boundaries

Clayton Christensen, the Harvard business professor and author of The Innovator's Dilemma, was once asked to make... a sacrifice. At the time, he was working at a management consulting firm, and one of the partners came to him and told him he needed to come in on Saturday to help work on a project. Clay simply responded: "Oh, I am so sorry. I have made the commitment that every Saturday is a day to be with my wife and children."

The partner, displeased, stormed off, but later he returned and he said: "Clay, fine. I have talked with everyone on the team and they said they will come in on Sunday instead. So I will expect you to be there." Clay sighed and said: "I appreciate you trying to do that. But Sunday will not work. I have given Sunday to God and so I won't be able to come in." If the partner was frustrated before, he was much more so now.

Still, Clay was not fired for standing his ground, and while his choice was not popular in the moment, ultimately he was respected for it. The boundaries paid off.

Clay recalls: "That taught me an important lesson. If I had made an exception then I might have made it many times." Boundaries are a little like the walls of a sandcastle. The second we let one fall over, the rest of them come crashing down.

Greg McKeown

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. Crown/Archetype. 2020. p.165.

all of myself

 

I didn't start out with the goal of devoting all of myself to my job. It crept in over time. Each year that went by, slight modifications became the new normal. First I spent a half-hour on Sunday organizing my e-mail, to-do list, and calendar to make Monday morning easier. Then I was working a few hours on Sunday, then all day. My boundaries slipped away until work was all that was left. 

Erin Callan

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. Crown/Archetype. 2020. p.52

questions to understand culture

Culture is felt through the behaviors that are reinforced or discouraged on a day-to-day basis on teams. If you want to get a sense of the story of the leader and team’s culture, use detailed questions. You will get a much better sense based on the responses, especially if the leader struggles to think of what to say. If you are a manager, prepare to answer detailed questions that illustrate your team’s culture...

Examples:

• Tell me about a time a team member changed your mind?
• Tell me about someone you are proud of.
• Do you fully disconnect during holidays and vacations?
• Describe a recent success or win. 
• Tell me about a disagreement or conflict on the team. 
• How did you start your last team meeting? 
• What is your ideal person for this role?
• Who have you promoted and why?
• Tell me about the last person you recognized.
• How do you focus on your own growth and development?

Karen Eber

"10 questions to ask in a job interview that will really expose a company’s culture," Fast Company. April 8, 2021

work-life balance

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.  -  L.P. Jacks

When people use the phrase "work-life balance," most of them imagine a seesaw or a scale. On one end is "work," and on the other end is "life." The two are linked in such a way that everything is a tradeoff. If work is up, life is down. If life is up, work is down.

More of one means less of the other.

This is insane.

"Work-life balance" implies that work is separate from living a life, or that it's something to be balanced against your life. That's strange, given that most people spend more time working every day than they do in any other activity. If all of those hours are not part of life, then something is deeply wrong.

Life and work are not two enemies battling for our limited attention. In fact, the opposite tends to be the case. When we have meaningful, fulfilling, purposeful work, it radiates through out lives. And when we have happy, secure, loving relationships, they, too, radiate through our lives. 

The balance we seek is not that of a seesaw, but of a symphony, Every element of a symphony has a role to play: sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, sometimes silent, sometimes solo. The balance we seek is not for every instrument to be played in moderation at every moment - that's just a long, boring honk - but for a complementary relationship where each instrument is played at the right pitch and the right intensity, with the right phrasing and the right tempo. 

At certain times, particular aspects of our lives come to the fore, while others fall into the background. As new harmonies emerge, we can create something beautiful.

"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven."

Resilience: Hard-won Wisdom for Living a Better Life by Eric Greitens. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2015. p.257

practice these essential basics

Our [HBR Leader’s Handbook] research [interviews with over 40 successful leaders of large corporations, startups, and non-profits] pointed to six leadership skills where practice was particularly important. These are not mysterious and certainly aren’t new. However, the leaders we talked with emphasized that these fundamental skills really matter. Aspiring leaders should focus on practicing these essential basics:

1. Shape a vision that is exciting and challenging for your team (or division/unit/organization).
2. Translate that vision into a clear strategy about what actions to take, and what not to do.
3. Recruit, develop, and reward a team of great people to carry out the strategy.
4. Focus on measurable results.
5. Foster innovation and learning to sustain your team (or organization) and grow new leaders.
6. Lead yourself — know yourself, improve yourself, and manage the appropriate balance in your own life.

Ron Ashkenas and Brook Manville

"The 6 Fundamental Skills Every Leader Should Practice" Harvard Business Review. Oct. 24, 2018

you are defined by your work

I know most people dream of being famous or being a celebrity... The attention is thought to be gratifying, or ego-building or something. I've found it to be a nuisance all the way around. There's very little of it that I enjoy.... You become a cartoonist all your life, all day... It's no longer a job. You are defined by your work. You suddenly have no private time. You cannot be a husband to your wife, you are still a celebrity cartoonist...I find that aggravating. If you can't have a personal life, it really seems to me to be a sacrifice.

As a culture, we embrace people for no reason other than the fact that they have a job that puts them in a position of recognizability... People who have no other virtues necessarily are somehow made into these things that we devour...There's something very strange about our fascination with other people's lives that I don't think is entirely healthy.

Bill Watterson

Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip by Nevin Martell. Continuum Intl Pub Group, 2010 p. 125, 126

habitual exercise

When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly. Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. It’s not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change. “Exercise spills over,” said James Prochaska, a University of Rhode Island researcher. “There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.”

Charles Duhigg

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Random House. 2012.

lives outside of work

In Guthrie’s experience, employees will follow up with recruiters and other job offers if they're even slightly angry, bored or dissatisfied. “Usually the hours are wearing on them or their spouse is on their case because they’re never home,” she says. “A really good CEO thinks about the bigger picture and realizes people have lives outside of work. That’s the number one way to prevent people from feeling like they might want to be somewhere else.”

Interview with Carly Guthrie 

"This is Why People Leave Your Company" First Round Review. Read on 2/24/2016

between the known and the unknown

Invention… is an active process that results from the decisions we make; to change the world, we must bring new things into being. But how do we go about creating the unmade future? I believe that all we can do is foster the optimal conditions in which it – whatever “it” is – can emerge and flourish. This is where real confidence comes in. Not the confidence that we know exactly what to do at all times but the confidence that, together, we will figure it out. 

That uncertainty can make us uncomfortable. We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where. That requires us to step up to the boundary of what we know and what we don’t know. While we all have the potential to be creative, some people hang back, while others forge ahead. What are the tools they use that lead them toward the new? Those with superior talent and the ability to marshal the energies of others have learned from experience that there is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the key is to be able to linger there without panicking. And that, according to the people who make films at Pixar and Disney Animation, means developing a mental model that sustains you. It might sound silly or woo-woo, this kind of visualization, but I believe it’s crucial. Sometimes – especially at the beginning of a daunting project – our mental models are all we’ve got. 

For example, one of our producers, John Walker, stays calm by imagining his very taxing job as holding a giant upside-down pyramid in his palm by its pointy tip. “I’m always looking up, trying to balance it,” he says. “Are there too many people on this side or that side? In my job, I do two things, fundamentally: artist management and cost control. Both depend on hundreds of interactions that are happening above me, up in the fat end of the pyramid. And I have to be okay with the fact that I don’t understand a freaking thing that’s going on half the time – and that that is the magic. The trick, always, is keeping the pyramid in balance.”

Ed Catmull

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Random House 2014.

addicted to busyness

If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”

Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence...

The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night... What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this... it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

Tim Kreider

"The ‘Busy’ Trap." The New York Times. June 30, 2012.

work/life balance

It’s essential that people work a sensible number of hours. If you’re putting in 50, 60 hours a week or more, then there will be people in your organization who will feel that they should, too. But that will create inner turmoil, because they will be torn between what they perceive as your expectations for them and the responsibilities and, indeed, desires they feel towards their families, and even their personal health.

Don’t force your employees to make a choice. Show them that work/life balance is so important that you practice it as well.

Morag Barrett

6 steps to great leadership. CIO. 8/10/2015