For years, many caregivers sought to achieve a “balance” that allowed their work responsibilities and family demands to peacefully coexist. Surely, many felt, it must be possible to excel in or, at the very least, feel satisfied with both realms.

Commonly touted solutions often suggested simple fixes to this complex problem: if only they could define boundaries, communicate more effectively, or find the right support, then work-life balance would naturally fall into place.

But then COVID hit, and the collision of work and home life created a tipping point. The pandemic’s shift to homeschooling and virtual work led many working parents — especially women — to take a step back in their careers, or to leave the workforce entirely. Exhausted caregivers left their jobs in record numbers, and organizations are still feeling the effects today.

While offices have reopened and women’s employment numbers have since bounced back to pre-pandemic levels, senior organizational leaders continue to grapple with how to attract, develop, and retain women leaders (and ways to support working parents or other caregivers in general).

For those with caregiving responsibilities whose jobs can be done from home, many say that they want to continue working remotely at least some of the time. A study from the Pew Research Center reveals that 71% of employees who work from home at least sometimes say this helps them balance work with their personal lives.

Increased flexibility in the workplace comes as a long-awaited relief for working parents who struggled even before the pandemic to juggle both parenting and leadership responsibilities.

Is the idea of “balance” more attainable at last?

Organizations Must Lead the Way to Support Those Balancing Caregiving & Leadership

Certainly, flexible work arrangements help, but the golden notion of “balance” probably still feels beyond reach for many caregivers and working parents, and for good reason: we consider work-life “balance” to be a faulty metaphor.

It’s simply not possible for parents and caregivers to be fully present for their employers and their families all the time, while also taking care of their own health and wellbeing.

And the truth is, caregivers shouldn’t be forced to seek this equilibrium without organizational support.

If your organization is reconsidering how it’s supporting working parents and caregivers, you’ll want to ensure that you’re creating an environment where all your employees can thrive by offering equitable family leave policies, hybrid and remote work options, and ample growth and development opportunities.

For companies to support working parents and attract and retain top talent, they must be willing to acknowledge the juggle between parenting and leadership responsibilities, connecting leadership and employee wellbeing. It starts with managers who can create environments where others thrive — reducing stress and burnout while increasing morale and productivity, yielding people who thrive and a workforce that is flourishing. ​​

Here are some specific actions that organizations can take to signal they’re serious about supporting working parents — and all employees who are caregivers.

Supporting Working Parents, Caregivers & All Employees: 5 Tips

Specific Actions That Organizational Leaders Can Take

1. Offer fair and inclusive family leave policies.

Workers now have more bargaining power. Companies don’t want to lose talent, so employees can often enact change by calling attention to archaic and inequitable leave policies, courageously asking for the support they need from their organizations. While these conversations are useful, we still believe the onus and impetus to adopt more inclusive leave policies should fall on employers, not on employees. Specifically:

• Organizations are charged first with recognizing that families come in all shapes and sizes. To create more inclusive policies around time off from work, “maternity leave” policies should be reframed as “parental leave” — or even better, caretaker or family leave — to reflect an expanded definition of caregiving. Providing care for a family member isn’t limited to biological mothers and new babies, and caregiving for children often includes fathers, grandparents, adoptive parents, spouses or partners, etc. Leave policies should also cover an employee taking time off work to care for any family member — including aging parents, sick partners, adolescent children, those with special needs, etc.
• Further, managers should normalize actually using the available leave to focus on caregiving. Simply renaming your maternity leave policy to a “parental leave” policy is not enough; senior leaders should also actively encourage new fathers and domestic partners to take the available leave (and model this behavior themselves where applicable). This signals that your organization is serious about enabling employees to bring their whole selves to work and helps combat ingrained stigmas and societal expectations that a mother’s role as caretaker is more essential than a father’s.

When organizations offer inclusive family leave policies, they’re better able to compete for talent and retain strong performers. That’s why both company language and culture should be explicitly and intentionally inclusive, so that taking time away from work to care for a family member seems (and actually is) equally accessible.

2. Be a champion for flexibility by extending it to all employees.

Flexible work policies aren’t effective (and can actually be quite harmful) when they’re only available to a select group, or in specific scenarios. While many talent managers might acknowledge that a new parent on their team just returning from leave might need additional flexibility in their schedule, it’s important that managers remind employees that flexibility is available to everyone.

According to research, people without children sometimes feel they’re expected to pick up extra work while colleagues with children are granted increased flexibility. This dynamic not only inequitably burdens employees without children, it also creates an environment that positions flexibility as an organizational weakness instead of a strength. But the opposite is actually true.

In addition, many employers realized in the early days of COVID that they don’t have to trade flexibility for productivity. On the contrary, studies revealed that productivity actually increased as many employees shifted to remote work. With this in mind:

• Don’t assume that your organization should resume the same work arrangements after the pandemic as before. Many things have changed in recent years, so carefully consider the necessity and impact of return-to-office announcements. Evaluate the potential impact to all your employees, including those who are balancing caregiving, parenting, and leadership.
• Offer employees as much autonomy as you can in determining work schedules and locations, including remote and hybrid work options. Regardless of whether they have children, employees who have the freedom and flexibility to schedule when and where they work are more productive with the time they have. You’ll improve employee retention post-pandemic with flexible work arrangements that enable a greater sense of control, leading to more engaged, productive, and loyal employees.

3. Support Employee Resource Groups.

Also known as “affinity groups” or “business networking groups,” Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are formed by employees who share common characteristics. Within these informal groups, members provide one another with support, career development, and professional networking. In recent years, such groups for caregivers have gained popularity, as working parents and others struggling with balancing family, caregiving, or parenting and leadership challenges found they needed a network for support and advice.

Your organization can help ERGs become even more impactful through your support. Here are a few ideas:

• Assist ERGs in being inclusive and in achieving specific goals; for example, providing resources, learning opportunities, and connections with other working parents or caregivers throughout the organization.
• Share ERG goals and immediate wins with your executive leadership team to encourage senior-level sponsorship and engagement.

4. Offer flexible opportunities for leadership development.

When working parents and other caregivers are feeling challenged by work-life conflict, leadership development can give them new skillsets and mindsets to adapt and show up in the ways they’d like to — both at work and at home.

For example, our flagship Leadership Development Program (LDP)® introduces participants to the idea of a button with 4 holes as a symbol for holistic leadership. The button helps participants remember that leaders are most effective when they understand how the 4 elements of their lives — self, family, career, and community — are woven together in an interconnected way, working in tandem to strengthen their leadership and enrich their lives.

• Offer training and professional development opportunities that build capacity and resilience. Incorporating vertical development as well as horizontal development can aid those who are balancing caregiving and leadership through the process of reconciling colliding perspectives.
• Avoid overwhelming their already full schedules. Acknowledge training as an important business priority, and provide participants with the space and time needed away from work to focus on their development, as well as to integrate the learnings into their daily routines. Working parents and other types of caregivers need options for how they engage in leadership development opportunities, including the format that best fits their needs. Whether it’s face-to-face training, virtual development programs, asynchronous learning, or a combination of formats, providing flexible development opportunities in a variety of modalities will help your employees balance parenting and leadership demands, while improving engagement and retention of your talent.

5. Support employees who choose to “power down” and stay the course.

Some caregivers, particularly women, may choose or be forced to step away from their careers entirely for a period of time to focus on child-rearing or other family needs. This was common before the pandemic, and data shows that COVID accelerated the trend, as it disproportionally impacted women, with remote schooling in particular causing many women to step back from their careers or leave the workforce, either temporarily or permanently.

• When an employee expresses a desire to step back, leaders can signal support for working parents by supporting this decision and also offering an alternative. Caregivers may not need to leave their organizations entirely, if they can adjust the demands of their roles. People managers can show compassionate leadership whenever and wherever possible by providing opportunities for parents or caregivers on their teams to reduce their hours temporarily if needed and enable them to stay connected through professional networks. To ensure caregivers avoid losing momentum in their careers when doing this, managers should have candid conversations about what the “powered down” period will look like, when it might end or be reviewed, and how they can support working parents or caregivers when they do ease fully back into work.

Learn 10 specific tips for juggling parenting and leadership in our book, Kick Some Glass: 10 Ways Women Succeed at Work. Co-authors Jennifer Martineau and Portia Mount explore the “power down” alternative for mothers to accommodate childbirth and child-rearing, balancing caregiving and career. The “power down” advice is widely applicable as a way of supporting working parents and caregivers in general.

• Organizations can also pair younger employees with more senior mentors and sponsors who are willing to provide guidance and support, as well as advocate on their behalf. While mentoring at work is beneficial for all employees, such programs can be especially critical in supporting and retaining talented women leaders. Learn more about how and why sponsoring and mentoring women leaders is so important.

Help Caregivers Bring Their Whole Selves to Parenting & Leadership

While many companies around the world have publicly made claims about supporting working parents in the past few years, many have not followed through and lack measures that actually change their policies, processes, and culture.

To show your internal and external stakeholders that you’re genuinely committed to making real and sustainable change, your organization must evaluate your current practices and make upgrades where necessary — including addressing outdated leave policies to better support those struggling with caregiving, parenting, leadership, and workplace responsibilities.

Properly supported working parents and other caregivers will become better, healthier leaders at work, at home, and within their communities — leading to positive impact for your organization that’s much greater than an annual retention report might reveal.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

If you’re interested in supporting working parents and enabling caregivers at your organization to stay and thrive, thereby attracting, retaining, and engaging more talent, sign up for our newsletters to get our latest research, tips, and insights on leadership.

The post Supporting Working Parents: 5 Ways Organizations Can Support Parenting & Leadership appeared first on CCL.

Imagine one of your shirt buttons: round, with 4 holes, holding your shirt safe and closed. Picture the thread that weaves between the holes, from one to the next, to the next, and so on, connecting the holes to each other and creating a tight attachment. The button may be pulled and twisted as you fasten and unfasten it, but when the 4 holes are interlaced well, the button holds securely to the fabric.

We’ve used this metaphor of a button as a memorable symbol of what truly holistic leadership looks like ever since the start of our original and now world-renowned Leadership Development Program (LDP)®, back in 1974.

The 4 Facets of Holistic Leadership

Like a button that relies on all 4 holes to secure it, those who take a holistic leadership approach find strength from weaving together 4 key facets of their lives:

• Self,
• Family,
• Career, and
• Community.

Now, we admit the button metaphor isn’t a perfect one. If you were to design a button to represent your own life — one hole for self, one for family, one for career, and one for community — it’s unlikely that each hole would be the exact same size. Unlike buttonholes, which are identical and symmetrical, in reality, these 4 facets of your life may be in flux or vary in proportion, especially over the course of your career.

But achieving balance doesn’t mean devoting equal attention to each part of your life at all times. In fact, we often say that “balance is a faulty metaphor,” because true balance requires understanding the importance of each facet individually and being intentional about how you prioritize your time and energy in each area.

Our decades of research have consistently found that leaders are most effective when they’re able to lead authentically. When leaders bring their whole selves to their roles, they’re better able to integrate their personal values and sense of purpose into their everyday actions, and support those they lead to do the same.

That’s why all our leadership programs now emphasize building self-awareness about personal values and understanding the ways these 4 elements of your life influence each other and work in tandem. This enables you to approach leadership holistically, with a values-based approach that leads to optimal outcomes.

How to Be a More Holistic Leader

Explore Each Facet of Your Life for More Holistic Leadership

While we may be able to compartmentalize certain behaviors — for example, committing to not checking work email while on vacation with family — theres no such thing as compartmentalizing our careers, our families, our communities, or even ourselves. All aspects of our lives are intertwined, interdependent, entangled, and overlapping.

Most leaders recognize the importance of making time for these 4 facets, in a general sense. But it’s easy to lose sight of good intentions, especially when to-do lists feel endless.

To bring a holistic leadership approach to your own life and be sure your behaviors are aligning with your intentions, take some time to think about how you want to show up as a leader and as a person. Ask yourself the following questions to boost your self-awareness and clarify your values and visions as they relate to each facet of your life.

1. Self:

• What energizes you?
• What gives you peace?
• How are you actively designing your desired future?
• What will you do to better prepare yourself to help others?

2. Family:

• Who are the people who love, support, and honor you? Who nurtures the greatness that resides within you?
• Are there people you need to grow closer to, or types of support and relationships that you need to nurture more deeply?
• Are there people from whom you need to distance yourself, in an effort to better manage your own energy and wellbeing?

3. Career:

• Are you just making money, or are you also making a difference?
• What do you want to give to your teams? Your organization? Put another way, what do your teams and organization count on you for?
• What is your hope for the future? What will you do to live into that hope?

4. Community:

• How do you serve others?
• How are you building connections to others?
• Are you establishing roots in the place you live?
• Are you helping to build a thriving community, whatever that means to you?

Integrating the Facets of Holistic Leadership With Intention

During the COVID pandemic, any lines that once existed between self, career, family, and community have become even more blurred. For many people who were used to devoting their attention to work while they were in the office and devoting their attention to their families when they were at home, the pandemic meant they no longer had the luxury of that clearly defined boundary as they shifted to remote work or began leading in a hybrid work environment.

Especially in the absence of physical barriers, it’s important to remember that the goal of holistic leadership isn’t to distribute time and effort evenly among your commitments. Rather, you want to make sure your behaviors align with your values. When you have to transition quickly from an urgent work call to a child’s homework question, are you behaving in a way that shows your child you value the time you have decided to take with them?

If you can clarify your values as they relate to these 4 facets of your life, you’ll have a north star to guide your behavior and determine if you’re acting in accordance with those values and living with intention at all times, even when something unexpected comes up.

Bring Your Whole Self to Leadership: 3 Tips

How to Live Out Holistic Leadership

Now that you’ve clarified your values, take the following 3 steps to adapt how you live out those values as you move through your day and make decisions about your future.

1. Define how you currently devote your energy and attention.

Think about sketching a picture of your personal button. If you were to draw in the 4 buttonholes proportional to your time and attention, what would that look like today? How are you supporting your own self-care?

When you think about how you currently spend your resources, don’t overlook your mental energy — your most valuable asset that fuels your enthusiasm, motivation, drive, and physical energy to live a full life.

2. Ask yourself how you want to allocate your energy in the future.

In 2 to 3 years from now, it’s unlikely that you’ll want those buttonholes to be the same proportions. As your life evolves, your priorities will shift. Take time now to set achievable goals that align with your values and priorities. Ask yourself the following questions to help you define your goals:

• Self: What can you commit to for yourself?
• Career: What is one thing you can do to increase your positive impact at work?
• Family: What do you commit to do to love, support, and honor those you consider family?
• Community: What skills, talents, and/or abilities do you have that you can give to your community?

3. Determine the adjustments required to make appropriate shifts.

In terms of balancing wellbeing and leadership, you give life to what you give energy to. If you were to look at your calendar, you’d ideally see a collection of rituals and patterns that reflect your values. Maybe your calendar shows you consistently set aside time to exercise each day. Maybe you work earlier or later certain days. Maybe you do a lunch date with your spouse every Friday. Maybe you call your parents every so often. Maybe you serve on a community board for an organization you care about or spend time volunteering on the weekends. Being very intentional about how you spend your time gives you a sense of control and ensures you’re really living your life in accordance with your values.

If rituals and patterns that matter to you aren’t a part of your life right now, and you’re committed to staying accountable and making them a part of your life going forward, you may need to verbalize your commitments to others. Does your supervisor understand that it’s important for you to leave at a certain time every Wednesday to coach your child’s soccer team? Does your family know how important your morning walk is to your mental and physical health?

Communicate your values and priorities to the people in your life so they can help you follow through on your commitment to being a more holistic leader.

Why Holistic Leadership Matters

“Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” Shakespeare’s Henry IV famously said to summarize the burden of kingship. In other words, it can get lonely at the top.

Most leaders can relate to that sentiment. Being in a leadership role, especially as you move up the organizational hierarchy, means dealing with a lot of leadership stress. Left unattended, that stress can cause failed relationships, career derailment, and poor health.

But if you understand that you aren’t defined solely by your career — that it’s but one aspect of your life, and is enhanced when you make time for every other facet of your life — then you’ve laid the foundation for overcoming burnout and becoming a truly holistic leader.

And as over 1,000,000 global alumni of our Leadership Development Program (LDP)® over the past 50 years will tell you, the button and its 4 holes can be a helpful symbolic reminder of what holistic leadership looks like, and that only by taking care of yourself, as a whole person, can you weave the life you desire and leave the legacy you want — as a person, and as a leader.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Leaders better understand themselves and learn to practice more effective and holistic leadership through our transformational, world-renowned Leadership Development Program (LDP)®.

The post How to Practice Holistic Leadership appeared first on CCL.

Does it seem like there just aren’t enough hours in the day? Are you constantly being pulled in several directions, juggling priorities and demands? Most people would probably say they feel overwhelmed and out of sorts, which suggests they feel out of balance.

The often-mentioned concept of the competing priorities of work and life is “work-life balance.” Yet the balance metaphor — meaning an equal amount of our waking time split between life and work — just isn’t very constructive or realistic.

The idea that work and life can be “balanced” presents a false (and unhelpful) dichotomy. Using the word “balance” sets us up to think of “work” and “life” as an either / or, instead of a both / and. It creates a sense of a problem to be solved, instead of acknowledging a polarity to be managed.

Our research team recommends shifting to the idea of work-life integration rather than work-life balance.

Aligning Behavior With Personal Values to Drive Work-Life Integration

Work-life integration isn’t about achieving the “right” equation of time and effort, equally distributed among your commitments. It’s more a matter of choices and tradeoffs than of time, so think instead of aligning your behavior with your values. Parenting and leadership, for example, needn’t feel mutually exclusive.

The choice to prioritize work-life integration means you might work on weekends. Other times, you might work on personal stuff during the “workday.” The goal of work-life integration is to transition easily between activities that bring you joy and fulfillment, regardless of when they happen, where they’re located, or whether you’re getting paid.

People have more energy to give when they’re doing things they think have a real impact on something that’s important to them (whether it’s volunteering, work, or other activities). That’s true even when they’re working long hours.

So, think about the things both at work and at home that you can do that are important to you, and that allow you to live a happy life. Being able to do what you want to do isn’t just about hours; it’s about whether you have the energy and drive to do them.

Work-life integration is about feeling energized by what you’re doing in all parts of your life, allowing you to channel energy into taking care of whatever is important to you — both at work and outside of work. This is the idea behind practicing holistic leadership.

How Boundary Control Connects to Work-Life Integration

Our research suggests that work-life boundaries are more important than work-life balance. Where balance suggests an unrealistic image of doing it all — and in just the right amounts — boundaries open more options both for  individuals and for organizations.

People vary, however, in how much flexibility they have to create boundaries within their work lives.

Our researchers have found that some people have higher or lower levels of boundary control, and that it has much to do with the circumstances or type of work they’re in.

• High Boundary Control: People with high work and life boundary control decide when to focus on work, when to focus on family, or when to blend the 2. For example, they may decide to work late to finish a large project. Or they might attend a school event on a weekday morning and only work a half-day. Individuals with high boundary control feel they have the authority and ability to make these decisions and to manage any resulting trade-offs.
• Mid-level Boundary Control: These people sometimes decide when to focus on work or on family, or when to blend the 2, but there are times when they feel they have no choice. For example, they can sometimes focus their attention and time on family matters during work hours, but there are times they’d like to, but can’t. They may want to separate or integrate more than they’re actually able to.
• Low Boundary Control: People with low boundary control don’t get to decide when they focus on work, when they focus on family, or when they blend the 2. In most cases, these limitations are established by the type of job they have, their personal circumstances, or both.

The more control a person has over where, how, and when they work and how they manage other responsibilities, the easier it is for them to fit the different pieces of life together and achieve work-life integration. Greater control also leads to a feeling of more autonomy and security.

But boundary control is only one of 3 factors that our researchers believe affect the integration of work and personal life. To fully understand your work-life situation, you must analyze your behaviors (what you’re currently doing), your identity (where you prefer to invest your time and energy), and your perceived control (your ability to decide when, where, and how to take care of work and family responsibilities).

3 Steps for Greater Work-Life Integration

How Leaders Can Begin a New Approach

Here’s a 3-step process we recommend for setting aside the unhelpful balance metaphor and creating work-life integration for yourself.

1. Reflect.

As much as you are able, try to live with intention both at work and at home to increase your energy levels and feelings of authenticity and effectiveness.

To ensure your behaviors align with your values, take time to reflect and clarify what matters most to you. Then consider whether you’re spending time in a way that’s consistent with your values.

• For one week, record what you do for any period of time of one hour or more. While you’re at it, write down why you did what you did. Do your actions reflect or contradict your values and goals?
• Or, take an inventory of the things you like to do best, including your skills and passions, the working conditions that you enjoy most, and what makes you happy. Then, reflect on what you can do to increase your involvement in similar activities.

You may also need to reflect on what you’re doing now as a choice you’re making instead of a situation you’re the victim of. Remind yourself why you’ve made the choice you have or why the current situation is what it is. For the moment, you may be focused on surviving a temporary challenge or setback. But if current demands don’t hold in the future, or if those reasons are no longer primary for you, consider what new choices you can make now or in a few months, so that you’re aiming for work-life integration, not making the 2 feel mutually exclusive.

Remember, your needs and expectations will continue to change, so keep coming back to reflect and set achievable goals for yourself that align with your values and current priorities.

2. Have Conversations.

Everyone needs support to achieve goals, especially those as complicated as work and family goals. After taking time to reflect, talk with friends and family about what you might do differently in the future as you prioritize work-life integration. Some might help you figure out how to best manage your time and energy or agree to take tasks off your to-do list. Others can provide encouragement or empathy as you seek to adjust your work and life patterns.

You may also need to have a conversation with your manager about flexing your hours so you can start later when you need to, get off early when necessary, or make up time another day. Remind your boss that flexibility in the workplace leads directly to important organizational outcomes like improved productivity, employee engagement, and retention.

3. Create a Plan.

If the way you’re spending your time feels out of alignment with your values, decide how you’d rather spend your time. Take 5 minutes alone to imagine yourself toward the end of your life and consider: What did you not get to do that was important? Who did you not get to be?

Now — what are you going to do about it? Create a plan to make it happen and turn your intentions into reality. Doing so will increase your effectiveness and the energy you have available, leading to a greater sense of and work-life integration.

Wrapping Things Up: Work-Life Integration for Organizational Leaders

What does all this mean for how you approach the issue of work-life integration within your organization?

First, replacing work-life balance with the concept of work-life integration within your organization can help reframe the conversations employees have with one another, with their managers, and with their families.

Talking about preferences versus reality can help to identify areas that are most frustrating for employees and managers — and reveal potential fixes that ease the struggle. Getting creative about boundary control can help shape even the most structured or high-demand jobs to give employees more ease to achieve work-life integration. Give workers as much autonomy as possible to decide when and where they work.

Work-life conflicts may be hurting your organization more than you realize, but small changes that hit the mark as you work to move toward work-life integration can make a big difference in the lives of your employees — and boost their capacity to be productive, committed, and effective on the job.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Equip your team with the tools to connect personal values to organizational goals and seek greater work-life integration. We can partner with you to provide a customized learning journey for your leaders using our research-backed modules. Available leadership topics include Authentic Leadership, Communication, Emotional Intelligence, Listening to Understand, Self-Awareness, Wellbeing Leadership, and more.

The post Why Leaders Should Aim for Work-Life Integration Over Work-Life Balance appeared first on CCL.

This onslaught of information — coming from all directions — has an impact on our health. We have been dealing with a lot of uncertainty and anxiety, and for some of us, that anxiety comes in waves. For others, it’s more like a steady drip into our sanity bucket — and we know it’s just a matter of time before that bucket overflows.

Employee enthusiasm, cooperation, morale, and creativity are all jeopardized in times of stress, making it all the more difficult to run the business or organization. It’s more difficult than ever to make time for wellness.

Wellness Can Help You Achieve Success (And Attain Your Full Leadership Potential)

For years, many positive psychology experts have issued the warning: “If you don’t make time for wellness, you will never be successful.”

It’s a serious message — and it’s as true now as ever.

As leaders, we are called to be strategic. We’re responsible for setting direction, getting alignment, and inspiring commitment from our people.

That’s a tall order, and it requires more than just our physical presence — whether we’re working from home or from the office. As we rise to the challenge of living and leading in an uncertain world, we must take care of our mental health and make time for wellness so that we are able to attain our full potential, both personally and professionally. This is a key part of living with intention, at work and at home.

By whatever measure we choose — career trajectory, paycheck size, a happy family — we often gauge our own success. And while you may be successful by most accounts — including your own — you may still be falling short of reaching your full leadership potential, because “success” doesn’t necessarily correlate with achieving your true potential.

By not addressing that, we run the risk of leaving a whole lot of potential on the table.

So, how do you access your full leadership potential?

It’s easier than you might think: “Making even small changes in your daily habits can have a significant impact on your wellness, which will directly contribute to your success, regardless of how you measure it,” notes Jessica Glazer, one of our senior leadership solutions partners.

These changes needn’t be major life overhauls. At CCL, we teach that making even small adjustments helps you make time for wellness, which will pay off in all areas of your life, helping you to come closer to reaching your true potential as a leader.

How to Make Time for Wellness: 4 Proven Positive Psychology Techniques

Wellness Tips to Help You Achieve Your Full Leadership Potential

Here are 4 wellness techniques that have been scientifically proven to decrease your stress and increase your resilience, wellbeing, and leadership:

• Increase your sleep, both in terms of quality and quantity.
• Increase your movement with exercise throughout the day.
• Develop your mindfulness skills (via various meditation techniques).
• Foster a culture of gratitude both at work, and at home.

Making headway in any of these 4 areas requires no more than 20 minutes a day — and often, as few as 3 minutes will do the trick. These small steps will improve your resilience and therefore help move you closer to accessing your untapped leadership potential.

By increasing in each of these 4 areas — sleep, movement, mindfulness, and gratitude — even if only minutes per day, you will make time for wellness, when time is at a premium.

Dive deeper into 8 evidence-based practices that keep you healthy, focused, and functioning with our book, Resilience That Works: Eight Practices for Leadership and Life, “a practical guide for gaining and maintaining strength through the trials and tribulations of leading and living.”
-Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author

1. Increase your sleep.

Time commitment: As little as 20 minutes a day

Research shows that you lose one IQ point for every lost hour of sleep. Go to bed just 20 minutes earlier. Or, catch up by taking a quick nap during the day, and reap the added benefit of increasing both your alertness and productivity levels for the afternoon. Consider a short nap after lunch or before dinnertime with your family. Your partner, friends, or children deserve your attention, and it can be hard to focus if you’re nodding off.

If naps won’t work, set your alarm to wake you at the time you’ll actually need to get up. Hitting the snooze button may make you feel like you’re sneaking in a few extra minutes of rest, but you’d be better off letting your alarm go off 20 minutes later and getting up after an extra bit of restorative sleep. Being tired at work is a roadblock for leaders.

2. Increase your movement.

Time commitment: 5 minutes a day

If you’re not currently able to fit exercise into your busy schedule, don’t feel you must jump headfirst into a CrossFit membership. Because exercise and leadership are closely linked, any movement is better than none. Just taking a 5-minute break to stretch or take a super-quick walk can have immediate positive effects on your stress levels, creativity, and productivity.

These effects are even greater if you get that walk in outdoors, around some trees or greenery. Aim to make time for wellness by increasing your movement just a little each day, and don’t forget to notice the exercise that you’re actually getting, but may be ignoring.

3. Increase your mindfulness.

Time commitment: 1 minute a day

Put a meditation app like Calm or Headspace in the spot on your smartphone where your most commonly used social media app usually sits. You’ll be surprised, both by how mindlessly you open up the app without a thought, and by how easily you can fill the few minutes you might’ve spent scrolling with a grounding meditation instead.

You may like a short, guided recording, or you may prefer the timed sessions that just play background music — try a few and figure out what works best for you. A recent favorite of ours is Calm’s breathing meditation, which rings a chime as an indication to inhale, a chime to hold your breath for a count of 2, and a chime to exhale. It’s simple and effective, and best of all: You can use it for a little as 60 seconds to help re-center yourself whenever you need to hit reset.

Mindfulness practices can boost your leadership skills, so getting into the practice of centering yourself — and becoming more mindful of your emotions and environment — will benefit you in a multitude of ways. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself more aware of the needs of your colleagues and family, or if you’re less rattled by the constant change we all confront each day. Being mindful helps us to notice more things, both internally and externally, and thus navigate through our days more effectively.

4. Increase your gratitude.

Time commitment: 3 minutes a day

Keep a gratitude journal. Use a book, use your phone, or use one of the many apps that offer this service, but don’t miss the opportunity to reframe your long-term mindset. Writing down even 3 good things every day will quickly train your brain to look for positives throughout your day. This will pay off both personally and professionally, as your happiness boost will be noticed in and out of the office.

If you want to spread the benefits and encourage gratitude in the workplace, you may wish to extend your thanks to others at work to help your team members feel appreciated, engaged, and supported.

Want to make this a daily practice? Once a week — perhaps first thing on Monday or last thing on Friday — spend no more than 3 minutes writing a quick gratitude letter to someone in your life. This can be handwritten or sent via email, but try following our widely recognized SBI feedback model to make it quick, easy, specific, and impactful:

• Share the Situation. (This morning, just before our weekly call …)
• Describe the Behavior you observed. (… when you agreed to accommodate my last-minute request to reschedule …)
• Depict the Impact on you. (… I felt supported and grateful. I’m so glad to get to work with you.)

Sign it, send it off, and you’ve not only benefited from gratitude, but you’ve made someone else’s day better, too.

A Closing Word On Reaching Your Leadership Potential

So, remember these 4 tips from positive psychology to carve out time for wellness and help you boost your resilience levels. When you make time for wellness, you’re equipped to seize all the possibilities that await, and truly achieve your maximum potential as a leader — and as a person.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Help your team make time for wellness and develop habits that support their own resilience, increasing their ability to reach their full leadership potential. Our evidence-based resilience training will help your leaders avoid burnout — and burn bright instead.

The post Make Time for Wellness to Reach Your Full Leadership Potential appeared first on CCL.

Though work-life conflict has long been an issue, it became an even bigger concern in recent years as people struggled to cope with pandemic stress. It’s more critical now than ever: Companies must support their workers as they face unprecedented challenges balancing their personal and professional lives.

Research has repeatedly found that organizations with leaders who support employee wellbeing — including those with a culture that supports people’s commitments outside of work — are more productive and profitable. They’re also better able to boost morale, reduce turnover, and attract top talent.

In this article, we’ll provide some tips on what HR departments and leaders can do in helping employees manage their work-life conflict.

But first, we’ll take a look at the question, Are balanced leaders better performers?

How Individuals Manage Work-Life Conflict Matters for Organizations

Yes, Leaders With Healthy Work and Life Balance Are Actually More Effective

The conventional wisdom is that dedicating oneself thoroughly to a cause usually pays off. However, sacrificing everything for career success is likely to backfire. Research has conclusively found that working more hours doesn’t lead to increased productivity; it leads to burnout.

And if spending more time on the job was directly proportional to one’s work effectiveness, then leaders who are rated by their colleagues as having a healthy work and life balance would receive low marks.

But in fact, our researchers found that the opposite is true. Their analysis of anonymized data from thousands of 360-degree leadership assessments completed by participants in our leadership development programs worldwide found that leaders whose colleagues rated them as having healthier work and life balance are also seen as significantly more effective in their roles.

The assessments evaluate a wide range of leadership competencies, but among the questions asked are these 5 related to work-life conflict issues:

1. Does the leader strike a reasonable balance between work and private life?
2. Does the leader act as if there’s more to life than just having a career?
3. Does the leader have activities and interests outside of his or her career?
4. Does the leader take his or her career so seriously that their personal life suffers?
5. Does the leader allow job demands to cause family problems?

We found that executives and managers who received higher scores on the balance questions had higher scores on leadership effectiveness, too, with balanced leaders typically scoring 16% higher on effectiveness than less balanced leaders. So the research is clear: organizations benefit when individual leaders feel supported and able to manage work-life conflict.

Now it’s up to HR leaders and managers to support employees in navigating their work-life conflicts.

Helping People Manage Work-Life Conflict Improves Productivity, Engagement & Retention

Unfortunately, some companies still haven’t bought into the idea that helping people better manage work-life conflicts will improve retention and productivity. The “Great Resignation” showed the flaw in that thinking: in the face of the global coronavirus pandemic and its aftermath, workers across industries began questioning the meaning of their work and rethinking what they want from their lives, and millions began leaving their jobs.

In contrast, productive organizations that use human capital effectively take a longer-term perspective on the employment relationship. Quality human resources are seen as a core competency of the organization. At the healthiest organizations, people are viewed as assets to be nurtured and developed, rather than merely as costs to be minimized.

Organizations that are allowing their employees maximum flexibility right now are the ones coming out on top. A survey from The Conference Board earlier this year found that 60% of HR leaders reported that productivity actually increased in their organizations. And allowing flexible work arrangements post-pandemic is enabling higher retention of existing employees and recruitment efforts that cast as wide a net as possible to find the best talent available.

The truth is, employees feel more engaged in their jobs and in their home lives when they are part of healthy work environments. They feel an energetic connection to their work and family activities, which fuels their engagement, productivity, and effectiveness both on and off the job. This is what holistic leadership is all about.

Therefore, rather than thinking of work-life conflicts only in terms of policies or benefits, HR teams, top executives, and managers across the organization should focus on creating greater congruence between employer and employee interests.

To strengthen employee engagement and motivation, ensure you’ve communicated clearly about who the organization as a collective is, what purpose it serves, and how the business impacts the environment, society, community, customers, employees. This creates more purposeful leadership, enabling employees to see the connection between their work and the direction of the overall organization.

We believe managing work-life conflicts will become even more important in the coming years, which is why organizational leaders can (and should) continue to evolve with our changing world.

Signs That Your Employees Are Able to Manage Their Work-Life Conflicts

Watch for These 3 Factors That Indicate Employee Wellbeing

Because managers are responsible for leading others, leaders have a duty to look out for their teams and help create an environment where others in the organization can be well. Here are 3 signals that organizational leaders can watch for to ensure that their employees are successfully managing work-life conflict and feel they are able to be well.

1. Employees feel recognized and valued for good work.

They believe that their jobs are a good fit with their abilities and interests. This is key for boosting employee motivation. Engagement and intention to stay are both dramatically higher for employees who believe their managers care about their development and wellbeing. In contrast, the absence of support makes the heart wander.

2. Workers believe there’s a mutual positive social exchange in the employment relationship.

This means they’re paid fairly and they don’t have to sacrifice their personal and family wellbeing in order to perform their jobs; they have a sense of control over their work-life conflicts and boundaries. The majority of workers report that they want flexible and remote work options to remain post-pandemic. With so many people quitting, is your organization embracing flexibility in the workplace and telling your employees that you’re open to continued hybrid and remote work, or flexible schedules?

3. Employees are developing skills and knowledge that keep them employable.

Being encouraged to keep learning and feeling that management supports ongoing development is extremely important for employee motivation. Make sure your managers know how to show boss support for development. And have you been looking seriously at ensuring your managers are ready for the new world of work, with the skills needed to lead effectively in the new hybrid workforce?

You may also want to consider whether your organization is helping your workers to manage any sense of work-life conflict by equipping them to build resilience, which will in turn will increase their engagement and performance. For example, are there additional actions your organization can take to show support for sleep and rest?

Your organization can signal that you take employee resilience and wellbeing seriously and provide more direct support for your people by helping them better manage their work-life conflicts.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Support your team and their sense of managing any work-life conflict by providing research-based resilience training solutions.

The post Cultivate Wellbeing to Help Employees Manage Work-Life Conflict appeared first on CCL.

Resilience is our ability to respond adaptively to challenges. It’s what helps us get back up again, stronger, after meeting life’s hurdles, disappointments, and failures. It’s more than simply bouncing back from adversity or not breaking in the face of hardship. Resilient leadership also includes growth.

In recent years, as we’ve all adapted to unprecedented change in our professional and personal lives, our resilience has been tested more than ever.

If you’re in a role managing others, it’s important that you are demonstrating resilient leadership for your colleagues at work. A resilient leader is one who demonstrates the ability to see failures as minor setbacks, with the tenacity to bounce back quickly and turn challenges into opportunities.

In difficult times, your team is looking to you for support and courage; they’re looking for you to set the direction and build alignment and commitment.

If you practice resilient leadership, you’ll project a positive outlook that will help others maintain the emotional strength they need to commit to a shared vision, and the courage to move forward and overcome setbacks.

Dive deeper into 8 practices that keep you healthy, focused, and functioning with our book, Resilience That Works: Eight Practices for Leadership and Life.

If your challenges are testing your ability to bounce back, there are steps you can take to help you become a more resilient leader who can thrive. By modifying your thoughts and actions, you can change your views, habits, and responses towards more resilient leadership. Not only will that help to broaden your own outlook, but it will also inspire your team to become more adaptable and resilient, too.

A Framework for More Resilient Leadership

As noted in our white paper, we believe that building resilience is a whole-self endeavor, involving a leader’s body, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Our researchers developed the following framework for building resilient leadership.

4 Core Areas of Resilient Leadership

• Physical resilience is the body’s capacity to respond to stressors with strength and stamina, as well as recover from injury.
• Mental resilience is the ability to maintain or regain cognitive capacities that risk degradation and to allow creativity to emerge.
• Emotional resilience centers on understanding, appreciating, and regulating emotions, and consciously choosing feelings and responses, rather than simply automatically reacting to the environment.
• Social resilience reflects an individual’s capacity to work with others to endure and recover from stressors.

Each of these 4 areas is vital to helping a leader respond to challenging situations and each contributes to an individual’s sense of flourishing, life satisfaction, and wellbeing. It’s important to note that these 4 areas are interwoven, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing — and resilient leadership itself is in the center, strengthened and reinforced by each area.

8 Practices for Resilient Leadership

To become a more resilient leader and grow in each of the 4 core areas, focus on the following 8 resilient leadership practices:

1. Increase Physical Activity.

In addition to lowering your blood pressure and cholesterol, we know that regular exercise improves your ability to process stress and simultaneously makes your leadership more resilient and effective. Learn more about how exercise is linked to leadership effectiveness.

2. Get Enough Sleep.

Detaching from work and making time for the recommended 7-8 hours of sleep each night is scientifically proven to strengthen resilient leadership. Learn more about how sleep makes you a stronger leader.

3. Boost Mindfulness.

Whether you’re celebrating success or enduring hardship, make time for mindfulness. Mindfulness fosters learning, new perspectives, and a degree of self-awareness that can enhance your resilience and build resilient leadership.

4. Challenge Your Assumptions.

Learn to notice and challenge potentially faulty assumptions about what others are thinking and doing — a process known as “cognitive reappraisal.” Our perceptions are more likely to become distorted and/or irrational when we’re under stress; in many cases, they become oversimplifications of the situation that may not be accurate. When you challenge these assumptions, you can arrive at more productive (and less stressful) beliefs. Learn more about the power of self-talk when leading through difficult times.

5. Savor the Sweet Things.

Deliberately enhance and prolong your positive moods, experiences, and emotions by intentionally savoring them. Consciously savoring the good things in life is important because neuroscience research suggests that our brains have a negativity bias, so leaders must be intentional about reaching for positivity in order to enhance resilient leadership. Learn more about how to maximize joy through savoring.

6. Practice Gratitude.

Take time to acknowledge and appreciate small things throughout your day. The more purposeful you are about practicing gratitude, the more things will naturally trigger a feeling of thankfulness. Giving thanks will actually make you a better leader.

7. Build Social Connections.

Develop and nurture a broad network of personal and professional relationships. Of course, having strong relationship skills at work is important for achieving business outcomes and meeting professional goals, but personal relationships matter too, and can provide the types of support you need for the work-life juggle. Both types of social connections are critical in helping you deal with hardships and in developing perspective. Remember that strong social connections matter for building resilient leadership on your team, too.

8. Engage Your Senses, Including Touch.

When we think of engaging our senses, we often forget about our sense of touch. But engaging in some types of physical contact can be a simple and effective way to reduce anxiety and stress. Because touching at work is not as relevant for hybrid and remote teams, and can be inappropriate and/or misunderstood in a work context, this resilience practice is best implemented in your personal life, where you can share contact with supportive people and snuggle with pets. Even brief positive touches, such as a fist bump or a high-five, can contribute to increased wellbeing.

Together, these 8 resilient leadership practices will make you a happier, more successful person, both as a leader at work and as an adaptable, future-ready individual.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Empower your team to develop more resilient leadership and habits that create conditions for peak performance with our resilience-building solutions, which will help your leaders avoid burnout — and burn bright instead. 

The post 8 Practices for More Resilient Leadership appeared first on CCL.

The science is increasingly clear: Sleep matters to your mental, physical, and emotional health.

People feel better and function better when they get adequate sleep. Without enough sleep, people are not only tired at work, but their self-awareness and interpersonal savvy decrease, and problem-solving and decision-making abilities also decline — all things that get in the way of quality work and effective leadership.

Although sleep is a personal and individual matter, the costs of sleep deprivation are paid by organizations. Sleep and productivity are linked, so if leaders are shortchanging sleep, packing more into their days without rest and recovery, they aren’t performing at their best.

Instead, they may be compromising team effectiveness; making poor decisions; and struggling to innovate, collaborate, and manage complexity.

Yet few empirical research studies have examined the sleep habits of leaders in organizations. Do they get enough sleep to perform at their best? Or are they tired at work?

Tired at Work? Our Research on Leaders’ Sleep Patterns

We’ve looked extensively at the connection between sleep and leadership, examining the sleep patterns reported by leaders and what these patterns tell us about organizational factors affecting sleep. In our research study, we found that:

• Leaders don’t sleep enough, but some struggle more than others.
• Leaders would like to get more sleep, but work often keeps them awake.
• Leaders don’t sleep differently from other people, but they are assumed to sleep less.

In an earlier white paper, we gained insights about the underlying beliefs that people have about the connection between sleep and performance. This is important because if you believe that your VP sleeps less than both you and your colleague down the hall, you’re showing an implicit association between getting less sleep and being a high performer at work.

But we found that the reality is different. In fact, there were no differences in self-reported sleep across all our respondents; consultants, CEOs, managers, and professionals in non-managerial positions all report similar sleep habits.

Executives were also some of the least likely to endorse such statements as “I think of high performers as energetic people that don’t need much sleep” or the assertion that “putting in long hours and sacrificing sleep is a necessary trade-off to get ahead at work.”

So when it comes to sleep, the view of the top does not match the view from the top.

Our paper’s findings also suggest that there are actions that organizations can take to improve sleep and work performance, such as:

• Educating leaders about best sleep practices;
• Countering the “workplace warrior” culture; and
• Supporting the ability to detach from work.

Supporting healthy sleep habits is an overlooked way organizations can nourish, develop, and protect their people, thereby improving retention and maintaining a capable, high-performing pool of talent.

Sleep and Leadership: What’s the Connection?

Experts around the globe are begging people to get more rest. And with good reason. The scientific evidence of the importance of sleep is staggering — and yet, most people don’t get the recommended 7–8 hours of sleep each night.

According to Harvard Medical School, even sleeping one hour less than what’s needed can have a negative impact, and sleeping longer on the weekend doesn’t prevent problems caused by lack of sleep during the week. As a result, many people are living and working in a sleep-deprived state.

In fact, 23% of employees in the U.S. report being too sleepy to fully function.

During sleep, significant work takes place — vital processes that are associated with a variety of functions impacting physical, cognitive, and emotional health. Not getting enough sleep is associated with the risk of infections, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, heart disease, depression, anxiety, and lower life expectancy.

Sufficient sleep lets people conserve and restore energy, build memories, and take in new information. Sleep improves cognitive functions such as memory, attention, and the ability to make connections and inferences. Sleep allows people to regulate their emotions and lower stress levels.

Notably, sleep impacts exactly the human capacities that are most important for leadership effectiveness: creative problem-solving, interpersonal savvy, sound decision-making, self-awareness, and energy.

Well-rested leaders are better equipped to be open to others’ views, juggle different mindsets and perspectives, demonstrate learning agility, and accomplish complex work through collaboration.

In contrast, poor sleep leads to:

• Diminished concentration
• Impaired memory
• Reduced ability to communicate
• Lowered creativity
• Increased moodiness, stress, and anxiety
• Difficulty responding to complex organizational challenges

When people are tired at work, their energy reserves are low and self-control suffers. They’re more likely to succumb to impulsive desires and compromised decisions. That’s why, like exercise, sleep is among the 8 practices for resilient leadership.

Some Closing Thoughts About Being Tired at Work

Remember, making time for wellness in general, and sleep in particular, isn’t a sign of laziness or weakness — rather, it’s a sign of strong leadership.

If you can’t improve your sleep quality on your own, see your doctor. There are treatments and therapies for many sleep disorders.

Organizations know they need leaders with the skills to engage and motivate others, steer through challenges, and manage change and complexity — which is why they provide leadership education, career experiences, and developmental opportunities to both their emerging and experienced leaders.

But for leaders to be high performers, consistently functioning at their very best, they need to get plenty of sleep, too. That’s why we advise organizational leaders to support and encourage rest and resilience.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Support your team in not being tired at work and help them better understand the sleep and leadership connection. Our resilience-building solutions will help your leaders learn how to avoid burnout — and burn bright instead.

The post Tired at Work: A Roadblock to Effective Leadership appeared first on CCL.