Work Life Balance

It was an early morning, breakfast meeting. We were the first ones in the door and the coffee was still percolating. As we took our seats, the waiter brought over the first pot and poured each of us a cup. He smiled and said, “It’s the best way to start a new day.” We nodded in agreement. 

The purpose of our meeting was to discuss what to do about baby boomers who were exiting the working force, and the company’s need to recruit young, professionals who could become the next generation of leaders. During the exploration of this important topic, she said to me, “We are focused on offering work life balance as a key part of our recruitment process. We know that it is what people want and it is what we think we can offer.”

I smiled and nodded in agreement. This was a good choice when it comes to recruitment, and for that matter retention, too. Still, I wondered how many people within the organization currently understood the term work life balance. I also wondered how many people were experiencing it. I even wondered how many people in leadership positions were achieving it in their own life. 

The idea of work life balance surfaced during the later half of the 20th century. It was not something people thought much about at the beginning of that century. However, as the century progressed, it became more prevalent and more desired. 

In simple terms, work life balance is the ability to achieve a state of healthy balance between work and home. An individual can experience this when they feel fulfilled in both areas of their life and when they can prioritize their overall well being. In particular, this balance results in minimal stress at work and at home. Another outcome is not having to worry about work when you are at home with your family. So, the overall goal, if one wants to experience work life balance, is to have the capacity or ability to manage your own life during the work day and to maintain a harmonious relationship between your work life and your personal life. In short, there is an equilibrium between the two.

However, while we strive for this ideal, reality rarely matches the ideal, because life and work are constantly changing and evolving. Therefore, the goal of creating and maintaining work life balance is, to a degree, more a myth than a reality. Since both are in constant flux and many elements in both are not within our circle of influence, the assumption of total balance is unrealistic. Given it is an unattainable ideal, the constant pursuit of it can cause unnecessary stress, and shame when it is not achieved. 

Therefore, we need to reframe the idea of work life balance and understand that it exists, but it is not a destination. Instead, it is a mindset based on conscious choices. The idea that you can split your time and energy equally between your work life and your personal life in order to experience a constant state of equilibrium between the two is something to strive for, but rarely attainable or realistic. Still, I support this idea as a recruitment and retention strategy if we understand the mindset of work life balance and the subsequent choices that need to be made. 

First, I rarely use the term work life balance. While I like it, I don’t think it is the right term. I prefer to focus on work life clarity before I would reference work life balance. When we are clear about our priorities and goals at work and at home, and when we have agency to support achieving them, then this level of clarity can guide our large and small decisions to make it a reality. However, we need to understand that certain jobs and certain work situations do not offer or support flexible working arrangements in order for people to experience work life balance.

Second, people in leadership positions need to understand, support, and role model this on a daily basis. As one of my former students said, “Our leaders say-do ratio speaks loudly on this subject. They get to have a work life balance, because they can delegate everything to us, and then just walk away. It’s a nice idea that doesn’t actually work for the rest of us.”

Third, leaders must recognize that a large part of work life clarity, and the subsequent balance, is not experienced or achieved due to communication issues more than just effort issues. As we all know, communication and decision-making are two major components of being a successful leader. And, at the exact same time, many leaders fail or struggle deeply with these same two issues. Most of this happens because they under-communicate and assume a high level of understanding when understanding is not present. 

Plus, when these same leaders are overwhelmed, they default to command, control, and delegation as their three major leadership solutions. For these leaders, the desired outcome is a reduction in decision fatigue and stress. They just want things to be done correctly. But, for those who work with them, these choices create difficult work conditions and regular burnout. 

Nevertheless, work life clarity and balance is not a hopeless ideal. It can be achieved when we make three important choices. First, we need to create personal clarity and then focus on applying it. This is where we begin. We need clarity at work and we need clarity at home. And all of this begins with clarity about ourselves. We need to understand how we think about our work life and our home life. We need to understand our core beliefs, values, and intention. A great place to begin this level of work is to read the following book written by executive coach, author, and founder of The Restoration Project, Lindsay Leahy, and called Take It All Apart: How To Live, Lead, and Work With Intention (River Grove Books, 2024). Once you have read the book and done the detailed work within it, then it is time to focus on translating a work life balance mindset into a work life balance experience. 

Second, we need to show ourselves a combination of patience and persistence. We need patience with the process of creating this mindset, because we know life is challenging and changing, all at the same moment. We also need a healthy dose of persistence to keep moving forward and to create this level of balance in spite of the difficulties in creating it and/or maintaining it. One element to maintaining patience and persistence over time is to find and to work regularly with an executive coach or mentor who can offer perspective and insights to the challenges before us. They can be an ally and a confidant in the midst of the whole process. 

Finally, we need to stop defaulting to command, control, and delegation as the best solution to all of life’s challenges. Instead, we need to step back from our reactive defaults and offer ourself and others some grace and compassion. Some days we also need to do a better job of listening and clarifying the desired outcomes. Other days, we need to clarify our expectations and offer strong support and encouragement. Finally, we need to remember that all of us are aways trying to do our best even on days when our best is not so great. 

As the late Stephen Covey shared so many years ago, “There’s no balance in life without balance in our inner life - without the synergy created when living, loving, learning, and leaving a legacy coalesce.” When we choose to do the on-going inner work of living, loving, learning and leaving a legacy, we have the potential to create work life balance, but not as a one time experience. Instead, we can experience it as the outcome of a mindset based on conscious choices about how to work, how to raise a family, and how to live. Then, the resulting synergy is empowering and uplifting, all at the same time. 

© Geery Howe 2025

Geery Howe, M.A. Executive Coach in Leadership, Strategic Planning, and Organizational Change

Attunement

In the September 1997 issue of Executive Excellence magazine, the late Warren Bennis, a distinguished Professor of Business Administration at the University of Southern California, wrote an article called “Leaders of Leaders.” In it, he states: “Leaders today must develop their social architecture so that it generates intellectual capital and encourages incredibly bright people, most of whom have big egos, to work together successfully and to deploy their own creativity. Most employees today are not just well-educated but also highly individualistic. Individualism that makes the work environment exciting, but also very challenging. The challenge is how to release the brainpower of people in organizations that are confusing, chaotic places to work. Executives must try to generate intellectual capital and foster creative collaboration.” 

It is now twenty-seven years later and his words still ring true. The challenges before us are many. They also are confusing and chaotic. And in the midst of it all, we must encourage people to work together successfully and foster creative collaboration. The difficulty is to know where to begin. 

Bennis answers this question, and explains, “In this period of ‘creative destruction,’ leaders will have to reinvent themselves, redesign their leadership roles, and reinvent their organizations. Rather than just downsize, leaders must deploy the creativity of the workforce to recreate the company.” 

I love his term “creative destruction.” I think it captures what will be the emerging strategy for many companies over the next 3-5 years. For if we seek to be successful in the midst of a VUCA environment, then we must take many things apart, including ourselves and our way of leading others, in order to generate creative and effective business strategies and a new business model in order to meet the rapidly changing expectations and needs of current and future customers. And the outcome and convergence of these many levels of work will be to recreate the company. 

However, in the beginning, leaders of leaders will need to work on themselves and their way of leading while also working with and on their team. Now, a great deal has been written about leaders needing to reinvent themselves. I also know there are many good resources about how to work with and on a team. For example, Patrick Lencioni writes that leaders need to “build and maintain a cohesive leadership team.” I believe this is a solid beginning, but it is not the sum of the work that needs to be done over the next 3-5 years. 

When I have observed leadership teams who have worked through a time period of “creative destruction,” I have noted something unique, namely that these leaders have figured out how to be there for their team. Now, on the surface this seems like a trivial statement. Of course, leaders are there for their team. They are a leader. 

But the subtle difference is significant. Successful leaders, who are or have reinvented themselves and their leadership role, know one thing. They need to switch off their problem solving mode of leadership, and to connect with the team and the team members. They understand that being there for the team is actually being present to and with the team. They remember that all relationships are complex, i.e. dynamic and ever-changing, which by the way is a good thing. Given this understanding, they know they need to address their own issues, and to help others do this as well. And, of course, they do that publicly and privately in appropriate ways. In essence, by choosing to be present with the team, they are able to attune to the team. 

Now, the dictionary definition of attunement is “the ability to be aware of and responsive to another person’s emotions and needs.” And within this short definition are some keys to exceptional leadership. First, one needs to learn how to be aware of another person’s emotions and needs. Again, this seems elementary. It is basic leadership 101 level stuff. But after decades of doing this work, I have met very few leaders who are good at this. And the ones who are can do this because they are able to tune into their own emotions and needs, not at a surface level, but at a depth where they have the language to do it well (think Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart). These same leaders understand that emotional intelligence is as important or even more important that just intellectual intelligence. 

When diving deeply into the concept of attunement, the dictionary notes that there are at least two main levels. The first is emotional attunement, which is “the process of recognizing and responding to the emotions of another person in a way that validates and supports their experience.” And the second is mental attunement, which is “the ability to tune in to oneself [and] to understand and respond to one’s emotional states, needs and perspective.” It is the combination of the two, which is at the heart and soul of someone being able to reinvent themselves at the personal and the professional levels. For when we can be completely present in the moment to ourself and to others, and when we can completely listen to ourself and to others, we engage and are present so that productive, and creative destruction can take place. In short, when we choose to show up with presence and inner clarity, we role model caring for people from a healthy interdependence rather than an unhealthy codependence.

As part of developing the social architecture that Bennis described in the aforementioned article, he writes: “Leaders create not just a vision, but a vision with meaning - one with significance, one which puts the players at the center of things rather than at the periphery. If companies have a vision that is meaningful to people, nothing will stop them from being successful. Not just any old vision will do; it must be a shared vision with meaning and significances.”

On the surface, this seems logical and important. Ten years later, Patrick Lencioni in his book, The Truth About Employee Engagement: A Fable About Addressing the Three Root Causes of Job Misery, formerly called The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (and their employees) (Jossey-Bass 2007), writes “Everyone needs to know that their job matters, to someone.” And he continues, “if a manager has any responsibility in the world, it’s to help people understand why their work matters.” Once employees understand that they matter and that the work they are doing matters, and if this work has line of sight to a “shared vision with meaning and significance,” then the capacity to generate creative collaboration is accelerated. 

However, for this level of clarity and social architecture to be effective, Bennis points out that something else has to take place. As he explains, “Leaders have a bias toward action. Not just reflection, but action. A combination of both of them, of course, is what we all want. And then you need to get feedback on how you are doing. You have to cultivate sources of reflective backtalk by getting people around you whose counsel you treasure - people who are capable of telling the truth, people you can depend on, people who have the future in their bones. You need these people. You can’t do it alone. You need people who can take the vision and run with it.”

This trinity of reflection, action, and feedback are the way to be attuned and to stay attuned during times of creative destruction. For when we do this on a regular basis, and when we create a “shared vision with meaning and significance,” we then generate intellectual capital and foster creative collaboration, all of which is needed at this time period. Although the article was written twenty-seven years ago, it still offers valuable and an important insights for those people who are leaders of leaders. 

Our challenge is to take his insights to heart and to do the inner work along with the outer work. Then, we can flip the current VUCA environment into a time period of vision, understanding, clarity and agility. And with this action, we will generate new possibilities for betters connections, creativity, and collaboration, all of which will help people work more effectively in the midst of these unique times. 

Geery Howe, M.A. Executive Coach in Leadership, Strategic Planning, and Organizational Change