Learning to live by: Coaches council executives on how to achieve work/life balance
The Business Journal of the Greater Triad Area
May 5-11, 2006
Dr. Roger Pearman, founder and president of Leadership Performance Systems in Winston Salem, is seeing black. Blackberrys, that is. From their increasing prevalence in airport terminals, to the colleague who recently had surgery for “Blackberry thumb,” to the leadership development seminar Pearman was forced to halt because participants were emailing instead of learning, these all-in-one instant communications devices are invading Pearman’s life.
Blackberrys are iconic of the kinds of external demands affecting people as workers and as couples, says Pearman, particularly in terms of the increasing inability to leave work at the office.
Leadership development coaches across the Triad are seeing a similar pattern in which a blurring of the line between home and work lives often results in unsatisfying and suboptimal performance in both. Subsequently, coaching professionals like Pearman are spending more time helping clients achieve a rewarding work-life balance.
“People used to talk about work-life balance meaning you put X amount of hours at work and X number of hours at home,” says Pearman, “The real question is, are you managing those pressures and those demands in a way that bring you satisfaction and enable you to feel that you are making the contribution you want to make at work and that you have a rich relationship at home.”
Joan Gurvis, Campus Director for the Center for Creative Leadership and co-author of Finding Your Balance, agrees. “Balance isn’t an issue of time; it’s (an issue of) choice. It’s about living your values and aligning your behavior with what you believe to be really important.”
While past discourse has most often focused on the adverse affects of work situations on home lives, professionals are finding the converse to be true as well. Kathy Bowman Atkins is president of the Lattitude Group, a company that helps CEOs, executives and managers reach their full potential.
“We look at the business holistically,” says Atkins, “in terms of all the things that are impacting their success or the lack thereof. It almost always comes down to what (success) means for their personal life.”
According to coaching professionals, stopping to consider your personal definition of success and the related goals is the first step to achieving work-life balance. Atkins suggests two essential questions for couples to answer individually and together: What is it we want to accomplish personally and professionally? What are we willing to do and not willing to do to get there?
Gurvis also suggests that goal-related change need not always be dramatic. “Sometimes it’s looking for the smallest change that can make the biggest impact: I can be home for dinner three nights a week and be fully present.”
All three coaching professionals were often approached at the conclusion of corporate seminars and leadership development training by participants interested in a similar self-exploratory program for couples. The common comment was, “I think if (my wife) understood my personality better or I understood her personality better, we could be a better couple/team and we could be happier.”
While the assessments and tools used by the Center for Creative Leadership, the Lattitude Group, and Leadership Performance Systems are effective for couples, Dr. Pearman chose a more focused approach. In March 2006, he unveiled Corporate Couples, a four-day workshop in which couples are given the tools to “clarify their couple-team roles in order to meet future challenges, learn stress management techniques, and develop communication strategies to enhance effectiveness and intimacy.”
Dan Parks, a coaching professional in Greensboro, works with Pearman to develop leadership development tools and assessments. Parks and his wife, Bonnie, who edits leadership development-related books, were invited to attend the initial screening of the Corporate Couples workshop in November 2004.
Through the assessment tools utilized by the Corporate Couples workshop, the Parks explored the ways in which their personalities aided and hampered communication as well as the benefits of living an intentional life.
“We have to be very intentional about the way we want our personal life to unfold and how that interacts with our business life,” says Dan.
The seminar was recommended to Dan and Margie Kensil at a time when Margie’s work life had become overwhelming. Margie leads the Salesman Service Division of Omega Performance in Charlotte, a position which often requires her to spend evenings at home catching up on email despite long hours at the office.
According to Margie, the benefits were two-fold. “It forced me to take that step back and to refocus a little bit on what I was putting myself through and, in some cases, putting Dan through,” she said. Margie has since realized that short breaks from work provided by quarterly vacations allow her sufficient time to manage the stress of her career, thus optimizing her work performance and home life.
Pearman asked Marc and Lynda King of Raleigh to attend a beta session of the program to provide feedback on the assessment and training tools. “We thought we would enjoy [attending],” says Marc, “but in the end we got a lot more out of the session than we realized we would.”
For Lynda, a social work supervisor, the training brought to mind long forgotten memories spanning their 34-year marriage which have allowed her to “move forward in a more positive way.”
While Marc says the biggest impact for him has been on his family relationships, he has also seen an impact in his work life, in which stress comes from long hours and overseeing 80 employees as Deputy State Director for the Small Business Technology Development Center. “It’s really made an impact on how I interact with people,” he says, “and how I deal with issues that come up in the workplace on a day-to-day basis.”
All three couples cite a better understanding of their spouse as a major benefit of having attended. While these couples’ experiences certainly demonstrate the personal benefits of achieving a work-life balance, it begs the question of whether it is valuable for companies and corporations to facilitate work-life balance training for their employees.
According to Pearman, organizations small and large currently face two opposing pressures. First is the need to adapt much more quickly to market shifts than a decade ago, and the second is doing so with fewer talented employees. As a result, organizations must put forth extra effort to keep talent in the midst of relocations, mergers, acquisitions, says Pearman.
“It’s more than just salary, it’s more than just paying for the moving now; it has to be, “How do we help the whole family make these adjustments in responsibilities, in relocations, in all the changes they experience, in the most successful way?”
While little empirical evidence exists regarding the effect on the bottom line from a satisfying work-life balance, anecdotal evidence collected by coaching professionals and researchers alike suggest that well-balanced executives and employees are more productive, provide better customer service, and experience greater team spirit and company loyalty.
Ultimately, says Dr. Pearman, the difference between high-performing managers and mediocre-performing managers often has less to do with intelligence or charisma than their ability to “manage themselves, manage their demands and pressures, and maintain high levels of personal satisfaction.”