Why are so many feeling that our Work-Life Balance is out of whack? In this series, I will explore four categories of issues that contribute to the feeling (and actuality):
Another moment in our career lives when things seem to get out of balance is during times of transition or transformation.
Transition
I was working with a client recently who may be one of the smartest and quickest people I work with. She had recently (about 8 weeks ago) taken over a new division within the company that was going to require the exercising of new leadership and management muscles that she hadn’t developed in her previous assignment. When I met with her she was expressing a great deal of personal frustration that she still didn’t know how to answer questions in certain areas and more importantly, didn’t know if a certain question or piece of information might be critical or just another piece of information.
During times of transition there seems to be two time frames that exhibit some consistency. The first is that it just takes about three months for you to get a handle on a new job. My client had stepped into her new role at the beginning of November. So, while she had been in the job for two months, with all of the holidays and vacation time taken during that time of year, she had really only experienced about a month of actual job time. I encouraged her to keep her frustration in check for a couple of more months and felt sure she would be feeling better about her job knowledge by the end of February.
The second time frame to pay attention to is something called the “window of opportunity.” The window usually opens about nine months into a new assignment and closes again at about the one-year tenure. If possible I recommend that new leaders not make any major changes (people, organization, vision, mission, etc.) before the window opens up at about nine months. If a leader makes these major moves before about nine months, people often wonder if they gave the incumbent person, system or process time to prove themselves. If the leader is still running things as usual after a year, people also wonder what new value the leader brought to the position. Now, there are always exceptions to this rule but if you’re feeling the stress of a new assignment, you might evaluate what are realistic expectations at this point in the transition.
Transformation
Transformation happens when you or someone else (or outside condition) is forcing a major transformation change on how work gets done. If you are the one being affected by the transformation, there is always the natural fear that you won’t have the ability or skills to perform and thrive in the new environment. This is the time to devout yourself to being open and learning what the new requirements and expectations are going to be. It is not the time to complain or lament about the way things used to be. Change happens. Get ahead of it.
If you’re the one driving the transformation, one thing I have always observed is that you will come to a point where it feels like failure. The new environment or approach hasn’t taken hold, the new vision or expectations are not emerging, or people are complaining and wanting to go back to the old way of doing things. To get through this one, turn to chapter 16 of my book “Trust Me” that’s titled Endurance. If you’ve taken all of the right steps (previous chapters) and know you’re headed in the right direction, stick with it. It’s always the darkest before the dawn.
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