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Work-Life Balance

Work-Life Balance – Transition

by Ron Potter February 19, 2010

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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Work-Life Balance – Time Management

by Ron Potter February 2, 2010

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):

Several years ago I learned some very interesting lessons about time management. I was working with a high level leadership team, all vice-presidents and above. While we were offsite spending time on leadership development issues one of the VP’s on the team finally stopped the process and said something like the following:

“Ron, we think all of these leadership issues you’re trying to teach us are wonderful and important, but until you help us with our time management problems, we can’t even think about putting more effort into improving our leadership skills. We’re all working at least 60 hours a week as it is. We’re destroying our health and our families. Help us with our time management first and then we’ll be ready to learn new leadership skills from you.”

He was right. They were worn out and suffering. I turned to a time management model put forth by Steven Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. In that book, Mr. Covey indicated that all of our time fits into quadrants of a two-by-two grid.

His premise was that once we fulfill all of the tasks in Quadrant I (both urgent and important) we tend to go on to tasks that fall primarily in Quadrant III (Urgent but not necessarily important).

I sent the team off to record where all of their time went over the next two weeks. When they returned with the record of approximately 120 hours each had expended over the last two weeks, we listed every activity for each participant on a flip chart and posted it on the wall. Then we went through a very interesting exercise. Line-item by line-item we went through each chart and identified into which quadrant it should be placed. A very interesting pattern began to emerge. On several of the line-items, the owner of the sheet would say that he/she had spend a number of hours producing a particular report (as an example) that was urgent but not important and they intended to stop performing that task in the future. However, once stated, there always seemed to be a challenge from the room. Someone would say, “If you don’t produce that report, I can’t get my job done. It must be placed in the important row.”

But, when we began to look into what data in the report was required, there often seemed to be a simple solution to the second persons needs that still eliminated the effort needed to produce the report (it’s on the web site, a quick email, it can be found in another location, etc.) The problem was solved and the bulk of the work eliminated.

Once we completed all of the “negotiations” around the room and everyone had agreed on the quadrants into which all work had been placed, a horrifying statistic emerged. Only 20% of all the work fell into the “Important” row. One VP hung his head and said:

“Do you mean to tell me that I just spend 24 hours of meaningful work over the last two weeks and all the rest was just thrashing?”

I’m afraid so.

The lessons that I have learned from this experience (conducted now several times) include:

It’s difficult (impossible) to determine on your own how much of your work falls into which quadrants. There is always someone else that needs to be brought into the negotiations.
It takes team support to stick with the decisions. Even after everyone agrees that you have some quadrant III work that can be dropped, there will be those who still want you to do it. It takes a team to help you say “no”.
If more than 70% of your work falls into quadrant I (both urgent and important), you’re headed for burn out and failure somewhere down the line because you are not doing enough important but not urgent work (prevention, production capability, relationship building, big picture thinking, etc.)

The links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the FTC’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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Blog Work-Life Balance

Work-Life Balance – Email Boundaries

by Ron Potter December 9, 2009

Image Source: Jypsygen, Creative Commons

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):

I have to share a story one of my colleagues told me about Work-Life Balance (Connectedness). She is working with a client that has a culture that is starting to burn people out. No Work-Life Balance. Another consultant had suggested to the leadership team that the situation was getting bad enough that they should do something to help people regain some balance. So the leadership team put out a memo that no one was required to answer e-mails after 8:00pm.

WHAT?

How about a memo that says everyone is required to stop sending e-mails after 6:00pm? No one is going to put their head on the chopping block in a fast paced culture and not read e-mails after eight. But, if you put the restriction on the sending end then the culprit clearly stands out. And my guess is the leaders are the culprits.

I started working with the head of a large division (400+ people) several years ago and he had a reputation of being a hard task-master, expecting people to work above and beyond the call of duty. One of the first things I observed is that he would send emails any time of the day or night and any time on the weekend. His response to the situation is almost identical to the explanation I always get. He would say

“I don’t expect people to respond to me immediately, that’s just my work style. As soon as I think of something I’ll write an email (sometimes to himself) and send it off immediately. I don’t expect my people to respond at night or over the weekend, that’s just my crazy work habits.”

The first thing I asked him to do was learn how to use the delay-send function in Outlook and not let evening emails go out until early the next morning or weekend emails go out until early Monday morning. Within weeks people were making comments to me like:

“I don’t know what you’ve done but things sure are calmer around here these days. It’s a much better place to work.”

Email can be a great tool. Just be careful how it’s being used and pay attention to the unintended consequences.

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Blog Work-Life Balance

Work-Life Balance – Connectedness 24/7

by Ron Potter November 21, 2009

Image Source: Jed Sullivan, Creative Commons

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):

I started my first real job in 1969. That means that my working life has now spanned 40 years. That 40 years has roughly been distributed with 10 years in the engineering/construction business, 10 years in the software industry, and the last 20 years as a consultant to a whole range of industries including pharmaceutical, auto, food, high-tech and others. And I must admit that I don’t see people working any harder or longer hours today than I have at any time over the last 40 years. So why is there so much talk about the lack of Work-Life-Balance?

Connectedness!

In the 70’s we communicated by phone or fax. Think about a vacation in Hawaii when the only mode of communication was phone or fax. Not much communication happened with the east coast in particular. It was a real vacation.
I carried my first Compaq “luggable” computer in 1983 (28 pounds). I used email for the first time in 1985. I still remember the day I sent an email to a client in Scotland and he responded within the hour… from Japan! Astounding!
The internet? That didn’t really happen until the mid 1990’s.
I bought one of the very first Blackberry’s in 1999 when they had been on the market for only a few months. It took 5 years for them to sell their millionth Blackberry. Think about that, it was only five years ago that there were a million Blackberrys and virtually no other smart phones. Today, iPhone alone sells nearly 5 million a quarter. And don’t get me started about Facebook and Twitter.
We never get away from it. 24/7 we’re connected. Maybe it’s because I spent much of my career without all of this modern connectedness that I’m a little better at managing it rather than it managing me (my wife will laugh at that statement). But, different than many of my younger colleagues, I believe it is ok to shut it off, not answer that phone, don’t respond instantly to that incoming message. I believe it’s because we don’t shut off this connectedness in the evening when we should be focused on family, or weekends when we should be focused on R&R and getting that job-list done or on vacation when we should be re-creating that our work-life balance seems out of whack.

Don’t get me wrong, I know there are many of you out there working long and hard through difficult times. But this has been going on forever. The difference today is that we never get away from it. Not for a minute, not for a day, and certainly not for a week or more.
Think about it and let me know what you think or what your experiences have been.
I’m going to follow with a few more blogs about Work-Life-Balance. Besides this 24/7 connectedness, I see a few other issues that seem to impact our sense of balance.

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