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.