While the concept of “work-life balance” long has been discussed in organizational development contexts, the usefulness of the model and likelihood of achieving balance in this construct is widely debated. The idea has always challenged me personally. Not because I don’t believe in balance, but because my life has always benefited from bringing the different aspects within it closer together rather than further apart.
An alternative model to the idea of separating our professional and personal lives that I have developed is to pursue living “one life.” This means instead of upholding the rigid boundaries between work and life and managing the constant to and fro between the two, I try to find the connectedness between how I live, how I work, and how the two can benefit from the personal and professional learning that occur within each.
By acknowledging the interconnectedness between the personal and professional throughout my life and career, I have come to believe that there are deeply rooted lessons from family life that leaders can leverage in their work to create safe and nurturing environments for their people to learn and grow.
This approach lines up well with recent research from Leadership IQ regarding the benefits of employees spending quality time with their manager, just as families benefit from spending quality time together. According to Leadership IQ, “the optimal amount of time [employees should] spend interacting with [their] leader[s] is six hours” per week.
Which begs the question, how would we perform our roles differently if instead of titles such as presidents and managers, we considered ourselves patriarchs and matriarchs? Furthermore, what could change in how we work if there were more tenets of family life in our organizations?
Here are a few of the concepts I use to guide the connection between leading a successful family and leading successful teams and organizations:
1. Spend quality time together. Much in the same way that spending quality time together over family dinners and outings can have substantial benefits within the familial structure, it also can have the same benefits in work contexts. According to Leadership IQ, employees who get six hours per week with their managers are: 29 percent more inspired, 30 percent more engaged, 16 percent more innovative, and 15 percent more intrinsically motivated. With scheduling demands though, finding ways to get a cumulative six hours per week can be difficult.
Leadership Key: Be on the lookout for how you can maximize both large and small format meeting occasions from group sessions, to one-on-one settings, lunch meetings, and coffee breaks.
2. Communicate continually. Just like in family life, it is important that colleagues, managers, and teams communicate continually and effectively. Whether familial or collegial in nature, when we live and work in isolation, we don’t get the benefits that come from working together, supporting one another, and staying connected to what each is doing. Managers must ask if their teams are just sharing a workspace like roommates share living space, or are they using the shared space to increase communication and collaborate like a family?
Leadership Key: Similar to how parents model behavior they want to develop in their families, consider ways you can model the frequency and kind of communication you want to see from members of your team.
3. Appreciate one another’s differences. Even when a group of people is related by genetics, the differences between each individual are abundant and unique. As a father of four, I often have been struck by the different ways I have had to choose to navigate difficult conversations with each of my children, depending on the situation. I do this much as leaders must do when creating growth opportunities for different members of their team based on their strengths and weaknesses. Instead of letting teams become frustrated by differing working styles, leaders can breed appreciation among their employees for the unique things each person brings to the group.
Leadership Key: By helping your people heighten their self-awareness through development opportunities, so, too, will each person’s ability to appreciate differences increase.
At Insights Learning and Development, we ask our people to “bring their whole selves to work” because we want an authentic and transparent work environment that allows people to grow and become the best version of themselves. It’s not dissimilar to how I support my family, except in one context I’m CEO and in the other context I’m Dad. My hope is that other leaders can come to know that the true work-life balance comes from those roles coming closer together, not apart.
Following his first career in merchant banking as an analyst in London, Andy Lothian rediscovered his passion for people development, changed careers, and returned to his home town of Dundee in 1989, where he co-founded Insights Learning and Development with his father, Andi Lothian Senior. Since that time, Lothian has been living his passion to inspire and transform, individuals, teams, and organizations as Insights’ chief executive officer. Lothian is the author of several books and video and audio programs, including Insights Transformational Leadership, Building Successful Sales Relationships, Understanding People, and Managing Team Dynamics.
