Total Leadership is about having a richer life, but work/life balance is the wrong metaphor. It signifies trade-offs, gaining in one area at the expense of another. The essence of being real, of acting with authenticity, is in knowing what you care about and then doing your best to be true to these values and aspirations.
Define your domains
- Work — For most, the work domain is your job. But think beyond the hours you sit in your office and consider the things you do as part of your career — travelling, taking classes, talking to mentors, participating in trade associations or doing research.
- Home — This can include the people (or animals) you live with, your family — parents, siblings or others — or your family of creation (spouse, significant other, children).
- Community — This can include friends, neighbours, social groups, religious institutions, charitable organisations and political committees.
- Self — The domain of your self includes your emotional health, intellectual knowledge, physical health, leisure and spiritual life.
Explore the relative importance of the four domains. Assign each a percentage (make sure they add up to 100).
Then consider how much time and energy you focus on each domain in a typical week. Assign a percentage to each.
This Four Way Attention Chart is an essential part of the picture of how things stand today. It shows how you allocate your time and energy and helps you assess whether you’re actually doing what you care about doing.
Where would you like to make adjustments?
Next, draw four circles, one for each domain. This asks you to consider whether you are the same person wherever you go.
Before you draw anything:
Consider size — the size of each circle corresponds to the importance you assigned it in the Four Way Attention Chart.
Think about relative location — do circles overlap or are they separate? Where you place the circles and how much they overlap represents the best estimate of how compatible the domains are with each other.
Complete overlap of all domains is extraordinarily rare, so don’t worry if your four circles don’t line up exactly.
Ask what you would have to do to have them overlapping. What would you have to change in your career to bring it closer to the person you are in your family? What is the purpose of your career — to enjoy the material things in life? Or is there something about it that makes you feel proud? What would you have to change to make this feeling grow and be more a part of your everyday work?
One goal is to create change in order to produce harmony among your four domains.
You can practice how to do this by designing and implementing smart experiments intended to produce benefits for your work, home, community and your self — four way wins.
Stewart D Friedman talks about ‘Total Leadership’ at BNET Intercom.
