The Importance of Work-Life Balance for Leaders
Those who ignore their own work-life balance do so at great personal peril. Leaders who undermine their team members’ balance put the organization at risk. Balance is required to produce the best long-term results for a team.
What Does it Mean to be in Balance?
Balance is sometimes scoffed at as an excuse to minimize effort and time at work. Outdated thought processes viewed favorably the ‘corporate warrior’ who was dedicated to their job, worked crazy hours and bled the company colors. However, it is now clear that balance is needed for the benefit of individuals as well as the benefit of the organization.
Work-life balance simply means to have a harmonious relationship between work and out-of-work (personal) life. What is work-related in today’s reality is blurred due to factors such as remote working and social networks or friendships at work. An individual’s work may also offer great rewards in terms of self-purpose or actualization. One person’s balancing point therefore will vary from another’s.
The assumption is that work will interfere with your private life, health, and well-being if mechanisms do not exist to create boundaries that are generally respected. Given this, work-life balance can be defined as a sustainable work pattern that maintains general health and well-being. The measure of success in balancing might be that work is not interfering with health, emotional well-being, or ‘reasonable’ activities outside of work.
Balance Optimizes Effectiveness and Efficiency
A well-balanced system will be both effective and efficient. Attaining a work-life balance will optimize our personal effectiveness and efficiency while also sustaining an appropriate effort level at work for the long term. A team of members who are each in balance will yield more predictable and sustainable results.
Efficiency and effectiveness require maintenance and reinvestment. We know this from what we see in business. This fact is especially evident in manufacturing facilities. It is quite possible (and far too often a deliberate practice) to defer major maintenance beyond when it should be done, to reap short-term benefits.
Take for example a car engine. We can decide to skip the oil changes. In the short term, we may seem to benefit from this deferral. Our car continues to operate normally and we avoid the trips to the auto shop and the maintenance expense. We happily repurpose that time and money for other activities. Then, one day, usually when it is most inconvenient and snowing, our car decides to stop working. We’ve run the oil dry and the engine has seized, or debris has gotten into some critical area because we didn’t flush it out with an oil change when we should have. Now we have a much greater repair cost and associated downtime while our car gets repaired. This wreaks havoc with our schedule and we get grumpy (made worse by the need to shovel snow). Our efficiency and effectiveness just got trashed as a direct cause of our short-term decision to defer the maintenance.
Guess what? Our bodies work the same way!
How do I Balance my Life?
Our bodies and minds require ongoing maintenance and reinvestment to ensure they stay effective and efficient. This means eating a healthy and balanced diet, exercising, getting plenty of sleep, spending time to nurture relationships, finding joy and purpose, practicing relaxation techniques, and avoiding destructive habits.
Attaining work-life balance is making sure that you maintain your engine! If you defer the required exercise and sleep time or eat garbage and use stimulants to keep you going, your engine will fail. It is not a question of ‘if.’ It is only a question of ‘when.’ When we take the deferral of health-maintenance path, we are able for a short period to put more effort into our work – but soon our effectiveness and efficiency will drop, or outright fail, and we will not be able to sustain the effort. In fact, our performance at both work and home will suffer.
If we measure ‘performance’ at work on a very short time scale – like this month or quarter – then it will be clear that those employees who are out of balance and working 80 hours/week may indeed be the highest performers. Many corporate cultures will reward these behaviors. However, they are deferring maintenance and burning out. Their performance is not sustainable and the rewards are misplaced.
If we measure performance over a longer time, working 80 hours/week is not sustainable for most individuals. Performance drops sharply when the wall is hit (when the car engine fails), and the average performance over the extended timeframe is less than that of the person who has been in balance for the entire period.
We cannot pretend that time-frames do not exist when extra effort at work is needed. These periods do occur and must be dealt with. However, if these become the norm with no off-setting rebalancing time, we are headed for trouble.
It is up to leaders to set the example and ‘enforce’ reasonable balance by their team members. Skipping vacations, coming to work when sick, and spending extensive overtime at the office for extended times should not be demonstrated by, nor tolerated by the boss. One way that leaders can establish and reinforce the expectation that all team members try to balance is to be empathetic and listen to the concerns of the team. Get to know the team. Understand when they need a break and encourage breaks when needed.
Conclusion
Ultimately, we all decide whether we want to have healthy habits or not. Part of that decision process is determining how to balance our work and personal life. There are situations where balance may not be possible – in which case you need to ask yourself ‘What is the cost of continuing to operate this way?’ In general, though, we can make decisions to bring our lives into more balance and to improve our habits with small changes that are within our control. Much of the work-life balance boils down to taking personal accountability to do the things we know we should be doing and avoiding the things we know we shouldn’t be doing.
Next time you find yourself still working 12 hours into the work day, or forcing your team to do so, ask yourself “Is this behavior sustainable, and is the benefit worth the true cost?” Balance is a critical element of long-term success.
