BETTER LEADER, RICHER LIFE (EXCERPT FROM CBMC LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE)

From CBMC Leadership Institute

CBMC – Better Leader, Richer Life

Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life (Overview)

Traditional thinking pits work and the rest of our lives against each other. But taking smart steps to integrate work, home, community, and self will make you a more productive leader and a more fulfilled person.

The Idea In Brief

Life’s a zero-sum game, right? The more you strive to win in one dimension (e.g., your work), the more the other three dimensions (your self, your home, and your community) must lose. Not according to Stewart D. Friedman. You don’t have to make trade-offs among life’s domains. Nor should you: trading off can leave you feeling exhausted, unfulfilled, or isolated. And it hurts the people you care about most.

To excel in all dimensions of life, use Friedman’s Total Leadership process. First, articulate who and what matters most in your life. Then experiment with small changes that enhance your satisfaction and performance in all four domains. Friedman’s research suggests that people who focus on the concept of Total Leadership have a 20%–39% increase in satisfaction in all life domains, and a 9% improvement in job performance—even while working shorter weeks.

The Idea In Practice

Total Leadership helps you mitigate a range of problems that stem from making trade-offs among the different dimensions of your life:

• Feeling unfulfilled because you’re not doing what you love

• Feeling inauthentic because you’re not acting according to your values

• Feeling disconnected from people who matter to you

• Feeling exhausted by trying to keep up with it all

To tackle such problems using Total Leadership, take these steps:

1. REFLECT

For each of the four domains of your life—work, home, community, and self, reflect on how important each is to you, how much time and energy you devote to each, and how satisfied you are in each. Are there discrepancies between what is important to you and how you spend your time and energy? What is your overall life satisfaction?

2. BRAINSTORM POSSIBILITIES

Based on the insights you’ve achieved during your four-way reflection, brainstorm a long list of small experiments that may help you move closer to greater satisfaction  in all four domains. These are new ways of doing things that would carry minimal risk and let you see results quickly.

3. CHOOSE EXPERIMENTS

Narrow the list of experiments you’ve brainstormed to the three most promising.

4. MEASURE PROGRESS

Develop a scorecard for each experiment you’ve chosen.

 Managing Yourself Scoring four-way wins starts by taking a clear view of what you want from and can contribute to each domain of your life, now and in the future, with thoughtful consideration of the people who matter most to you and the expectations you have for one another. This is followed by systematically designing and implementing carefully crafted experiments—doing something new for a short period to see how it affects all four domains. If an experiment doesn’t work out, you stop or adjust, and little is lost. If it does work out, it’s a small win; over time these add up so that your overall efforts are focused increasingly on what and who matter most. Either way, you learn more about how to lead in all parts of your life.

People who participate in this practice report improvements in their effectiveness, as well as a greater sense of harmony among the once-competing domains of their lives. They’re working smarter—and they’re more focused, passionate, and committed to what they’re doing.

The Total Leadership Process

The Total Leadership concept rests on three principles:

• Be real: Act with authenticity by clarifying what’s important

• Be whole:  Act with integrity by respecting the whole person

• Be innovative: Act with creativity by experimenting with how things get done

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