Chapter 14
Help Your Team to Achieve Balance

Balance is more than just a physical parameter impacting performance. Winners interpret balance to mean much more than physical equilibrium. Balance is a concept that has become a major issue in the lives of most people. It's a topic at many conventions and is especially relevant to employees who are married or have families. Most of the time, the two sides of the scale are work life and personal life. For leaders, this is perhaps the most important chapter in the book because without balance in your own life, it's very difficult to help your colleagues achieve it in theirs.

There are also very specific issues of balance within your personal life. If you're a parent, how do you balance time with your spouse and your children? How do you balance time between the children? How do you find personal time for yourself?

If you are a management professional or a leader in the corporate environment, your work life can also be a juggling act. How do you balance your job within the parameters of your environment? Do you push some employees too hard while neglecting others? What if you have one person who's not motivated and five people who are self-motivated? Do you spend more time motivating the one person or should you be more concerned with the five good people?

It's critical that a manager understand balance in order to deal with employees successfully. Many companies have committed a fatal error in thinking that everyone can be motivated and the same methods apply universally. You must understand that, in every day of your life, balance is a challenge because you are a leader.

How many people today work longer hours than in past years, as evidenced by the number of corporate re-engineering announcements and cutbacks in workforces? Companies expect more productivity from fewer people. That usually means more time away from home for employees.

Most people in high-productivity environments work longer hours than they did in the past. It's not necessarily a negative development. You should work longer hours when you absolutely must, but doing so should not become a permanent part of your lifestyle.

Achieving balance seems to be an impossible task for many professional people and for many parents as well. Spend some time around moms and dads who have three to four children. You realize it's incredibly difficult for them to keep balance within the home. They may feel as if they never have any time for themselves, as a couple or individually.

Even children's lives are at risk of being poorly balanced. How many obligations do children have these days? When I was a youngster, we played a sport or two and went to school. Now there are so many extracurricular activities and school activities that children have a hard time maintaining balance in their lives.

Whenever I include a balance component in my program, it generates more comments than any other single segment of the presentation. People are hungry for balance, and they are asking for help. This is a dramatic change from just a few years ago and, as a result, I've come to believe that we as a society are beginning to understand the importance of balance in our lives. We are beginning to understand fulfillment, meeting our basic needs, and helping those around us meet theirs. I think we're making progress.

If we look at the quality of time as opposed to the number of hours, which I think is necessary, how many of us have lost our balance? I find that an alarming percentage of successful people in high positions in the community, civic clubs, and the corporate world are unhappy and unfulfilled because they've lost their balance, and they don't really have any idea about how to correct the issue. They work longer and harder, and rest on the excuse that they're financially providing for their family, which is their job.

Winning demands intensive training and devotion to a daily routine. That takes a commitment to work. Incredible amounts of time are required to achieve perfection or high levels of performance. Therefore, most of our time is spent on work. That fact alone doesn't mean that you lack good balance. It's the quality of the time spent that is a critical issue. People who are devoted and good at what they do are usually going to work long hours, but again, the key to balance is the quality of time spent.

A challenging assignment for me was working with a group of promising young sales managers in management development sessions. We met every month, first as a group and then individually. In the one-on-one meetings, conversations often turned to the issue of professional versus personal interest. Over and over I heard people complain, “I have no personal time. I don't have time for my children.” Balance was a major issue in the lives of these young professionals. As is so often the case these days, their goal was to work long and hard and retire at 35. Some of them worked seven days a week, sometimes 15 to 18 hours a day, which left no time for family, friends, or themselves. Paradoxically, productivity declined as they spent more hours at work because their focus wasn't as sharp. This reinforced the cycle of working more to get everything done, and a very simple philosophy prevailed: Need more money, work longer hours.

I used the strategies in this book to help them be more aware of where they were, where they wanted to go, whom they wanted to take with them, and when, realistically, they wanted to get there. We also set goals for the personal side of life. Each person kept an hourly log for a week to determine how time was spent and what was accomplished. We were looking for common threads running across every day, similar tasks at similar times and so forth. I was looking for time slots for self-reward as well as time slots for learning opportunities. For some in the group I had to actually plug in family time until they began to understand the value of spending time at home.

The good news is that after three months of working together, every person in the group summarized the course with comments about balance: “I'm grateful for these meetings because I have balance in my life,” wrote one individual. “I finally feel good about me and about what I do, and about my role professionally and personally,” another wrote.

I've seen major-league athletes with tremendous talents never make the grade and even be released by teams because they never learned to balance playing the game with the things that are peripheral to it. When that happens, it may be too late to save a career in sports or in business, or to salvage personal relationships. I've worked with athletes who have played better after dealing with things peripheral to the game.

When rookie players come to the major leagues, I tell them this in our first conversation: You can play or you wouldn't be at this level. Now your major issue is learning how to live at the major-league level. In other words, learn how to balance your life. Learn how to rest and get enough sleep. Learn when to do each of the things you have to do. It takes some athletes a couple years to do that.

Start-up businesses in the digital age are especially susceptible to being out of balance. The lure of the prospective payoff at the back end is so great that people work a staggering number of hours up front, and they're willing to roll the dice, knowing the business may not succeed.

My question to the start-up workaholics is this: What have you done to your life and what have you done to your personal relationships if there is no payoff? You should never put your entire life in your job. You must never give up the personal things in your life. Always retain quality of life on the personal side. Just because you're at home a number of hours doesn't mean that you have balance. You have to be there not only physically, but also mentally to count it as quality time. That doesn't mean you have to plan a lot of activities. It's enough to stay at home and enjoy the company of your family and friends. You need to have that in order to say that you truly have balance.

In speaking at conventions when I emphasize the urgency of gaining balance and maintaining it, some people get very uncomfortable. From my observation, most of the ones who don't like the idea are at the executive level of their company, but I don't think those people are leaders in most cases anyway.

At a team-building seminar for a major consulting firm, I talked with a senior partner of the firm before the seminar in order to evaluate the topics and the points to be covered. “I saw your videotape,” he told me, “and I loved your material, but I want you to avoid talking about that balance issue with my people.”

“Sure,” I laughed, thinking he was kidding.

The grim look on the guy's face told me he was not kidding. “I don't want my people thinking that when they leave the meeting with you today,” he said, “that they will be free to leave the office before eight o'clock at night. I don't want them to think that, for the sake of this balance you're talking about, they don't have to come in on weekends either.”

It was sad, but that is how people are used many times. When I talked with his employees, many of them were young, single, high-energy people right out of college. I had a very difficult time omitting the part about balance, which those people needed so badly. Even though I didn't talk about it as a topic, I slipped in some references to balance within other topics. I felt an obligation to do that whether or not I got invited for another seminar at that firm.

The long and the short of it is pretty simple. Adding hours to the day is not the answer. There isn't much evidence that if people work 13 hours versus 10 they will be more productive. The key is to explore ways to get the productivity needed within the time frame planned for the work.

A corporate executive once told me he was proud to say that he'd spent 16 to 18 hours a day doing his job his whole career. “Fine,” I replied, and left it at that. But I don't know that there's any job worth 18 hours a day of your life or one that would even require close to 18 hours a day. It does not make sense to routinely add hours to the day.

If business is tough, your employer may call you in and say, “We need to get more done. We need to increase business.” Immediately, as a leader, your tendency will be to add hours onto your team's schedule. That's not the answer. If they're already working eight hours, they start working eleven. If they're working five days a week, they add a day and work six. Then on the seventh day, they're mentally still at work even though physically they're off. These workaholics never stop to examine the 10- or 11-hour days that they work. They never learn to find more productive time within a normal workday. Yet a great amount of research indicates that there are only 7 or 8 hours of productivity within those 10 hours. I would suspect the same would hold true for 12- or 13-hour days. It's like stretching four years of college into six. You stay busy and get the degree two years later.

Think about what is happening in your life. If you're working a tremendous number of hours and you miss the things your children do growing up, do you not regret that as time passes? You may not hear your child say the first word or take the first step or catch the first ball or get the first hit or bring home the first A or get the first black eye or have the first emotional squabble or the first dance. Firsts don't happen twice. Of course, you can't possibly see everything your child does for the first time, but you should make an effort to do as much as you can with your children in terms of quality of time so that you don't miss all those things. Think about it. You can't go back and walk and talk about things you missed with your children once they're adults because they know you weren't there, so you need to make a commitment to attend to the important things in life, whether they involve your children, your spouse, or someone else.

Most of the time when balance is lost, it's gone before you realize it. Then retrieving your balance is extremely difficult. You get into a routine, get comfortable, and it's very difficult to change.

Regaining balance becomes essentially a behavioral change, the toughest change for an adult. Changing behavior with respect to balance may not always mean personal interest versus professional interest. The issue may be balance within the job itself. For example, professional golfers have a tendency to overpractice. They don't have much balance between the physical and mental practice. Hitters who are in a slump have a tendency to go to practice early every day and hit too many balls as opposed to balancing out the physical practice with the mental practice. If you're a hitter and you're in a slump, take a couple of days off. If you're a golfer and you hit three great shots in a row, then go on to the next club and practice with it. Hit three shots and then walk away.

How do you achieve balance? Well, the first thing you do is set aside time. You must feel comfortable about giving up this time. If balance is based solely on the amount of time spent and not the quality of time—and in the beginning this often holds true—it's worse than no balance at all.

I once worked with a tremendous young tennis player. I had no doubt she would win a college scholarship and rise in professional competition. She was not only a great athlete but she also had a winning personality. She was warm and unassuming. During her matches, we encouraged her parents, or at least one for every competition, to attend and give moral support. This became a major problem. The father didn't want to take time from work because that was his life, but since we made it a requirement he showed up at the matches. He was so uncomfortable taking the time out of his work that his behavior became erratic. He became verbally abusive to his daughter and her opponents. On one occasion he threw a chair onto the tennis court. Finally the officials banned him from the matches. Although I didn't talk with him afterward, I'm sure he felt better when he was at work because that was where he wanted to be and he didn't need to make excuses anymore. When he spent time at the matches it fell far short of genuine balance because he was not there in a supportive fashion. The quality of the time he spent ranked lower than 0 on a scale of 1 to 10 because it was a negative experience for everyone.

The girl's mother was asked to fill the gap. She began attending the matches, but this took time from her social activities, which she felt were the most important things in her life. Her obsession with social doings probably exceeded her husband's obsession with work. She became rowdier than he had been, and as a result, both she and her daughter then were banned from the tennis court and the park. That father and mother grudgingly spent a quantity of time with no quality attached, and it significantly impacted their family in a negative way. Their daughter never played tennis again. This illustrates that time spent is not the same as quality time.

A growing number of businesspeople and employees are attempting to find balance by telecommuting. Some work at home two or three days a week while others do their job almost exclusively at home, but there is a misconception that if you are in your home office that you automatically have balance. Many times just the opposite happens. Though your children may be present in the “office” with you, they are not likely spending any quality time with you. You might assume that you have quality time for yourself because you are in a better work environment. Often, the opposite is true. When you have your workplace at home, you may spend more time working than you would if you were in a corporate environment. As a result, your balance is actually worse than it would have been if you didn't have the home office. You need to still pick your times when you are there and when you are not there. It's virtually impossible to get quality time if you don't designate specific work hours.

You need to learn to manage your time wisely and then to balance it. Once you have developed an effective time-management plan, then you're in the swing of the process. You'll find you're better organized, more productive, and have more time to be proactive toward balance. You must accept the idea that time pressure will not end as long as you are a normally functioning individual. You can come in early, work late, work on weekends, and think about work when you're not working, but the time crunch will always be a challenge. Time management can be stressful, but that provides you with what you need to thrive. The advantages of thriving on stress are covered in Chapter 11.

As a leader, it's virtually impossible to help people with balance if you don't have balance in your own life, so this chapter is meant to help leaders develop the skills before teaching them to their colleagues. In order to develop balance that we can maintain, we must recognize some common barriers to time management. Here's a starter list:

You can start by controlling the controllable factors. This is accomplished when you follow these steps:

  1. Step one: Keep a log for at least one week. List the things you do each day. Attach a time to each task. You will discover that your productive times will be very similar from day to day. You'll also discover that conceptual, creative productive times will be consistent across days. The first step will help you determine when you are most productive.
  2. Step two: Select one hour per day for a few days. Plan productive execution during that hour and evaluate your productivity.
  3. Step three: Share what you're doing with those people who influence your time. This is absolutely necessary as a leader. In order to achieve your desired time management and balance, mutual respect for each other's approach must be developed.

Continue to follow these steps, gradually increasing the amount of time you consciously manage. Be committed to leaving free time each day to do nothing. Once you are comfortable with what you're able to accomplish in a typical day, you might start making a to-do list nightly for the next day. It's essential that you start each list with things that you can and will accomplish early the next morning. This approach simply gives you momentum to get through your list.

I recommend people make two lists, one for the things you want to accomplish personally and the other for professional tasks and goals. Put a time frame on these items, taking into account some of your long-term goals. Next try to prioritize the two lists into one and look at the result. If it's skewed dramatically toward one side or the other—personal or professional—then you have no balance or very little balance at best.

For everything that's professional in life, you need something that's important personally. When you really examine what you do and why you do it, the personal things in your life are going to be the things that begin to take priority. Now is the time to start achieving and restoring balance to your life. Acknowledge the need for better balance and do something about it. Without balance, everything takes on the same importance, and when that happens, there are no priorities. Gaining balance will make you recognize and appreciate your total value, not only to your profession but to those in your personal life. In the final analysis, they are the most important things in your life.

img Achieving Balance

This worksheet will enable you to prioritize what you do and to start developing the balance and time management that will help you win every day.

Task and Time Required

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Have I Included?

  1. Time for me
  2. Time for family
  3. Time to evaluate
  4. Time to plan (to visualize and to anticipate)
  5. Plans that are consistent with weekly goals
  6. High probability of success items at appropriate times
  7. Toughest items when I am sharpest
  8. Time for telephone calls
  9. Tomorrow's planning
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