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WORK-LIFE BALANCE
Work-Life Balance Through Interval Trainingy Scott Behson
UNE 03, 2014
At a ThirdPath Institute conference a few weeks ago, a great
discussion arose around the fact that workloads tend to ebb and
flow, and it’s importan
now how to alternate between periods of peak effort and
recovery. Before long, someone noted the analogy to high
performance in sports, and use
hrase that piqued my curiosity: Corporate Athlete. I loved the
term so much I jotted it down, thinking I might make something of
it in my writing an
onsulting. Then I Googled it.
Oops. Apparently, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz have already made
quite a lot of the term corporate athlete, having coined it way
back in a 2001 HB
rticle ( I was only 13 years late to the party!) and
explored it in a series of best-selling books about engagement,
energy, and business success. So mu
or my plan to unleash it on the world.
ut I was all the more glad to find so much work already done on
corporate athleticism, because it has a lot to offer my field: the
challenges faced by
working parents.
oehr and Schwartz look at how the winners in the world of sports
prepare for competition and then apply these techniques to
managerial work. Th
rge executives “to train in the same systematic, multilevel way
that world-class athletes do.” No, CEOs are not forced to run wind
sprints (although
ome do). Rather, they are coached in a holistic program designed
to help them attain – and sustain- the highest performance at their
craft.
What strikes me most in the writing Loehr and Schwartz have done
is their frequent use of the word “balance.” In particular, they
see great athletes
orporate athletes achieving the right balance across three
critical dimensions:
. Mind and Body
. Performance and Development
. Exertion and Recovery
Of course, people trying to succeed both at work and at home are
constantly thinking in terms of balance. But perhaps Loehr and
Schwartz have giv
s a more nuanced way of thinking about what needs to be
balanced. Using their dimensions, how might someone go about
becoming a superstar W
ife Athlete?
irst, let’s think about that mind-body balance. For athletes,
the classic mistake to avoid is focusing only on preparing one’s
body for the game. Gre
oaches equip their players to win the mental game as well the
physical one. Executives, by contrast, are too likely to grind away
at intellectual task
nd overlook that their bodies must be healthy if they are to
have the energy to perform well on the job. As Loehr and Schwartz
put it, a successful
pproach to sustained high performance “must pull together [many]
elements and consider the person as a whole.” It must address the
body, the
motions, the mind, and the spirit.
or work-life athletes, mind-body balance suggests that we should
get enough sleep, eat reasonably well, engage in some exercise -
and make room
ur lives for social interaction, “me time,” and
perspective-seeking through reflection and meditation or prayer.
You don’t have to be in perfect shap
e good at your job or effective as a parent. But if we neglect
our bodies, or spirits, we may not have enough sustained energy for
effectiveness in ei
http://thirdpath.org/https://hbr.org/search?term=scott+behsonhttps://hbr.org/https://hbr.org/http://fathersworkandfamily.com/2013/04/19/taking-a-break-from-parenting-benefits-everyone-or-in-praise-of-me-time-for-dads/http://fathersworkandfamily.com/2012/09/19/networking-for-fatherhood-or-in-praise-of-beer-fire/http://fathersworkandfamily.com/2013/07/25/regular-exercise-can-help-us-be-better-dads/http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=jim+loehr+and+tony+schwartz&tag=googhydr-20&index=stripbooks&hvadid=18834207149&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=14499608003987812247&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=b&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_68t1kq542m_bhttps://hbr.org/2001/01/the-making-of-a-corporate-athlete/ar/1http://thirdpath.org/https://hbr.org/search?term=scott+behsonhttps://hbr.org/topic/work-life-balance
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work or family, let alone both.
he performance-development balance also has a particular
relevance to the work-life realm. Athletes know that the vast
majority of their effort is
pent on development, preparing for the performance they must put
in during actual competition. In business, it feels like the
proportions are inver
very day executives must perform, and only a tiny fraction of
their time is set aside for “professional development.” But
actually, the athlete’s
nderstanding of the balance would make more sense for business
people, too. Athletes in their development days focus on individual
elements of
ame and build their capacity in the fundamentals; on competition
days, they pull all the pieces together and push performance to the
maximum.
ikewise in business, there are those high-stakes occasions when
managers can only pull off what they are trying to accomplish by
drawing on ever
ompetence they have; but between “big game” days, many
assignments could be focused on honing particular fundamentals.
Now consider that working parents also have moments when their
capabilities as work-life athletes are seriously put to the test
and their performan
as the greatest consequences. In those moments, they too need to
pull together all their resources and abilities to make the right
moves. And ideal
hey would have prepared for those moments by deliberately
developing individual elements in situations where the stakes were
not so high.
Anyone who wants to sustain a performance edge needs to figure
out how to keep developing new capabilities, and not just keep
drawing on existin
nes. If this can’t be accomplished through daily tasks, then it
requires regularly scheduled time to be set aside. Whether it’s
protecting 30 minutes
very other day to read up on industry developments, listening to
a language-instruction course during the morning commute, or trying
a new recip
very week, turning off the performance pressure creates more
openness to new approaches and heightens performance in the long
run.
his brings us, finally, to the exertion-recovery
balance that Loehr and Schwartz see great athletes managing so
well. “In the living laboratory of spo
hey write, “we learn that the real enemy of high performance is
not stress, which, paradoxical as it may seem, is actually the
stimulus for growth.
Rather, the problem is the absence of disciplined, intermittent
recovery.” For example, in weight lifting, one stresses muscles to
the point where the
bers literally start to break down. However, after an adequate
recovery period, the muscle not only heals, it grows stronger.
Without rest, one ends
with be acute and chronic damage.
n business, demanding projects, with tight deadlines and stretch
goals, can be great – but can’t be unremitting. Occasional overwork
is a necessity,
work and in the rest of our lives, but chronic overwork robs us
of our resilience. This reduces our performance over time, and
causes damage in our
work and personal lives. Similarly, too many working parents go
full-tilt, non-stop to tackle all they have to do without allowing
themselves the
ecovery time needed for sustainable effectiveness. “Recovery”
for the work-life athlete might not come when they jump from the
demands of one
ront to the demands of another. It might require taking breaks
from the jumping itself. A good start might be to arrange for some
standing “no/limi
ontact” time slots with managers and coworkers (e.g., specifying
that no one should expect a response to an email between 6:30 and
9:30 pm). Fo
matter, why not set “no screen” hours at home, when everyone
stays off their phones, tablets, and other devices and is available
to each other?
rom a management standpoint, we need to rethink the notion that
non-performance time is wasted time. Instead, we need to see that
recovery is
omponent of sustained high performance. This means we must
resist continually increasing the time demands we put on our
employees and expe
ur employees to be constantly “on call” even after hours. We
need to encourage our employees to take lunch breaks, relax on
weekends, and actua
ake their vacation days, unplugged (and also do these things
ourselves). By helping to strike the right balances, we can build
the work-life athletici
we need when the stakes are highest.
Scott Behson is a Professor of Management at Fairleigh Dickinson
University, and the author of The Working Dad’s Survival Guide: How
to Succeed at Work and a
Home. He writes about work and family issues for Time,
WSJ, the Huffington Post and his blog, Fathers, Work and
Family. A national expert in work-family issues
Scott was a featured speaker at the White House Summit for
Working Families. Follow him on Twitter @ScottBehson.
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3 COMMENTS
ennethfung 2 years ago
cott, the term “corporate athlete“was new to me too and it’s a
good one. In particular, the need for recovery time which I think
is absolutely essential particularly with
nowledge work. The brain simply cannot constantly analyze,
create or synthesize. It needs both rest time and time to take on
new information. One question Scott- who do
hink should be in charge of insuring our corporate athletes get
into top condition – HR, managers, or executives at the top?
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