tewart Friedman
started seeing the world differently after his first child, Gabriel, was born. A
professor at the Wharton School, Friedman had focused largely on leadership development
issues. But after Gabriel’s birth, he started to think companies should focus not
just on developing talent, but on developing human beings—keeping in mind all facets
of their lives. Friedman calls this "total leadership." He has written the book
Total Leadership
to help firms and employees put the concept into practice. Friedman
recently spoke to Workforce Management New York bureau chief Jessica Marquez.
Workforce Management: What is total leadership?
Stewart Friedman: The purpose of total leadership is to improve performance in all
four domains of life: work, home, community and then the private self. You do this
by creating mutual value among them and integrating them. I’m about integration,
not balance.
WM: What’s wrong with work/life balance?
Friedman: First of all, it’s impossible. And second, I don’t think it’s necessarily
a good thing. The problem with balance is that it connotes a trade-off mentality—that
you have to sacrifice one part of your life to be successful in another. If people
think about pursuing four-way wins and making small changes that can improve things
in all four domains, then people can make things better and get support from others.
WM: What can employers get out of this book?
Friedman: There is a lot of good news in this method for employers, but it requires
an openness to experimentation, and that’s a little scary for people. But I have
found that the idea of helping people experiment intelligently with the different
ways of getting things done can help to reduce that fear. When companies help employees
do this, those employees then perform better, work smarter and feel better. So this
is a way for companies to improve the capacity of their workforce.
WM: Is this just flex-work?
Friedman: No. It’s not about whatever the employee wants to do. That’s the problem
with work/life—it has created an entitlement mentality. Employees think, "I have
a family and everyone knows that family is the most important thing, so if you,
employer, don’t let me be with my family, then you are evil." Employees need to
talk about how to change work not just for themselves but also for their employers.
For example, instead of an employee saying to their boss, "I need to take off after
3 p.m. on Thursday afternoons to coach my child’s soccer team," the employee says,
"I have got an idea where for the next month I will leave early Thursday afternoons,
but I am committed to the belief that my performance will improve and that I will
be more effective at work. If it doesn’t work, we can revisit this idea after a
month." The difference between those two statements is that in the first one the
employee is only thinking about himself, but in the second the employee is thinking
about himself and his employer.
WM: How can companies implement this?
Friedman: Companies can kick-start this by first laying out the basic ideas in workshops
and then doing smaller breakouts. My book has several exercises that people can
use to help figure this out. The key is to implement this in small groups. So get
groups of three and do peer coaching. So start small, experiment with things and
then surround the experiments with lots of data. Then make adjustments based on
what the data tells you.
Workforce Management, August 11, 2008, p. 8
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