Leadership, balance and choice
From LLN
Leadership, balance and choice
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Notes--mostly from beyond librarianship--on leadership and balance, whether leaders need to be managers (and whether everyone should aspire to leadership), and related issues.
Leader's Digest
- by Leslie Dillon
The high price of stress & how to cut your costs
When leaders are stressed and worn out, the consequences are felt at both personal and professional levels.
Personal effects include allergies, colds, aches and pains, sadness, depression, fatigue, sleeplessness, and so on. Some busy executives self-medicate, eat wrong, and stop exercising. Stressed leaders can also cause problems for their organizations. When you don’t manage your stress, you don’t treat other people well.
Why is leadership stressful? The “stress of leadership is brought about by unique demands” that are magnified by today’s economic uncertainties—ambiguity; lack of control; high expectations; working outside your comfort zone and beyond your technical expertise; and managing conflict.
What can you do to better manage stress?
- Exercise. “Exercise induces relaxation by reducing physiological tension, and it can also work as a healthy distraction from stressful situations.” Exercise can also help you increase your sense of control and your self-esteem.
- Build in stress breaks. Leave your desk; walk around. Take mental or physical breaks.
- Set boundaries. “It’s important to make time for a life away from work.”
- Know your stress response. “The sooner you recognize that your body is responding to stress, the sooner you can do something about it.”
- Rethink the work. Find ways to organize and streamline your work. “Planning, organizing and prioritizing are effective stress managers.”
- Learn from the pros. “You can actually do more in less time by practicing the art of recovery.” Professional athletes know they can’t push themselves at 100 percent capacity 100 percent of the time.
“Relaxing is critical for clear and creative thinking, strong relationships, and good health. Leave the job behind: the time and energy you spend away from work can enhance your productivity and your capacity to deal with work.”
("The high price of stress: 6 ways to cut your cost," Center for Creative Leadership, February 2009.)
Be a better leader, have a richer life
Based on a program called Total Leadership, the article describes how to “integrate work, home, community, and self” so that you can become “a more productive leader and a more fulfilled person.” Friedman believes that it actually makes more sense to pursue excellence as a leader in all four domains—work, home, community and self —rather than to trade off one for another. You can find mutual value among them. He calls this achieving “four-way wins.”
You begin ”by taking a clear view of what you want from and can contribute to each domain of your life.” Next, you systematically design and implement “carefully crafted experiments.” You don’t need the workshop if you follow the process outlined in the article.
- Getting started:
- Think, write, and talk “with peer coaches to identify your values, your leadership vision, and the current alignment of your actions and values—clarifying what’s important.”
- Identify “key stakeholders.”
- Design “experiments and then try them out…”
- Next steps:
- Design the experiments to produce a change that will fulfill multiple goals benefitting each domain of your life (four-way wins.)
- Think of as many possible experiments as you can.
- Then choose a few that will give you the best return on your investment, help you practice desired leadership skills, be fun, and move you forward.
- Set up your own scorecard. Develop metrics that will work for you.
- Keep the experiments small/manageable to minimize risk.
Don’t try this at home (or at work) without reading the full article and checking the worksheets! You'll find worksheets and blank versions for downloading here. For more a more comprehensive set of online tools, videos, and blogs, (and some testimonials on the workshop) go to www.totalleadership.org.
(Stewart D. Friedman, "Be a better leader, have a richer life," Harvard Business Review, April 2008.)
Do you really want to be a leader?
Frequently, executives’ "ambivalence about their jobs leaks into…conversation.” Paul Hemp, a member of the editorial team at Harvard Business Review, believes that’s “partly because a lot of people…simply aren’t cut out to be a leader or manager. They lack the requisite analytic or people skills; dither when making decisions; don’t have the stomach to fire people; or would simply prefer to spend their energies on creative rather than managerial tasks.”
Some companies are helping non-managers decide if management is right for them. That’s good, but organizations also need to think about how to deal with the ambivalence among existing leaders, even those who are successful. They may not be comfortable promoting organizational goals that conflict with their values, or they may suffer from burnout.
Creating temporary leadership roles can help people avoid burnout. Methods for sharing leadership, e.g., encouraging “collaborative responsibility for decisions” can make leadership more appealing.
(Paul Hemp, "Do you really want to be a leader?," HBR Editors’ Blog, Harvard Business blogs, Mar. 27, 2008. This post generated a number of very interesting comments, by the way, so you might want to read more.)
- Editor's note: Are leaders always managers? Some of us would argue otherwise, that you can be a leader without having "the stomach to fire people." We might even argue that most thought leadership comes from creative people. Oddly, the first sentence in the post itself is "Do you really want to be a manager?"--and that may be a different question. See Directors, leaders and work-life balance for more discussion.
Related articles
- Reflections on library leadership - Michael Golrick, Barbara Kelly, Jeff Scott, Brett Bonfield and others offer thoughts on essential characteristics of library leaders.
- Who's a leader? - Walt Crawford considers the word and its many uses.
- Leading or managing? - two library leaders discuss the distinctions.
- Qualities of successful leaders - Notes on how successful leaders think and the qualities that make them great.
