WORK-LIFE BALANCE

Work-Life Balance Through Interval Training

At aThirdPath Instituteconference a few weeks ago, a great discussion arose around the fact that workloads tend to ebb and ow, and its important to
know how to alternate between periods of peak eort and recovery. Before long, someone noted the analogy to high performance in sports, and used a
phrase 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 and
consulting. 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 a2001 HBR
article(I was only 13 years late to the party!) and explored it in a series ofbest-selling booksabout engagement, energy, and business success. So much
for my plan to unleash it on the world.

But I was all the more glad to nd so much work already done on corporate athleticism, because it has a lot to oer my eld: the challenges faced by
working parents.

Loehr and Schwartz look at how the winners in the world of sports prepare for competition and then apply these techniques to managerial work. They
urge executives to train in the same systematic, multilevel way that world-class athletes do. No, CEOs are not forced to run wind sprints (although
some 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 and
corporate athletes achieving the right balance across three critical dimensions:

1. Mind and Body

2. Performance and Development

3. 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 given
us a more nuanced way of thinking about what needs to be balanced. Using their dimensions, how might someone go about becoming a superstar WorkLife Athlete?

First, lets think about thatmind-body balance. For athletes, the classic mistake to avoid is focusing only on preparing ones body for the game. Great
coaches equip their players to win the mental game as well the physical one. Executives, by contrast, are too likely to grind away at intellectual tasks
and 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
approach to sustained high performance must pull together [many] elements and consider the person as a whole. It must address the body, the
emotions, the mind, and the spirit.

For work-life athletes, mind-body balance suggests that we shouldget enough sleep, eat reasonably well, engage insome exercise- and make room in
our lives forsocial interaction, me time, and perspective-seeking through reection and meditation or prayer. You dont have to be in perfect shape to
be good at your job or eective as a parent. But if we neglect our bodies, or spirits, we may not have enough sustained energy for eectiveness in either

work or family, let alone both.

Theperformance-development balancealso has a particular relevance tothe work-life realm. Athletes know that the vast majorityof their eort is
spent on development, preparing for the performance they must put in during actual competition. In business, it feels like the proportions are inverted:
every day executives must perform, and only a tiny fraction of their time is set aside for professional development. But actually, the athletes
understanding of the balance would make more sense for business people, too. Athletes in their development days focus on individual elements of their
game and build their capacity in the fundamentals; on competition days, they pull all the pieces together and push performance to the maximum.
Likewise in business, there are those high-stakes occasions when managers can only pull o what they are trying to accomplish by drawing on every
competence 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 performance
has the greatest consequences. In those moments, they too need to pull together all their resources and abilities to make the right moves. And ideally,
they 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 gure out how to keep developing new capabilities, and not just keep drawing on existing
ones. If this cant be accomplished through daily tasks, then it requires regularly scheduled time to be set aside. Whether its protecting 30 minutes
every other day to read up on industry developments, listening to a language-instruction course during the morning commute, or trying a new recipe
every week, turning o the performance pressure creates more openness to new approaches and heightens performance in the long run.

This brings us, nally, to theexertion-recovery balancethat Loehr and Schwartz see great athletes managing so well. In the living laboratory of sports,
they 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 their
bers literally start to break down. However, after an adequate recovery period, the muscle not only heals, it grows stronger. Without rest, one ends up
with be acute and chronic damage.

In business, demanding projects, with tight deadlines and stretch goals, can be great but cant be unremitting. Occasional overwork is a necessity, at
work and in the rest of our lives, butchronic overworkrobs 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
recovery time needed for sustainable eectiveness. Recovery for the work-life athlete might not come when they jump from the demands of one
front 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/limited
contact 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). For that
matter, why not set no screen hours at home, when everyone stays o their phones, tablets, and other devices and is available to each other?

From a management standpoint, we need to rethink the notion that non-performance time is wasted time. Instead, we need to see that recovery is a key
component of sustained high performance. This means we must resist continually increasing the time demands we put on our employees and expecting
our employees to be constantly on call even after hours. We need to encourage our employees to take lunch breaks, relax on weekends, and actually
take their vacation days, unplugged (and also do these things ourselves). By helping to strike the right balances, we can build the work-life athleticism
we need when the stakes are highest.

Scott Behson is a Professor of Management at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and the author of The Working Dads Survival Guide: How to Succeed at Work and at
Home. He writes about work and family issues for Time, WSJ, the Hufngton 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.

This article is about WORK-LIFE BALANCE

Related Topics: MANAGING YOURSELF |

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kennethfung

2 years ago

Scott, the term corporate athletewas new to me too and its a good one. In particular, the need for recovery time which I think is absolutely essential particularly with
knowledge 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 you
think should be in charge of insuring our corporate athletes get into top condition HR, managers, or executives at the top?
00

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