Work Life Balance: Balancing Life

Work-Life balance is a major topic in today’s business world. Every organization is focused on addressing the issue and there is tons of literature on this topic. There is lot of time spent thinking about solutions to improve work-life balance. Are we successful? Do we really understand what work-life balance is?

I have fundamental issue with the word ‘work-life’ balance. This tends to indicate that work is not part of life.

·         How could we define a place, where we spend majority of adult, active life as NOT LIFE?

·         ‘Work-Life balance’ tends to indicate a mindset that we need to minimize work as much as possible so that we can have life

·         This is in contrarian to the Organization goals to maximize output from their employees to improve overall profitability (nothing wrong by the way. That’s why organizations exist – to maximize profitability)

·         Hence, this denotes continuous conflict between Organization and its employees. Not a great state to be in.

·         Most employees tend to look for alternatives, jump from company to company, in search of ideal work-life balance but they fail to achieve it.

The above denotes that we can never achieve work-life balance as the interests of the Organization and its employees are in conflict. But is it true? Can we not achieve work-life balance? In my mind, we are looking at the problem in the wrong way. Problem is not about achieving work-life balance but in achieving right balance in life. Work is part of life and hence if we achieve balance in our life, our goal will be achieved.

But, how do we achieve balance in life? The only way to balance life is if all our needs are met. Every Human being have needs that could be categorized as follows: Intellectual needs, Emotional needs, Physical needs and Spiritual needs. If we balance our life against these needs, we can achieve the desired balance in life.

·         Everyone has different levels of needs. It is possible that a person has higher intellectual needs while another could have higher spiritual needs. Also, it is important to note that these needs tend to vary over a period of time. For example, as a young person, you may not have much of spiritual needs but by middle age, you may see this need emerging.

·        Our needs could be met at different places. Typical thought process is that intellectual needs are met at office, while emotional needs are met at home. This may not always be right. It is possible for office to cater to emotional needs if you have close friends or social circle in office while intellectual needs could be met at home while pursuing a hobby/activity. A case in point – we do tend to see that sometimes people leave a company to go to another company when their close friends move. This is predominantly to sustain their emotional needs.

·        It is also important to understand that we cannot achieve the desired balance of the needs every day. At the same time, if it takes more than a year to achieve balance, it’s a shame. How many times did we hear the adage – ‘we spend our health to achieve money and then we spend money to regain our health’? Hence, it is important to define a timeframe within which we would like our needs to be balanced. It could be weekly, bi-weekly or monthly – whatever appeals to you.

Having said the above, I’d ask you to follow the below process:

1.      I’d like you to think through what your intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual needs are. Having identified those needs, allocate points out of a maximum of 10 points, for each of the needs. The total points across all the needs should be 10. If you think you have higher intellectual needs than emotional needs, please allocate more points to intellectual needs. It is ok to allocate zero points to a need. For example, if you decide that you do not have any spiritual needs at this point in time, please allocate zero to that need.

2.      Figure out where these needs are being met. For example, we have different segments in our life – Office/Work, Home/Family, Parents, Friends, Hobbies/Activities, College/Education (if you are pursuing), Colleagues, etc. Determine what needs are being met by each segment of your life and to what extent. You could use the table listed below (illustrative) to capture this data:

	Intellectual needs <x1/10 points>	Emotional needs <x2/10 points>	Physical needs <x3/10 points>	Spiritual needs <x4/10 points>
Office/work
Home/Family
Parents
Friends
Hobbies/Activities
Education
Colleagues
Charity/Social work
… (Any other aspect)

3.      Do validate and see if your needs being met are in line with the priority that you have assigned to them. Also, are they being in the right proportion and in the right places? If not, there is opportunity to balance them. For example, if your intellectual needs are high and they are not being met at work place, you should see if they could be met through hobbies or through friend circle that you have. If not, it is important to address it – either by changing the workplace (if the organization is not providing those opportunities to you) or by changing the career (if there are no way you can meet your intellectual needs in your line of work).

4.      Create an action plan (based on the above) to bring changes in your life and segments that would help you to balance your life much better, by meeting the priority of your needs

5.      Review the action plan and see the average timeline in which your needs are met. Is the timeline congruent with your demand? If not, go back to step 4 and re-do the action plan so that the timeline could be closer to what you desire.

If we can move away from ‘work-life balance’ to focus on balancing our overall life, we will be happier in our lives and more content with the outcomes.

Given the above, how do we deal with the work component of our life? We need to think beyond money from work. If workplace is catering to your multiple needs like Intellectual, Emotional, Physical etc., then feel free to spend more time at work – as it will fulfill both your needs and monetary aspects. However, if the workplace does not fulfill any of your needs, you need to seriously examine how much time you want to spend at workplace or more importantly, should there be a need for a change either in workplace or your career.

What do you think? Could we address the work-life imbalance by balancing our life? Is it practical? Would you do it?

Influence to Success

“Influencing” has emerging as one of the most critical leadership skill in today’s world, as stated by CEOs, in recent leadership surveys. However, do we really understanding, what “influencing” is? How much of it is a skill and how much of it is a mindset? Could we all be good at it?

More than ever, Influencing is emerging as a critical element for all Leaders. With geographically distributed teams, Gen Y workforce, and disparate groups needing to collaborate together to deliver business outcomes, a Leader has to depend upon teams outside of his/her control to achieve success. This situation is further magnified by emergence of social media/networking. While social media provides access to multitude of people/resources that were earlier not possible, it requires the Leader to be in a position to influence remotely. Not an easy task at all. Before we go further, let us understand what “influencing” is?

Influencing means persuading an audience to:

·         Give you something

·         Take action

·         Accept your ideas

without formal power or authority. Even when we are in the position of power or authority, influencing is the best way to get things done. In our personal lives too, an effective way to engage with our children is through Influencing. One key aspect: Intent behind Influencing is to achieve a win-win situation. Focusing only on self-win will lead to manipulation, not influencing.

To best understand the framework of Influencing, we need to travel back to 4^th century to meet Aristotle. He was a Greek philosopher and a teacher of Alexander the Great. He came up with framework for persuasion (Yes. Influencing was critical even in the 4^th century) – Ethos, Logos and Pathos. Ethos refers to an appeal to the authority or honesty of the presenter. It refers to how well the presenter convinces the audience that he/she is qualified to present (or speak) on the particular subject. Logos is the logical appeal or simulation of it. It is used to describe facts and figures that support Speaker’s points. Pathos is an appeal to audience emotion. It is the ability of the speaker to connect to the underlying emotions/values of the audience. What does it all mean to us?

Ethos refers to our ability to build credibility with our client (target audience). Logos refers to the content of the message and Pathos refers to our ability to understand our client. Each topic by itself is a blog (that I’ll detail in the future) but here is the summary:

Ethos: Ethos is focused on you. Are you credible with the audience? Why should they listen to you? Why should they agree with you? Hence, before we start on our influencing path, it is important to understand the following areas:

Brand: First area to examine is our Brand. Do we know what our brand is? Branding is not an impression of ourselves that we carry in our minds, but perceptions that are carried in other’s minds about us. It is important to understand that brands are born of experience and reflect our reputation. Therefore, our actions/behaviors/words play a critical role in the way our brand is perceived by others. So, in order to build a powerful brand, first and foremost it is important to understand our Unique Value proposition. This should, in turn, help us to re-position our brand. We will discuss the process in a future blog

Knowledge: To gain credibility, it is important to build and share original thoughts. You may have great amount of knowledge but if it is not shared, you are not helping yourself. It is important to first - build your knowledge, second – translate the knowledge into your original thoughts (primarily, how you can apply the knowledge in your areas of expertise) and third – articulate your thoughts in various forums. Hence, it is important for you to be active in forums at your office, and on social media like blogs, twitter, LinkedIn etc

Network map: How do we address a situation where we need to influence, but do not have credibility with the audience – either because the audience is not aware of us OR we are not the subject matter experts in that specific area. This is where, we need to ‘borrow credibility’ by leveraging people who are in our network map. It is important to ensure that we have diverse set of people in our network. If all the people in our network are of the same profile as us, then we have a weak network. We should have people from our customer organizations, our own organization (but from different areas), industry. Network map also constitutes our personal connections and ability to tap into their networks.

Logos: Logos is focused on the content and our ability to articulate it effectively.

Content: It is important to build the content from audience perspective. More often than not, content is defined by the key points that we want to articulate as against what is important from audience perspective that would help us achieve the objective. One area where we implement this effectively is at the time of giving gifts. We may define the budget but when we think about finalizing on the gift, we always think about it from the perspective of the person who is receiving it. However, when we deliver the messages, it is all about what we want to convey as against what others need to receive. Content is not just about the message but is also about the timing of it (is this an appropriate time for the audience to receive the message).

Articulation: Even, when we have defined the content well, the success or failure is dependent upon how we articulate it. Do note that the articulation process is highly dependent both upon you and the audience. Even between same two people, articulation should vary depending on the subject that you want to influence upon. Usually, there are two techniques for articulation – Push and Pull. Push technique should be used when you have credibility with the audience and are an expert on the subject. Pull technique should be used when you do not have the credibility but yet need to influence. We will learn more about these techniques in a future blog.

Pathos: This section is all about understanding your client (audience). Unless, we understand our clients well, we will not be able to structure the message well and be able to know if we have the credibility with the customer.

Understanding the client: It is important to spend time in understanding your client. What is it that drives them? What do they like and dislike? What are their key goals? How does the current situation impact their eventual success? There are many other such questions that we need to answer before we can say we understood the client.

Stakeholder Analysis: More often than not, we tend to think that there is just one person who will make the required decision. However, in professional organizations, usually there is more than one person involved. It is important to do a comprehensive stakeholder analysis to first identify who are all the key people who will be involved in the act and then, identifying their current positioning on the topic before we decide how to influence them.

Influence Map: It is important to create an influence map that shows all our key stakeholders and their current relations/positions. We should then intersperse the influence map with our network map so that we know the leverage points. This is a critical point in the influencing exercise as it will allow us to prioritize/sequence the influencing process

Levers of Influencing: Once we are able to establish Ethos, Logos and Pathos, we can then identify Influencing levers that we could leverage during the Influencing process. Robert Cialdini has done significant research in this space and has arrived at 6 levers for Influencing – Reciprocity, Scarcity, Consistency, Consensus (Social Proof), Authority, Similarity (Liking).

Influencing is critical for success in today’s world. I’ll try to detail each of the above areas in future blogs so that we could cover each topic in a comprehensive manner. Kathleen Reardon, workplace politics expert has said that ‘Each of us is atleast 75% responsible for the way we are treated because we have the CHOICE to influence what others think and say about us; and the obligation to learn how’. Influencing is not only about achieving results but also about how we are able to influence our perception on others, thus laying a strong foundation for our success. If not anything else, I do hope I piqued your curiosity and influenced you to learn about Influencing?