If you want to survive in today’s marketplace you have to balance self awareness with the needs of others: if you make it all about you, you’ll miss what is impacting your customers, suppliers, co-workers and employers. If you make it all about them, at the expense of your personal or professional well being, they may be better served but you won’t have the emotional energy to sustain those essential relationships.
Work life balance has become a catch all phrase that is used so often we fail to realize that it means different things to different people.
For some, it describes a necessary separation or break between what happens at work and what happens at home. It’s less about balance and more about boundaries: setting them, keeping them, and having them respected by those on each side of the equation.
The people for whom the gap is more important than the balance beam that bridges it, are typically described by those who know them best as almost unrecognizable when they change hats and the places they hang them. The people so described typically agree:
I’m totally different at home than at work. At work I’m tightly wound, everything has to be the way I want it or I get undone. I’m more focused on projects than people, despite the fact that I get my feelings hurt really easily when people are rude or dismissive of me. I can’t say that I like what I do. It’s more that I respect what I do and where I work because I know that without that income and those people I can’t live the life I love, at home.
When I’m home I’m laid back, a so-so housekeeper and a really good friend. I love to socialize, for my kids to have their friends over, for everyone to feel comfortable and enjoy themselves. Once in a great while I’ll invite someone from work and when they see me they think they’ve stepped into an alternate universe. “Why aren’t you like this at work?” they ask. I figure they’d like to add… ‘because we’d like you better’. The only response I have is, “I wouldn’t know how.”
Work life balance can be something quite different for those who want to bring the whole person to work. For them, it’s important to be where people do the right things for the right reasons while treating others as they wish to be treated.
They prefer attunement to alignment, consensus to dissension, and team work, team play, and having each others back, to me, mine, and get out of my way. They want to hit targets, make budget , and make money, but not at the expense of family and a decent night’s sleep. They expect actions to have consequences, strategy to precede tactics and Plan A’s to have Plan B’s.
That’s the balance they seek and although they might not get all of what they want and are willing to give, they’ll narrow the gap because they believe life is too short to wish for and work for anything less.
