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Help Your Team Achieve Work-Life Balance — Even When You Can’t

Help Your Team Achieve Work-Life Balance — Even When You Can’t
by Rebecca Zucker

You block time on your calendar for a yoga class, lunch with a friend, or even a tech Shabbat. But how often do you cancel it due to what seems a more urgent work demand? Recent research from Boston University and Harvard Business School faculty shows that with the unrelenting pace and volume of work, setting and keeping boundaries has never been more challenging — or more important.

As a leader, you have an opportunity to model behavior in a meaningful way and facilitate appropriate boundary setting for your team members and your organizations’ employees. This is necessary even if setting and keeping boundaries is an area you struggle with yourself.

I understand the challenge. As an investment banker at Goldman Sachs in the 90s, work came before everything else. To the firm, I was the “ideal worker” — a phrase sociologists use to describe a problematic archetype of a fully committed employee with no personal “entanglements.” I was single with no children, and had almost unlimited capacity for all things related to work. But so did my peers, whether or not they had children, partners, or aging parents. It was just the industry and firm norm.

It wasn’t until I moved to Paris in 1997 to become Finance Manager for Disney Consumer Products Europe, Middle East, and Africa that I experienced someone setting a non-negotiable boundary for herself.

We received a request from Disney headquarters in Burbank, California, for a financial analysis. I told our controller she needed to work late that night.

“No.”

Stunned by her immediate response, I didn’t recall posing it as a question, nor did I even know that this response was an option.

She was a single parent who needed to pick up her child at daycare. She was also French; when she told me, she’d just shrugged her shoulders, seemingly not feeling any sense of conflict like her American colleagues might in the same situation.

I remember feeling both tremendous respect and envy for the boundary my colleague had set. She gave me the data I needed to complete the task, and the world didn’t fall apart when she left at 6 p.m.

Read full article on Harvard Business Review.