Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life

An interview with Stewart Friedman, Professor, University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
From harvardbusiness.org



Interview transcript:

Hello I’m Paul Michael, director of content for harvardbusiness.org and I’m delighted to be joined today by Stew Freedman. Stew, is the author of the Harvard Business Review article “Be a better leader, have a richer life” and the book “Total Leadership”.


PM: Stew thanks for joining us today.

SF: Thanks for having me Paul, great to be here.

PM: Our pleasure. Ok our goal for today is to help our audience become better leaders by simultaneously excelling in four areas of their life, work, home, community and self.

SF: Right.

PM: So let’s begin by allowing me to play devil's advocate. We’re talking about work here. Why do we care about the other three areas?

SF: Why care about your family, the society and your private self, your mind and body and spirit when your primary focus is work? Well, the most important reason is that these other parts of your life affect your work so how things are going at work when your private sphere of mind, body and spirit and your sense of contribution to society or to your friendship networks, your social groups, all that affects your performance at work. And one of the things that we’ve found is that the more you can bring the whole person in, the more energy, the more productivity, the more commitment, loyalty and focus you’ll have at work. So it makes business sense to account for the whole person’s interests and passions.

PM: Is that we’re talking about here your work-life balance or there’s something more to it than that?

SF: A lot of people talk about work-life balance. Many more people today than when I’ve first started addressing this issue twenty years ago in my first summer …. and it’s become a very present issue in many different sectors of our society and abroad and there’s a lot of important reasons for that. But balance is the wrong metaphor.

Balance is the wrong metaphor because it implies trade-offs, it implies that you’ve got to give up one part of your life to have success in another part. And what I want to encourage people to do, is to see the possibility of what I call 'four-way wins' which requires that you use leadership to better integrate the different parts of your life, all four, work, home, community and self; and to generate the support that you need from the key people around you for making change, creating meaningful, sustainable change in how, where and when you get things done so that is better for you and better for the different people in the different parts of your life. And what I find is that when you do that, when you take an approach that is not about trading off or balancing but rather integrating in an intelligent way that fits your life, your world: that actually works.

PM: So help me out here. I, like a lot of members of our audience, I’m sure was brought up with a mentality that these are bad trade-offs but you do have to be willing to sacrifice in one area to excel in another. So let’s get specific here. Help us understand how to take that lead to this new mentality.

SF: It starts with being real which means understanding what really matters to you. There are really a couple of really fun and interesting ways of doing that: looking at your core values, looking at your future, what’s the legacy you want to leave for the world twenty years hence. What are the most important parts of your life today in terms of work, home, community and self? So you take the 'four-way view' and see which of these parts are really most important to me and where do I focus my time and attention and how are things going in each of the different domains. So all that is part of being real, what really matters.

The second piece be whole is about understanding the needs and interests. What I call the performance expectations of the key stakeholders, the most important people in your life. See, you think about and write about who the most important people are and what your mutual expectations are, at work, in the community and for yourself in terms of your own mental health, physical health and spiritual growth and development and leisure. And see, you have a new perspective on where now can I create sustainable change? Where now can I experiment with how to bring the different parts together in a way that produces a four-way win? so that’s a third part: the innovator.

Act with creativity by experimenting with how you do things and so the fun part is experimenting. So, what kind of experiments do people do? Well, they range from changing the where and when of getting things done, what I call time-shifting or replacing, working at home a day a week for example, or in a more micro scale, focus on concentrating experiments where you ah…shut off your Blackberry from the hours of 6 to 10 pm a couple of nights a week, and see what benefit that brings for the different domains of your life, the different areas, or there’s the example that I write about in the article…ah a man who was new to his community and was working in a financial services company, wanted to become a high potential for executive promotion in his company and also wanted to join a community board that would involve his fiancée who is very interested in community service activities and would also connect him more closer with his sister who is a special education teacher so his experiment was to join this community board and to extend his network in a professional context in the community. Of course the bank saw that as it was good for them and it was also good for his family as well as for himself and his community. So those are some examples.

PM: Great, we’ve got something here and begins with introspection, reflection, discussion with others, finding that gap between who you are, who you want to be, and experimentation.

SF: Right, so when I talk to people months and years down the road about what they take away from this process. It’s less about the impact of a particular experiment than it is on their capacity to lead change in all the different parts of their life. And that’s really a primary goal of this approach.

PM: Stew Freedman, thanks very much.

SF: Thank you.

To learn more about how to put Stew’s ideas into practice you can visit his website totalleadership.org