Qualtrics Survey Solutions. Work + Home + Community + Self. Take an assessment—produced in partnership with Qualtrics—of your Total Leadership skills, and learn how to strengthen them and about people who exemplify them.
Overcommitted. Distracted. Stressed out. Stretched too thin. This is how many of us describe ourselves today. A commitment to better “work/life balance” isn’t the solution. Such integration starts with embracing three key principles—be real, be whole, and be innovative—that I described in a 2008 HBR article, “Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life.” Skills for Being Real For well over a decade I’ve run a program called Total Leadership that teaches the three principles to executives, MBA candidates, and many others.
Know what matters. The ability to do the first two things is especially crucial. A complementary exercise, called conversation starter, encourages people to embody values consistently. Balance is bunk. She could also see how just a few small changes in approach might create much more overlap. Skills for Being Whole. Reduce Stress by Pursuing Four-Way Wins. The pendulum is finally swinging back from the apogee of complete immersion in work as the business ideal.
A great hue and cry now strains to contain our out-of-control culture of overwork. 7 Policy Changes America Needs So People Can Work and Have Kids. We are in the midst of a revolution in gender roles, both at work and at home.
And when it comes to having children, the outlook is very different for those embarking on adulthood’s journey now than it was for the men and women who graduated a generation ago. I recently published research from the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, comparing Wharton’s Classes of 1992 and 2012. One of the more surprising findings is that the rate of Wharton graduates who plan to have children has dropped by about half over the past 20 years. It’s worth noting that these percentages are essentially the same for both men and women, both in 1992 and in 2012. Successfully Integrate Your Work, Home, Community, and Self. You can be a committed A-player executive, a good parent, an attentive spouse, and a healthy person with time for community engagement and hobbies.
How on earth do you do all that? Stop juggling and start integrating. Begin with a clear view of what you want from — and can contribute to — each domain of your life (work, home, community, and self). Carefully consider the people who matter most to you and the expectations you have of one another. Then experiment with some minor changes and see how they affect all four domains over a short period. If an experiment doesn’t work out in one or more areas, you can make adjustments or put an end to it, and little is lost. Skeptical? One of the best ways to address the incongruities that may surface via the assessment is to structure an experiment focused on improving your well-being and performance in all four domains of your life. David is a VP accountable for a multibillion-dollar P&L. So he devised an experiment. Men: Win at Work by Leaning In at Home. Research shows that many men want to have richer lives, with greater emotional engagement and joy in their family lives and bigger contributions to their households.
But they face substantial barriers at work, in their homes, and inside their own heads. Just as women need support from their organizations and their families to surmount the hurdles of fear and tradition, men need help in getting past the roadblocks that keep them from engaging more fully as caregivers and homemakers. And, of course, for women to advance in the world of work, men must advance in the world of home. The really good — seemingly paradoxical — news is that when men find smart, creative ways to “lean in” at home, they also perform better at work. This article shows how. Getting Past What Holds Men Back Traditional gender stereotypes are prisons for men too and hold many back from trying. We Are All Part of the Work/Life Revolution. The Twitterverse has been aflame with a lot of noise about Sheryl Sandberg, Anne Marie Slaughter, and Marissa Mayer.
But a lot of this talk is knee-jerk criticism that misses the big picture: our nation’s failure to address the issue of integrating work and the rest of life has finally emerged as a critical economic, social, political, and personal issue affecting not only women, but all of us, and it’s capturing deservedly serious attention and accelerating experimentation with new models in our brave new world. For the first time in the 25 years since I’ve been studying the intersection of work and life, it’s now front-page news and everyone has an opinion — because for the first time everyone feels that they have a stake and a voice. It’s no longer only a women’s issue. The key word there being heat; not light. Each is speaking out, on the basis of her experience, about why and how change must come. Let’s not lose the forest for the trees.