They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
—Andy Warhol
A work-related crisis can affect our health, our family, and our finances. And the reverse is true too. A family, health, or financial crisis can impact our work. The quantity and quality of our output may suffer. Projects can slip. Budgets may be missed. Colleagues—who often don’t have much margin themselves—are forced to fill in the gaps.
Here’s the reality: Your personal life is a myth. There is no such thing as a compartmentalized life. Every area, space, category, and set of relationships is interrelated. You are a seamless whole.
When the Great Recession hit, I (Michael) experienced this firsthand as the CEO of Thomas Nelson. As mentioned before, the company went through several layoffs to survive the fallout. The executive team searched for other solutions. They haggled with suppliers, postponed purchases, slashed expenses, and fought daily to keep the boat afloat and moving forward. But there seemed to be no end in sight. No one can turn off this kind of stress with the office lights. We brought all that stress and worry home, negatively affecting our families and health.
We realize that events in one area of our lives cascade into every other area. While a Life Plan can’t protect us from the impact of something as global as the recession, it can help us avoid many self-inflicted wounds. At least three very important ideas are connected to the realization that you cannot compartmentalize your life.
The first is something we said at the start: Self-leadership always precedes team leadership. Leaders who build cultures and organizations that make the greatest difference are highly self-aware and well rounded; they invest time into several accounts and live lives that are attractive to those they serve and lead.
The second is that our teams are watching us. They set their levels of trust and engagement based on what they see in our lives. How we leaders live matters.
Many leaders we have worked with have excelled in using their Life Plans to help them improve how they influence and lead. But unfortunately others never created plans for their lives or abandoned them to focus on just their professional or financial accounts. So again, who we are, the decisions we make, our investments of time, talents, and treasures will show those around us what we value most.
The third is this: What’s true for you is true for your team members. They can’t compartmentalize their lives either. The first two points should color the third, which is the focus of this chapter: How you can use the Life Planning process to empower your people and strengthen your organization.
The Business Benefits of Life Planning
Companies across the globe are beginning to see that one’s personal life and work life are inseparable. Many are encouraging their employees to develop written Life Plans and giving them the training they need to do so. These companies are benefiting in three specific ways:
1. Helping employees do Life Planning communicates your care. Employees working for you have dreams, hopes, and aspirations. When you encourage Life Planning, you are essentially saying, “We want to help you accomplish your ultimate goals and dreams. We know that involves your job, but we also know it is more than what you do while at work.”
Chick-fil-A has been a wonderful client of Building Champions for many years. Early in the relationship we coached a few leaders in their organization. It has grown into hundreds of coaching relationships. Their leadership has been so impacted by Life Planning that it is now a part of the training for all new restaurant owners. Several times a year one of our coaches will join them to walk groups of new owners through the process of creating their own Life Plans. They absolutely believe that self-leadership always precedes team leadership.
Similarly, Marc Laird, CEO of the national mortgage banking firm Cornerstone Home Lending, decided several years ago that the personal gains he received from the Life Planning process could benefit his employees. So Building Champions helped him craft a strategy to roll out Life Planning to his more than one thousand teammates.
Cornerstone had a Building Champions coach come to their larger markets to walk their teammates and key clients through the process. Marc also recorded videos for all new hires, encouraging them to take a paid day off to create their plans. He also had me (Daniel) record several Life Planning videos that are now stored on their intranet as a team resource. Additionally, Marc had Building Champions assist with team challenges and help his teammates to live out their plans.
Todd Salmans, CEO of Prime Lending, is another leader who sees Life Planning as key to building a high-performing team. His organization subsidized the investment of Building Champions coaching for hundreds of their teammates. They also partnered with Building Champions to create a private four-day Coaching Experience for 250 of their managers and leaders. Everyone spends the first day just working through their Life Plans.
And here’s one more valuable story about using Life Planning to care for the people who work with you: Brian McKay is the vice president and chief operating officer at SC Telco Federal Credit Union in Greenville, South Carolina. He became a Life Planner in 2011 after reading about it on my (Michael’s) blog. It had such a radical impact on his own life that he shared it with other executives at the corporate office, including his CEO Steve Harkins, who immediately saw the potential for the entire workforce.
They brought me in to the annual all-employee meeting to provide a three-hour training session for everyone—from the executive suite to the mailroom. Following the meeting, Brian appointed a steering committee to promote Life Planning in the organization, using the company newsletter to recount stories of employees who were succeeding at Life Planning. They offered small group assistance and support. They answered questions as they came up.
A year later SC Telco invited me back for a follow-up session at the annual all-employee meeting. In addition to doing a review and sharing best practices, I interviewed two employees with significant Life Planning success stories. “The biggest takeaway for me in the Life Planning process is knowing I am working for a company that wants me to be happy and productive in every area of my life,” said one, a compliance officer with the bank. “That’s a gift!”
2. Helping employees do Life Planning ensures they are productive at work. When employees engage in Life Planning, they are less likely to have something like a health crisis or marital conflict distract them at work. They can be more fully present on the job and focus on tasks at hand.
Dr. Melanie Lankau of Wake Forest University partnered with Building Champions to assess the impact of coaching. One of the key findings of her research—which was no surprise to us—is that “Life Satisfaction is positively correlated with job satisfaction and all performance measures.” Said another way, those who feel satisfied with their personal lives are more satisfied with their careers and perform better.
3. Helping employees do Life Planning empowers them to be engaged on the job. When employees are working to attain passion and progress in every area of life, they are less likely to be cynical or apathetic. They have the emotional resources to invest in their work and the customers they serve.
We have heard from countless clients that after completing their Life Plans they are more focused, present, and engaged at work. They are not worried about what they are not doing or should be doing in the other critical areas of their lives, because their Life Plan provides the framework for dealing with those as well. It provides the structure that frees them to give attention to their teammates, customers, projects, and tasks without distracting thoughts or the guilt of neglecting another area of their lives.
And here’s why that’s ultimately important: When employees feel valued, and are more productive and engaged, they create a culture that can truly be a strategic advantage in today’s competitive environment.
The Corporate Implementation Process
Hopefully, by now you are convinced that Life Planning could benefit your organization. We’d like to share seven best practices for implementing it.
1. Practice before you preach. St. Francis of Assisi reportedly said, “Preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words.” Nothing speaks louder than our lives. When we preach what we aren’t practicing, people consider us hypocrites. That’s hardly the outcome we’re after.
On the other hand, when we practice what we preach—especially before we preach it—we provide evidence that what we are advocating actually works. We’ve all had this experience when a friend or co-worker decides to lose weight. Their strategy is far more compelling after they have lost fifty pounds.
2. Get your leadership team on board. Alignment is essential in any major, corporate-wide initiative, but it is especially relevant here. Some executives have been conditioned to believe that there needs to be clear distinction between one’s personal and work lives. As long as they believe this, it will be difficult to get their support.
This is why we usually advise a staged rollout. Buy the book for your executive team first. Get them enrolled in the process. Bring in outside training if necessary. You want your leadership team familiar with the process and also practicing it before attempting to implement it throughout the workforce.
But here’s a caution: Make it optional. We have seen the strategy backfire when it is rolled out as a mandate instead of an invite. In connection to point 1 above, it has been most successfully implemented when the changes in the leader’s life become noticeable and his passion for Life Planning causes those around him to want what he has.
3. Set aside a half day for training. This is where it starts to get fun. This is also where you begin to communicate to teammates that you are serious about this Life Planning stuff and willing to put money where your mouth is. You can provide this training in one of three ways. We have arranged these from least to most expensive:
4. Give everyone a copy of the book. You would probably expect us to say this, but we really believe in the power of books to spread ideas. We’ve tried to keep this one relatively brief and to the point. Our hope is that even nonreaders will start and finish it. Bulk discounts are available directly from the publisher in both print and digital editions. We especially encourage you to do this in conjunction with a training experience as outlined in point 3 above.
5. Offer employees additional paid time off. Some companies give employees an entire day off to work on their Life Plan. The advantage of this is it really takes away the excuse that the employee doesn’t have the time. A possible disadvantage is that he or she won’t have any skin in the game. If you go with this option, we encourage you to build some kind of accountability into the process. It could be as simple as a form they sign indicating they completed the Life Planning process. It could also require that an accountability partner of their choosing cosign it. Regardless, few people abuse the privilege of having time off to complete their Life Plan. In our experience most employees are genuinely grateful and take the day seriously.
Other companies have offered a hybrid system where the company contributes a half day of paid time off and the employee uses a half day of their existing paid time off. The advantage is they then have skin in the game. The disadvantage is that this can be a little more complicated to administer and you are likely to get fewer takers.
We suggest you test your plan with a pilot group to gain insights into what works best in your culture. Once you eliminate the bugs, you can then roll it out to more departments or even company-wide.
6. Provide encouragement and support. This is perhaps the most important step. What happens after people develop a Life Plan is critically important. Having and living a Life Plan are two different things. The goal is not simply to create a document, put it into a file, and forget about it. The goal is happy, productive employees who are pursuing passion and progress in every area of their lives.
You can provide ongoing encouragement and support in several ways:
7. Consider offering additional life resources. To really see progress in their life accounts, people need motivation, education, and training. You might decide to provide these as a part of a larger life curriculum. For example, many companies make Weight Watchers, gym memberships, or similar programs available to their employees as a way of raising the overall health of the workforce. At Building Champions, for instance, we partner with the teammates in our corporate office to encourage them to use the gym or participate in our healthy food plan.
Several of our clients have brought in Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace program to help employees get out of debt and experience financial freedom. This often has a dramatic and almost immediate impact on people’s productivity at work. Many feel for the first time that they are making financial progress and their work plays a key role in that.
Others have brought in various marriage training programs, like Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages. These have the added advantage of directly involving spouses. Building Champions and several of its clients have had great success by inviting teammates to marriage retreats either created by us or conducted by other organizations with this expertise. Some companies have brought in parenting programs like Foster Cline and Jim Fay’s Parenting with Love and Logic. Attention to family-related areas like these can also have a positive impact on work productivity.
The main thing is viewing this as something that is part of an ongoing program. Life Planning provides the foundation, but people need additional resources if they are really going to succeed.
What We’re Really After
This may sound grandiose, but we are out to change the world. If you have made it this far in the book, we believe you share our goal. But we all know this change won’t come because of new political initiatives, scientific or technological advances, or better or more accessible education. All of these might play a role, but none of them are enough.
Real transformation happens when people take responsibility for their own lives and begin to live intentionally in every area. When they begin recovering their passion and start seeing progress, their lives change. Changed people result in changed families, schools, synagogues, churches, companies, and governments. And when this happens, you begin transforming culture in profound and lasting ways.
So, as this book draws to a close, we invite you to help us launch a Life Planning revolution. We want to help people experience the difference a little planning and initiative can make—for them, their loved ones, and everything they hold dear.
Will you join us? The Living Forward revolution begins with you.