization - go off of what they see happening, not what they are hearing in the moment. Character and actions count, and I, madam, am observing your every move and planning my own counter moves accordingly.
I am looking to connect more to the heart, to what I feel, and to leading people - living, breathing, feeling human beings - from that place. I want to live out work-life harmony, to state it openly as a desire of mine, and to let the chips fall where they may as I pursue that state. Because what’s the alternative? To be perpetually exhausted? To be running late to everything, expecting the people who were on time to pause, give you a moment to catch up, while losing precious time together and whatever rapport or progress made before you arrived? To not be present with people, not connecting the right or needed dots so it always feels a little scattered and confusing? Which has the unintended - but very real - effect of your team engaging less because they don’t want to be the sudden focus of your scatteredness, to absorb the impact of the balls you dropped, feel the effects of your lack of presence?
Let’s change the conversation to one of work-life harmony; here are some questions to get you started:
How/where am I feeling weighted down in my life? What’s one way I can lighten the load (be specific)?
What does work-life harmony mean to me? What does it look like/feel like (think of 1-3 specific examples)?
Who is someone I admire for their ability to have work-life harmony? What do they do/say to keep that a priority? Can I set up time with them over the next month to ask they how they do it and get some ideas on how to do it in my own life (send that text! send that email! reach over social media! I guarantee they’ll want to connect and chat a bit about this)?