Leaders Eat Last

Being a true leader, says Simon Sinek, author of Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’'t (Penguin), isn’t about being in charge, having all the answers or being the most qualified person in the room. Instead, it’s about creating a “circle of safety,” a culture that leads people to feel protected and free from danger inside the organization. That, in turn, allows them to focus their time and energy on protecting the organization from outside threats and on seizing big opportunities.

Here, from Sinek, are five precepts of his leadership vision. 

1.  Leaders have to accept that their responsibility is not the performance of the company but the performance of their people, and that doesn’t mean numbers but whether people are working to their greatest potential. Are they being given opportunities to try and fail and try again?

2. Leaders, whatever the size of their organizations, are those willing to put the interests of other people before their own. For entrepreneurs or small-business owners, that means committing ourselves to the success of our clients and our customers and showing up every day not simply to grow our own bottom line but to help somebody else’s bottom line.

3. Online communities function like any other community. You can’t just milk social media to tell people about your company without being willing to serve. Instead, use these platforms to offer and share information that has value to other people even if it has no direct impact on you whatsoever.

4. When an employee is going through a slump, don’t fire them, coach them. Consider the tech company Next Jump, which has a policy of lifetime employment. Once firing wasn’t an option, more care was taken to hire the right people—evaluating not just skills and experience, but character as well. Training became much more comprehensive; peer counseling groups were formed in every part of the company, and performance evaluations became more open, honest and real. Turnover went from 40 percent—average for the industry—to 1 percent. The best leaders don’t come down harder on people whose performance is lagging; they come to their aid.

5. Temper idealism with realism and accountability. While we’d want all our client relationships to be long, fruitful and marked by reciprocity, the economic realities of business sometime require us to say yes to clients that we know are going to be difficult. If someone rakes you over the coals during the contract negotiations—guess what?—they’re going to rake you over the coals later on, too. Treat the relationship for what it is: a short-term hit. When you’ve gotten what you need—better cash flow, say—politely move on. We sometimes need to take on difficult and unreasonable clients, but let’s do it consciously.

Shelley Levitt 

The Importance of Giving Credit

Virtually everyone has experienced or witnessed instances in which credit was assigned in an unfair manner: managers unabashedly took credit for the work of their invisible hard-working staff; quiet performers were inadequately recognized for their contributions; credit was assigned to the wrong individuals and for the wrong things.

If a company reliably assigns credit to deserving individuals and teams, the resulting belief that the system is fair and will honestly reward contributions will encourage employees to give their utmost. On the other hand, if credit is regularly misassigned, a sort of organizational cancer emerges, and individuals and teams won’t feel the drive to deliver their best because they won’t trust anyone will recognize it if they do.

From my experiences leading teams in government, academia, clinical medicine, and the private sector, I have evolved a set of rules to help manage some of the issues with the assignment of credit. These rules are my own and don’t reflect any official policies of the organizations where I’ve worked.

Keep people honest. It is important to demand that individuals be honest about their true contributions to projects and initiatives. And their claims should be cross-checked.

Individuals whose careers developed in organizations where they had to fend for themselves will often err on the side of overstating their contributions. A star performer on one team that I led was often taking more than her share of credit and it was rubbing her colleagues the wrong way. When I drilled into the root cause, I discovered it was bad behavior she learned in her previous job, where unabashed self-promotion was required to rise. Guiding her to be honest about her true contributions and to highlight the contributions of others sent a strong message about our organizational culture.

Recognize those who recognize others. In addition to verifying individual accomplishments, there is a lot of value in recognizing and highlighting cases when individuals take the time to recognize others. It sends a signal that generous and honest attribution of credit is something that the organization values. Early in one of my jobs, I took a few moments to send e-mails to thank individuals who had helped make a project of mine successful and copied my boss. My boss, in turn,scheduled time with me to thank me for taking the time to recognize others. In doing so, he sent an important message that he valued this type of behavior, and it became a habit: Ever since then, I’ve religiously sent similar e-mails to members of successful teams I’ve led.

Look out for and elevate the quiet performers. The best contributors are often the quietest. For whatever reason, they are not worried about credit and are happy to take a back seat. But people in the guts of an organization often know that some of these individuals are the lynchpins who sustain a project or unit. Taking the time to identify and reward the quiet heroes can generate good will across an organization because it creates the sense that there is real integrity.

Remember that there’s plenty of credit to go around. A mentor early in my career once told me that “credit is infinitely divisible” — in other words, there are no limits on how many individuals can be recognized for contributing to an outcome. That said, credit quickly loses meaning when everyone gets it, including people who didn’t do anything. Highly specific attributions of credit always trump blanket statements of praise. And the value of praise and credit is always higher when leaders and organizations deliver criticism with equal discipline.
Getting the assignment of credit right is important to everyone. It is a driver of high performance. It is a key to making people feel fulfilled and motivated. The very best leaders and organizations get this and spare no effort to get it right.

Sachin H. Jain

Sachin H. Jain is chief medical information and innovation officer at Merck, an attending physician at the Boston VA Medical Center, and a lecturer in health care policy at Harvard Medical School.

5 Transitions Great Leaders Make That Average Leaders Don't

The secret to leadership is there aren’t any real secrets. The best leaders have simply gone to school on improving their tradecraft. While the capabilities possessed by the best leaders might seem otherworldly to many, they are merely the outcome of hard work, experience, perspective, and yes, a bit of luck. The best leaders have just learned to make certain transitions that less effective leaders curiously remain blind to.

Some leaders hit their stride early in their career, others find their path later in life, and regrettably, far too many leaders never seem to get their footing. Great leaders discover pivot points and transitions that create a certain rhythm and balance, while average leaders tend to be somewhat tone deaf and awkward. We all recognize great leadership when we see it, but many fail to see what it is that actually makes the leader great. Following are 5 key transitions great leaders make that average leaders do not.

The best leaders recognize a common purpose, shared values, and aligned vision are the hallmarks of any great organization. These three elements set the foundation for a sustainable culture. Leaderswho fail to bring people together around these three constructs sentence their company first to the chaos of mediocrity, and ultimately to the pain of obsolescence. Great leaders create culture by design, while average leaders allow culture to evolve by default.

A lesson lost on many is profit doesn’t drive purpose, but purpose certainly drives profit – great leaders understand this; average leaders do not. Leaders who are driven by profit will find they may be successful for a season, but they’ll eventually come to realize a pure profit agenda is not sustainable over the long haul. Great leaders make the transition from profit to purpose and are handsomely rewarded for doing so. A unified purpose can endure all things.

People First– Leaders are nothing without people. Put another way, people will make or break you as a leader. You’ll either treat them well, earn their trust, respect and loyalty, or you won’t. You’ll either see people as capital to be leveraged or humans to be developed and fulfilled. You’ll either view yourself as superior to your employees, or as one whose job it is to serve them, learn from them, and leave them be better off for being led by you.

The best leaders don’t put people in a box – they free them from boxes. Ultimately, a leaders job isn’t to create followers, but to strive for ubiquitous leadership. Average leaders spend time scaling processes, systems, and models – great leaders focus on scaling leadership.

Develop Awareness– Great leaders are self aware, organizationally aware, culturally aware, contextually aware, and emotionally aware. They value listening, engaging, observing, and learning over pontificating. They value sensitivity over insensitivity and humility over hubris.

Leaders who come across as if they know everything haven’t fooled anyone – except themselves. 

Great leaders avoid the traps, gaps, and blind spots average leaders so easily step into. Leaders who choose to live in the bubble of their own thinking rather than understanding the benefits of seeking others input and counsel make things harder on everyone. The willingness to allow your positions and opinions to be challenged is a sign of strength not weakness. I’ve often said the most powerful and overlooked aspect of learning is unlearning. Leaders never willing to change their mind ensure only one outcome – a lack of growth and development.

Shun Complexity– Complexity is a leader’s enemy not their friend. Great leaders live to eliminate or simplify the complex, while average leaders allow themselves and those they lead to be consumed by it. Complexity stifles innovation, slows development, gates progress, and adversely impacts culture.Complexity is expensive, inefficient, and ineffective.

I’m not minimizing the fact we live in a complex world, and I’m not suggesting that profit cannot be found in complexity. But great leaders understand opportunity and profits are extracted from complexity through simplification, not by adding to the complexity. While many think it was Einstein who said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” the statement was actually borrowed from Leonardo de Vinci – both gentlemen were correct.

Get Personal– If I only had a nickel for every time I’ve heard someone say, “It’s not personal; it’s just business.” Great leaders understand nothing is more personal than leadership, and they engage accordingly. The best leaders understand a failure to engage is in fact a failure to lead. 

Average leaders remain aloof and distant – great leaders look to know and care for their people.

Average leaders are viewed as business executives, the best leaders are viewed as great human beings.The best leaders understand it’s not a weakness to get personal, to display empathy, kindness, and compassion – it’s the ultimate strength. Peak performance is never built on the backs of others, but by helping others become successful. Treat your people as if your life depends on it – it does.

The reality is anyone can lead, but very few lead well. Will you just show up for work and check the box, or will you lead well? Thoughts?


 

Mike Myatt,

Why CEOs Don't Focus On People - Even If They Say It's Important

Erika Andersen,  

I often lament the state of people management and leadership in the world today, and note how important it is to the future of business for executives to be better at leading and managing. And you may have heard me opine that poor management and leadership are a key factor in both the exodus of top talent and the failure to build successful companies.

And I often wonder aloud why executives aren’t better managers and leaders, given all the data that shows the connection between engaged employees and great business results.

This morning I got some insight. A post here on Forbes by Susan Adams discusses a new study, conducted by two groups at Stanford Graduate School and the Miles Group, a New York-based consulting company. I was so fascinated by the results that I went to the study itself to investigate further.

The study polled over 160 CEOs and directors of North American public and private companies, focusing on what they saw as the CEOs’ strengths and weaknesses, and asking what measures and weighting the boards used in evaluating the CEOs.

I wasn’t at all surprised by the strengths and weaknesses. Boards (and the CEOs themselves) say that the CEOs are excellent at “decision-making” and “planning,” for instance, and not so good at things like “mentoring and development skills,” “board engagement,” “listening,” and “conflict management.”  Sadly, that’s what I would have expected.

As I read further, however, I had my ‘ah-ha.’  It turns out that there’s a big gap between what boards are actually requiring of their CEOS, and what they think they’re requiring.

That is, while a large majority of board members believe their evaluation of their CEO is balanced between financial and non-financial metrics, it’s simply not true.  For example, the survey found that, on average, a CEO’s performance in the areas of talent development and succession planning was given only a 5% weighting, and only a 2.5% weighting was given to employee satisfaction/turnover. The most heavily weighted metrics were in accounting, operating, and stock price.  The study also found that supposedly important measures like product service and quality, customer service, workplace safety, and innovation aren’t included in more than 95% of CEO evaluations.

Something I’ve learned over the years about us human beings: if you want people to behave in certain ways, you have to make them feel those behaviors are easy, rewarding, and normal.  That is, they have to believe they know how to do the behavior and nothing will get in the way of them doing it (easy), that it will give them something they value (rewarding), and that their peers and/or people they admire do it (normal).

Given this, it makes sense that CEOs don’t focus enough on building a committed, engaged workforce, on creating great customer service, or on innovation: their boards are making it not-easy, not-normal, and definitely not-rewarding to do so.

If boards are giving lip service to the importance of leading and managing well – but are actually only holding CEOs accountable for stock price and growth metrics, then most CEOs will continue to drive financial value for the short-term, in ways that may not be sustainable.  They will read all the data that shows how employee engagement is a key (perhaps the key) driver of performance – nod sagely and agree…and then continue to behave as they’re being required and rewarded to behave by their boards.

Here’s one thing we can do to change this: if you’re a stockholder in a public company, write to your board and let them know how you’d like them to evaluate the CEO: that you’d like that person – and his or her team – held accountable for both great financial results, and how they achieve them.

I’d love any other ideas you have about how to change this state of affairs…
________________
Check out Erika Andersen’s latest book, Leading So People Will Follow, and discover how to be a followable leader. Booklist called it “a book to read more than once and to consult many times.”

Are You The Worst Boss You Ever Had?

 

 

When was the last time you took a vacation? Where you powered off the smart phone, disconnected from the internet, locked the office door behind you and went away. If it wasn’t within the past year, you might just be the worst boss you ever had. Employees get every weekend, plus stat holidays, plus at least two weeks of “compulsory” vacation for a total of 134 days. Yet every day I meet entrepreneurs who can’t, don’t or won’t take a single day away from the business, let alone a week.

It’s not because they love the work so much that they couldn’t bear to stop. It’s usually because they fear the business can’t function without them and even though there are delegated tasks, there’s just never enough time in the day to breathe, let alone rest. Their employees take vacations. But they do not.

Vacations are a critical  part of success. The idea of recreation – kicking back and letting the problems rest for a while – is one of the most consistent characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. I know several successful entrepreneurs who manage to take 8 weeks of real vacation time every year. They come back refreshed, rejuvenated and re-energized to tackle problems with speed and efficiency they never imagined possible.

As you begin thinking about your business plan for next year ask yourself this question, “am I building an asset like an entrepreneur or is this just a job with the worst boss ever?”





By: Mary Lou Gutscher , Magnetic Business Solutions

Crew? Or Cargo? Get the Staff You Deserve

 

 

Businesses are most often started and built by initiative… entrepreneurs who see an opportunity, jump on it and make it sing. They have the drive and take the risk to create a business from a blank sheet of paper. But then, the business grows to the point where delegation is needed and managers are hired to run various departments. That’s when the trouble starts.

When you become a manager, you also need to become an initiative giver instead of an initiative taker. If you can’t make that transition, you’ll discover that instead of a ‘crew’, your staff has become ‘cargo’. Why? Initiative doesn’t exist in the air, it exists in people, and when you take the initiative (because you’re the captain of the ship and it’s in your genes), you take it away from the very people you hired to help you grow the business.

Here’s an easy test. If one of your staff pokes her head in your office and asks you “how is it going?” it might be a sign that you’ve been taking too much initiative. If you’re in charge of all the ‘its’ – the projects, the reports, the results – the people you’ve hired to do the work (or at least the ones who haven’t yet given up and quit) are curious to know how “it’s” going. No wonder they aren’t enthusiastically engaged in the business.

Clearly, “How’s it going?” is what the captain should be asking. Your crew takes the initiative, they’re moving the business forward and you want to know how all that is going.

So, in your business, is the initiative-taking gene that got the business started also the very thing that’s preventing it from becoming what it needs to become?

 

By: Mary Lou Gutscher , Magnetic Business Solutions 

CEOs are Terrible at Management

 

 

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer: Is she listening to eople management, people inside her company? (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

A new study shows that CEOs are doing a lousy job when it comes to people management. The study, a joint project by the Center for Leadership Development and Research at Stanford’s Graduate School of  Business, Stanford’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance and The Miles Group, a consulting firm in New York that focuses on C-suites and corporate boards, found that both CEOs and boards are overly focused on the bottom line, at the expense of mentoring and engaging their boards. The survey polled 160 CEOs and directors of North American public and private companies.

One of the questions to boards of directors: Rank the top weakness of your CEO. “Mentoring skills” and “board engagement” tied for first place. “This signals that directors are clearly concerned about their CEOs’ ability to mentor top talent,” said Stephen Miles, CEO of The Miles Group, in a statement. “Focusing on drivers such as developing the next generation of leadership is essential to planning beyond the next quarter and avoiding the short-term thinking that inhibits growth.”

It makes sense to me that boards are preoccupied with financial measurements. But the study found that the attention given to talent development and mentoring was at rock bottom. The survey asked boards and CEOs about the weighting they give to various aspects of CEO performance. The most important thing, rated at 41%, was “accounting, operating or stock price performance.” The weighting given to people performance was incredibly low, with “succession planning” getting just a 5% rating and and “workplace safety” just 2%.

The researchers say that CEOs need to reach beyond numbers and care about people management. Two other statistics from the survey that underline how disengaged CEOs are from concern about employees: When asked about their CEOs’ greatest strengths, 70% rated “decision-making skills” at the top. At the bottom: 27% said “compassion/empathy,” 23% said “mentoring skills/developing internal talent” and just 23% said “listening skills.” The lowest-rated skill was “conflict management.” Likewise, when asked about CEOs’ biggest weaknesses, 24% said “mentoring skills” and 22% said “sharing leadership/delegation skills.”

Also striking is the fact that a sizable majority of directors (83%) and boards (64%) agree that the CEO evaluation process should rely on a balanced approach between financial performance and nonfinancial measurements. “Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that the CEO evaluation process is not that balanced,” said Stanford’s David Larcker, co-director of the Center for Leadership Development in a statement. “Amid growing calls for integrating reporting and corporate social responsibility, companies are still behind the times when it comes to developing reliable and valid measures of nonfinancial performance metrics.”

More results from the study:

-          Directors don’t rate their CEOs highly. Only 41% of directors say their CEO is in the top 20% of their peers and 17% say their CEO is below the 60^th percentile.

-          A sizable minority, 10%, say they have never evaluated their CEO.

-          CEOs who are evaluated, agree with the marks they get. “Shareholders have to wonder at the objectivity of the evaluation process,” said Larcker. “It’s hard to believe that boards are pushing CEOs on their evaluations if they pretty much agree with their evaluation.”

-          Many directors forgive CEOs for legal and regulatory violations. This is one of the most striking results of the study. When asked about unexpected litigation against the company, a significant minority of directors, 27%, said that it would have no impact on a CEO’s performance evaluation, while 24% said that regulatory problems would have no impact. Shouldn’t CEOs be held accountable for legal and regulatory lapses? At least directors were unforgiving about ethical violations and a failure to be transparent with the board. A full 100% said their CEOs would get worse performance evaluations in the face of ethical problems.

I agree with the study’s authors that in the ideal world, CEOs would care about people management and they would be grooming successors to step in should something go awry. But I also understand boards’ and bosses’ preoccupation with the bottom line.

Also I can think of two recent examples of companies where the CEOs left abruptly under unexpected circumstances and the companies reached outside for replacements who, thus far, have arguably done a good job—better, perhaps, than someone from inside would have done. At Yahoo last year, Scott Thompson had been CEO for just four months when activist investor Daniel Loeb, who opposed Thompson’s appointment, sent a letter to the board revealing that Thompson had lied about his credentials. Thompson, who was an outside hire from PayPayl, had zero time to groom a successor, so Yahoo reached outside again and hired Marissa Mayer from Google. Though she’s been in the post for just a year and may still hit roadblocks in her efforts to revive the struggling company, Yahoo’s stock has risen from $15 when she took the helm to $26.

Another example: Struggling big box retailer Best Buy lost its CEO, Brian Dunn, suddenly last April after his inappropriate relationship with a female subordinate came to light. An insider, director G. Mike Mikan, served as interim CEO for four months. Then the company hired Frenchman Hubert Joly, who had been running a Minneapolis travel company called Carlson. Though Best Buy’s stock fell from $20 when Joly came on board to $11 in January, he has managed to revive the company’s fortunes and bring the share price back up to $26. It’s not clear that an insider could have done a better job.

Maybe I’m guilty, like directors and CEOS, of focusing too much on the bottom line here, but in the end, that’s what shareholders value. Though I agree with the Stanford study authors that in an ideal world, CEOs would channel more of their energy toward listening to the people inside their companies and developing talent from within.

  Susan Adams Forbes Staff

Management Is (Still) Not Leadership

A few weeks ago, the BBC asked me to come in for a radio interview. They told me they wanted to talk about effective leadership — China had just elevated Xi Jinping to the role of Communist Party leader; General David Petraeus had stepped down from his post at the CIA a few days earlier; the BBC itself was wading through a leadership scandal of its own — but the conversation quickly veered, as these things often do, into a discussion about how individuals can keep large, complex, unwieldy organizations operating reliably and efficiently.

That's not leadership, I explained. That's management — and the two are radically different.
In more than four decades of studying businesses and consulting to organizations on how to implement new strategies, I can't tell you how many times I've heard people use the words "leadership" and "management" synonymously, and it drives me crazy every time. 

The interview reminded me once again that the confusion around these two terms is massive, and that misunderstanding gets in the way of any reasonable discussion about how to build a company, position it for success and win in the twenty-first century. The mistakes people make on the issue are threefold:

Mistake #1: People use the terms "management" and "leadership" interchangeably. This shows that they don't see the crucial difference between the two and the vital functions that each role plays.

Mistake #2: People use the term "leadership" to refer to the people at the very top of hierarchies. They then call the people in the layers below them in the organization "management." And then all the rest are workers, specialists, and individual contributors. This is also a mistake and very misleading.

Mistake #3: People often think of "leadership" in terms of personality characteristics, usually as something they call charisma. Since few people have great charisma, this leads logically to the conclusion that few people can provide leadership, which gets us into increasing trouble.

In fact, management is a set of well-known processes, like planning, budgeting, structuring jobs, staffing jobs, measuring performance and problem-solving, which help an organization to predictably do what it knows how to do well. Management helps you to produce products and services as you have promised, of consistent quality, on budget, day after day, week after week. In organizations of any size and complexity, this is an enormously difficult task. We constantly underestimate how complex this task really is, especially if we are not in senior management jobs. So, management is crucial — but it's not leadership.

Leadership is entirely different. It is associated with taking an organization into the future, finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster and successfully exploiting those opportunities. Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and, most of all, about producing useful change. Leadership is not about attributes, it's about behavior. And in an ever-faster-moving world, leadership is increasingly needed from more and more people, no matter where they are in a hierarchy. The notion that a few extraordinary people at the top can provide all the leadership needed today is ridiculous, and it's a recipe for failure.

Some people still argue that we must replace management with leadership. This is obviously not so: they serve different, yet essential, functions. We need superb management. And we need more superb leadership. We need to be able to make our complex organizations reliable and efficient. We need them to jump into the future — the right future — at an accelerated pace, no matter the size of the changes required to make that happen.

There are very, very few organizations today that have sufficient leadership. Until we face this issue, understanding exactly what the problem is, we're never going to solve it. Unless we recognize that we're not talking about management when we speak of leadership, all we will try to do when we do need more leadership is work harder to manage. At a certain point, we end up with over-managed and under-led organizations, which are increasingly vulnerable in a fast-moving world.

 

John Kotter

Dr. John P. Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School and the Chief Innovation Officer at Kotter International, a firm that helps leaders accelerate strategy implementation in their organizations.

The Ripple Effects You Create as a Manager

 Each one of us holds a set of beliefs and attitudes — a mindset — that determines how we interpret and respond to situations. That mindset shapes how we interact with others, and therefore it also affects the people we work with — in ways both subtle and profound. A person with a distrustful mindset, for example, views situations at work as competitive and acts to advance his own interest at others' expense by politicking: shifting allegiances, taking credit, assigning blame, withholding or distorting information. These behaviors drive up stress and burnout in others, and undermine organizational effectiveness. On the other hand, a mindset of openness, trust, and generosity promotes behaviors that have beneficial effects on others. In his new book Give and Take, Wharton professor Adam Grant marshals an impressive body of scientific evidence to show how a mindset of generosity radiates to yield broad gains. Here's one powerful research example: a 20-year longitudinal study of healthy employees found that people with social support from coworkers were two and a half times less likely to die prematurely than those without. So it's not an exaggeration to say that by being supportive of people at work, you're not just brightening their day — you're literally helping to save lives. 

What you might not appreciate is that the socially-transmitted impact of your mindset extends well beyond those people with whom you interact directly in the workplace. It also touches those to whom they are connected — most notably their partners and family members, but also their larger networks and communities. A growing body of research confirms that the stress employees experience at work crosses over to and impairs the functioning and well-being of family members, even impacting children's performance in school. This chain may unfold as follows: a manager who believes that the best way to manage employees is to "keep them on their toes" habitually makes unreasonable demands, confronts employees publicly, provides little positive feedback, and withholds information. These behaviors cause stress in the employees who are subject to them. When they come home from work at night, the employees are more likely to display anger and impatience. Their spouses' stress levels rise and marital quality declines. Their children learn to leave the parent alone in the evening rather than risk getting yelled at, and their psychological adjustment suffers. And so on, into schools and communities. 

 Happily, positive relationships in the workplace also have strong ripple effects. The person with a positive, open, and trusting mindset acts in ways that build emotional resources among work colleagues, which in turn enrich the well-being and good functioning of their families.

Let's look at how a fairly common mindset plays out in the workplace and beyond. For years, many managers have believed that a mark of a competent, committed employee is that he or she is able to leave family and personal life at the office door and, while "on the clock," focus 100% on work. This assumption is powerful; it shapes expectations about what it takes to succeed in a career, how companies assess their employees' value and performance, and the way managers behave. 

The problem is, it's also flawed. Way back in 1977, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter coined the phrase "the myth of separate spheres" to describe the problematic way in which managers thought about the interface of employees' work and personal lives. It was a myth then, and it's a myth now. Human beings can't completely segment their lives; expecting them to do so both increases strain and diminishes the gains that can be realized by deliberately seeking wins across multiple areas of life. While companies are increasingly awakening to awareness of the mutual gains of work-life integration, the separate spheres mindset still persists.

What do separate spheres and integration/mutual gain mindsets look like in action? Two starkly contrasting examples from the early years of my own career come to mind. I spent five years in my twenties working for an organization, the first two in one department and the subsequent three in another. Although the departments were located right next to each other and performed related work, they differed considerably in terms of management style and culture. I recall a particular meeting in the first. During a few minutes of small talk while people entered the conference room and settled around the table, I chatted with a colleague whose wife was shortly expecting their first baby. Being a new mother myself, I commiserated with him about late-stage pregnancy and the anxieties leading up to birth. "Will you take paternity leave when the baby is born?" I asked this question knowing that the organization had a policy in place that offered new fathers a week off with pay upon the birth of a child. He smiled and hesitated for a moment before his boss scoffed from the other side of the table, "Paternity leave? I'll give you your paternity leave: a box of cigars." And just like that, the door was shut, not only for the expectant father, but also for anyone else who may have wanted to use the policy. Like many work-life policies, the paternity leave was subject to supervisor approval. But this manager's separate-spheres mindset precluded consideration of what might have been gained by a valued employee, his family, and ultimately by the organization in exchange for a single week off work.

Two years later, when my second child was born, I went back to work full-time after six weeks of maternity leave. I was exhausted and found it stressful to be away from my very young baby for so much time. It was apparent to me that much of the work I performed could be done from home with equal or greater efficiency and no adverse impact on anyone at my office. I decided to approach my boss and request to work from home two days per week for the next six months.

 Somewhat to my surprise, he agreed. The fact that my manager was open and responded with trust and a willingness to experiment in order to meet both my needs and those of the department was transformative, not just for me, but for my family too. I cherished the opportunity to spend two extra days of each week with my baby. I was much happier and healthier. With my stress reduced, I approached my work with renewed enthusiasm. My husband, then a full-time student, had more time for studying and less work-life conflict. Importantly, I saw my manager as more multifaceted than I had previously appreciated, my respect for him deepened, and I felt a greater sense of commitment to the organization. 

 

So what can you do to radiate positive, productive energy through employees at your workplace and out through their work-life networks? Here are a few ways:

• Be a role model for work-life integration. Be open about your own challenges and strategies for fitting together your work, family, and personal life. Let your employees see you as a whole person.


• Appreciate others as whole people. The fact that everyone you work with has a life beyond work means that the team and the organization is embedded in a larger network of valuable relationships and shared goals. Appreciating the commitments that others have beyond work creates openness to looking for ways to create mutual work-life gains.


• Be willing to experiment. Keep the focus on what your team or organization is trying to achieve and how each person can best contribute to those results. Ask people what would help boost their ability to achieve desired work results while also increasing their well-being beyond work. When employees are involved in designing and implementing solutions, their commitment to making them work is strong.


• Offer socio-emotional support. Understanding of work-life challenges, sensitivity to how work can impact personal life, demonstrating respect, and offering encouragement go a long way in fostering positive relationships that help employees perform while keeping work-life conflict to a minimum.


• Be an advocate for work-life integration in your organization. Promote the cause of work-life integration. Talk about why you believe it's important to recognize and respond to employees' work-life challenges. Share success stories and examples with other managers to help decision-makers in the organization understand how to provide work-life support.

It can be difficult to recognize and change one's own mindset (in fact, this goal is at the heart of the leadership development industry). One way to approach an examination of your mindset is by asking this question: what kind of social influence would you like to have? Whether you realize it or not, each person you supervise or work with connects you to their work-life network — initially to their immediate family, but ultimately to communities and to society. What you must decide is what kind of ripples you want to transmit through these networks, because one way or another, you will create them.
   

Monique Valcour

Monique Valcour is a professor of management at EDHEC Business School in France. Her research, teaching, and consulting focuses on helping companies and individuals craft high-performance, meaningful jobs, careers, workplaces, and lives. Follow her on Twitter @moniquevalcour.