When Slaughter’s Atlantic piece — chronicling the difficulty maintaining a high-powered career while still being able to nurture her teenage sons — became the most read article in that journal’s history, the field of work/life, long in the shadows, catapulted to center stage. Then the Yahoo! controversies: first everyone had an opinion about Marissa Mayer as a pregnant CEO, then everyone had another opinion about her revocation of work-from-home policies. Now the brouhaha about whether or not Sandberg can or should speak for all women has turned the heat up further.

The key word there being heat; not light.

Each is speaking out, on the basis of her experience, about why and how change must come. As a life-long policy scholar, naturally Slaughter emphasizes policy. And as an employee and an employer, Sandberg naturally draws on her own experience. Ideas and action on both the individual and policy levels are essential, and they both recognize this. And yet each is pitted against the other, in a non-existent “feud.” Now pundits are treating Mayer’s decision about the remote-work policy at one struggling company as if it were an all-encompassing value judgment on flexibility policies.

Let’s not lose the forest for the trees. The discussions inspired by Slaughter, Sandberg, and Mayer are good news for those of us who care deeply about creating a more just society where men and women can participate in the spheres of work and home as they choose. As my 20-year study of Wharton students shows, and as others are finding as well, women are no longer alone in this fight, although it’s undeniable that they still bear the greatest burden. Men of the new generation have a different take on how work and life must cohere than do my grey-bearded peers. Young men do not merely accept that their spouses may work, they expect it. And they expect to have lives beyond work that include caring for their children and pursuing other passions. They want flexibility as much or more than women do. When asked to describe their dream jobs at the start of my class recently, one man said, “Stay-at-home Dad.”

And so we find Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO, talking about the art of “conscious leadership” in his recent Wisdom 2.0 talk. This leader of one of our hottest companies is espousing the importance of taking the time to listen, ask questions, and coach rather than prescribe; of being mindful in order to make course corrections and experiment; of harmony among the spheres of life while eschewing the folly of balance; and of managing compassionately, not as a perk, but as a way of increasing economic opportunity and productivity. It’s increasingly OK for men to think like this and to talk like this.

As women (and some men) have worked for decades to help women enter and advance in the workforce, as women’s presence in the workforce has grown so that a new generation of children have been raised by working parents, and as the changing division of labor at home strains both men and women, we have entered a whole new world. The revolution is here.

But our policies have not kept pace with these changing realities. We must catch up to other developed nations. Though there’s been some movement since Jeff Greenhaus and I wrote Work and Family — Allies or Enemies? in 2000, we still need more flexible work arrangements, better-quality childcare, and, most importantly, leaders who recognize and respect the whole person. But what is heartening to me about this moment is how many have joined in the debate. And the conversation happening now will undoubtedly affect the choices that all of us — both men and women, at all levels of society — are making every day, by increasing the range of available possibilities for our companies, our families, our communities, and our selves.

The post We Are All Part of the Work/Life Revolution appeared first on Total Leadership.

In this post I describe a couple of case studies from Target executives who have been experimenting with creative ways to integrate the different parts of their lives — and how they’re teaching others to do the same.

David is a VP who is accountable for a multi-billion dollar P & L business. (All names have been changed and specific titles disguised.) He has structured several experiments to simultaneously improve his performance at work and his life at home. Now that he’s done a number of them, he says he’s learned that by framing these changes as experiments he can overcome what at first seems daunting. The first, he told me, “had a huge impact for me and probably an even more significant impact for my wife and family.”

“My initial challenge was this: I spend most of my waking hours at work and I’ve always shut down from work at home. But this was hurting my relationship with my wife because we didn’t talk about what was happening with me at work. We talked about the kids and that was what we had in common. The work problem was that I never had enough time to prepare for all my meetings. So the experiment was to look at tomorrow’s calendar and pick the biggest meeting for which I needed to prep. On the drive home I’d think about what I should do at that meeting and when I got home I’d talk to my wife about it.”

“This gave us something new to talk about, it gave her a much better understanding of what I do, it engaged her, and it enhanced our relationship because we were having richer conversations. Simultaneously, I was able to prepare and do a dry-run for my meeting. What was cool about it was getting an outside person’s perspective. My wife made some good suggestions! And I’ve had better meetings as a result. But the big takeaway was to question the way I was doing things.”

David said that the results of his experiments “have been astounding. I’m more productive and my wife is thrilled. Our company is also benefiting because of the effects on my team. I told my team that I was trying a change in my schedule and have been transparent about when they could expect to find me in the office. I was showing my team that there was a way that you could prioritize well-being holistically. This is leading them to think about some of the same things for themselves. I’m helping my team to be more engaged and to think more about their well-being, too. I’m developing better team leaders around me.”

“For example, because of the change I made, I found out that one of my direct reports was having a medical problem that was worsened by his work schedule, and we have now changed his schedule. One of my other team members told me that he feels more empowered to make choices to spend time with his family during the day. He feels more empowered — that it’s OK — and he doesn’t feel guilty about it. The example I was setting before was work first, work first, work first.”

“I might be here for slightly fewer hours now, but I’m making faster and better decisions. And, at home, my wife is now more understanding of those choices I sometimes have to make when work does have to come first. In the long-term, for Target this means that I’m a more engaged leader without an unmanageable tension between my wife and my work.”

Alan is a VP located on the West coast. He’s been in that region for 15 years and has three children, ages three, five, and seven. His wife is a finance director at another company.

“The first thing about Total Leadership that really had an impact for me was the stakeholder mapping,” he told me. In this exercise, you identify the people who are most important to you in your work, home, self, and community spheres. This is part of seeing your life not as just a random unfolding of events, but as a system you can change. “This was something that I had done intuitively on my own but I wasn’t maximizing it…. It was important to… connect with those people, find common ground, and learn what their expectations are.”

“With work I’m very intentional and so things happen, because it’s work. But if I’m truly accountable I would be taking the same approach in the other domains of life that I am taking at work to accomplish the things that matter. That was an ‘Aha!’ moment.”

“That’s why my experiment centered on time with my family; with my sister and her kids and arranging time together for all of us. I used some of the things that I do at work and applied them in this other realm. My sister owns a business and my brother-in-law has a property development job, so they have demanding schedules. Our kids are on different Spring breaks. We have a vision now (we didn’t until my experiment) of two week-long vacations per year together with the kids doing something — skiing or going to the beach — and then a couple of long weekends. Coordinating all that is difficult and so it just really wasn’t happening.”

“I was lamenting this, wondering how I might effect a change. It dawned on me that if this was work I would have all kinds of tactics. So I drafted an email to the key players (my brother-in-law, sister, wife, mom, and a couple of others) and I laid out a plan for a dinner, just the adults, to talk about what we wanted to achieve each year. We were able to come up with two week-long vacations, but planned well in advance, and then two long weekends. We set up some checkpoints and conference calls — the last thing you’d think of with family. We went away together the last two weeks of the year, and we bought those tickets in June. This was a success and an example that I’ve learned I could use in general: If a process works in one part of my life, then maybe I can apply it in other parts of my life.”

“If we’ve got leaders in the company who are able to apply skills from work to other parts of their lives and share these stories with their teams, then this can help us make our people happier and strengthen our retention of talent. We invest time and money every year training people. So when you strengthen retention and reduce that expense, then you have savings but you also have more experienced people who are more productive.

“I’ve come to realize that one of my challenges is taking time off, and ensuring that I am effective enough to do that and not miss a beat. This year I’m looking at six weeks of vacation. When I think back a few years I just wouldn’t have even considered that; this year I intend to take it all. If I only took three weeks, I would have people on my team see that as a signal. So I’m teaching others by example. Again, the stakeholder mapping and integrating the four domains in a way that works for me is important, and I also teach my team how to do that for themselves, in part so they can be effective when I’m not here. My goal is for them to be effective all the time. The more that I can lead that way, the more it means that if I’m gone for a week or two then the impact is minimal.”

Target is working on “starting a movement — not just a program” says one of the members of the organizational effectiveness team. But changing those norms isn’t easy. Max, the VP who now runs the largest P & L business at Target, admitted that he “saw a couple of eyebrows raised” when he told his team, on his first day in his new position, that he comes in late two mornings a week so that he can “go to the gym and have breakfast with my kids.”

But when senior executives are modeling healthier behavior, it lets a grassroots movement take hold. For instance, David’s boss checks in on his experiments regularly. “She’s given me tips and shared her experience on what she’s learned,” he says. “I talk to her about it to hold myself accountable. She’s reminded me that each new job is bigger and more demanding so it will be critical to continue to get better and better about managing my time and calendar as I develop throughout my career.”

When steps like these are taken to improve performance and reduce stress, and employees see that this is a legitimate and fully authorized activity, then an increasing number of them are going to generate experiments of their own. Slowly, the culture changes as new models for what’s expected emerge, and as people at all levels demonstrate that it makes good business sense to take care of all the things that matter in your life.

The post Real Leaders Have Real Lives appeared first on Total Leadership.

In the few days since Marissa Mayer’s baby arrived, I’ve watched the resurgence — again — of the debate about working parenthood, maternity leaves, and even “baby bumps.” I have mixed feelings about this.

Mayer’s situation is extremely unusual. A short maternity leave may be relatively easy for her, in part because she and her spouse have great wealth and because, as CEO, Mayer has considerable discretion about how to spend her time. This is not the case for most working women — or for most working men.

And yet, that the board agreed to hire a pregnant Mayer as CEO was a sign of real progress in our collective grasp of what’s possible, for men and for women. The decisions made by Yahoo’s board and by Mayer signal something important to us all — greater freedom. This episode in our social history is but one highly visible example of the many new options available to people as they aim to pursue lives that fit with their most precious values. Mayer made her choice, and that she was able to do so is not just because of her financial wherewithal, it’s also because her choice is now socially and culturally legitimate. Even five years ago it would not have been.

We’re going to see more new possibilities, if my research on Wharton students (part of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project) is any indication. In 1992 we surveyed over 450 Wharton students, at the moment they graduated. Then, this past May, we asked the same set of questions of the Wharton undergraduates in the Class of 2012. In part, the surveys explored attitudes about two-career relationships. We asked students to what extent they agreed with these two statements:

• Two-career relationships work best when one partner is more advanced than the other.
• Two-career relationships work best when one partner is less involved in his/her career.

In 1992, men were much more likely to agree with both these statements than were women. Our preliminary analyses show that in 2012, however, there is a convergence of attitudes about two-career relationships: Men are less likely to agree with those statements than they were 20 years ago, but women are now more likely to agree; both have changed. Compared to graduates 20 years ago, young men graduating today are more egalitarian in their views and women are less so, perhaps because they are more realistic.

Men and women today are more likely than the previous generation to share the same values about what it takes to make dual-career relationships work. One implication of this finding is that there is greater solidarity among men and women and therefore more flexibility about the roles that both men and women can legitimately take in society. There is now a greater sense of shared responsibility for domestic life. Young men are realizing they have to do more at home than their fathers did, and today’s young men want to do so. Ellen Galinsky’s research on the “new male mystique” affirms this trend.

Our survey also asked men and women to indicate how strongly they agree with these statements:

• It is easier for men to combine the demands of work and family.
• Pursuing a demanding career will make it difficult for me to be an attentive spouse or parent.

In 1992, we saw no difference between men and women in the way they answered those questions, but in 2012 we find that women are more likely than men to agree with those statements. Again, women today have a less sanguine view of what’s possible. How can this be good news?

While it used to be that women had aspirations for hierarchical advancement that were lower than those held by young men, today those aspirations are the same for men and women. But now women’s family ambitions (if we can call them that) are lower than they were 20 years ago; that is, in 1992 79% of women graduating from Wharton said they definitely planned to have children, while in 2012 only 42% made this claim. There is now greater awareness of constraints, and expectations are being adjusted accordingly. Sounds like a reduction in freedom, right? But perhaps, with a more clear-eyed vision of what is to come — and with men and women holding more aligned views about the value of work and parenting — people will take more focused, concerted action to chip away at the established order and more successfully pursue new options.

Marissa Mayer is just one very fortunate person. But as a simultaneous new CEO and new mother, she represents something more — a new prospect of what is possible. That her choice is available to her doesn’t mean, of course, that such possibilities are now here for all. But her choice is real. We are at the cusp of the emergence of new models. Young people will increasingly be active in carefully, consciously, and deliberately crafting their roles.

Attitudes are changing. Yes, it remains incredibly difficult for women to break through to the top strata, because it’s still primarily a man’s world at the most senior levels and because there are all kinds of additional burdens that women continue to carry. And yes, it still remains difficult, though increasingly possible, for men to opt for the non-traditional path of stay-at-home-dad.

But we are seeing more expressed freedom, more realistic goals, and more unity among young men and women as they are creating new ways to pursue lives that fit with who they truly want to be. And that is a good thing.

The post New Research on Working Parenthood: Men are More Egalitarian, Women are More Realistic appeared first on Total Leadership.

But this is not a women’s issue; our increasingly shared understanding is that this a critical socialissue with great economic consequences.

And if we’re going to address it, everyone needs to have an informed point of view. This holds true whether you’re just waking up to this issue because you’re a 60-year-old male CEO whose daughter is confronting severe constraints in her ability to figure out how she’s going to fit your grandchildren into her life plan, or whether you’re a 25-year-old with no children who’s managing a 45-year-old struggling to take care of aging parents.

There are a bunch of us — mostly women, but a few men too — who’ve been tilling these fields for decades, and so there’s not much new in Slaughter’s arguments and substantive recommendations. What’s significant is the article’s symbolic value and how it addresses current intergenerational differences in attitudes and experiences. Twenty years ago the Work/Life Integration Project launched a research program, one output of which was the book I wrote in 2000 with Jeff Greenhaus,Work and Family — Allies or Enemies? We detailed an action agenda — echoed now in Slaughter’s recommendations — including the need for:

• reshaping the division of labor at home
• changing society’s gender ideology through education and socialization
• helping young people choose careers that fit their values
• teaching employees how to generate support from others
• investing in what employees do outside of work
• creating work environments that value employees as whole people
• training managers to take a new look at work processes
• demonstrating the economic value of investing in family-friendliness
• authorizing employees to think and act like entrepreneurs
• expanding childcare options, including through public-private partnerships.

Out of this evolved three simple principles that form the foundation for best practices, for individuals, teams, organizations, and society:

• act with authenticity by clarifying what’s important
• act with integrity by respecting the whole person
• act with creativity by continually experimenting with how goals are achieved.

When I was head of leadership development for Ford Motor Company (from 1999 to 2001), we successfully implemented a program, called Total Leadership, that built on these basic principles. Its series of exercises culminates in the implementation of practical experiments designed to produce “four-way wins” — improved performance at work, at home, in the community, and for the private self.

To make it easier for men to buy in, I don’t use the term “work/life.” My teaching focuses instead on “performance,” “results,” and “leadership.” This has been an effective strategy; this language makes it easier for organizations to gain acceptance for using the Total Leadership approach to help men and women, at all career stages and at all levels, learn what they can do personally to create meaningful, sustainable change.

In the US Army, Target, UnitedHealth, and other organizations, we have found that when given the chance, people are eager to take up the challenging task of experimenting with new ways to fit together the pieces of their lives. And they’re able to muster the courage and support to do so because they believe that the purpose of their initiatives is to make things better not just for themselves, not just for their families and communities, but for their organizations, too.

They discover through trial and error that work and life don’t always have to be a zero-sum game. They feel a greater sense of control and less stress. And their performance at work improves even as they devote less time and attention to it and more to the other aspects of their lives. It sounds paradoxical, but it’s what we observe time and again: when people focus more of their attention on the things that matter they are more efficient, engaged, and productive. Naturally, they feel greater loyalty and commitment to their organizations as a result. And, because they are consciously practicing and getting feedback on their leadership skills, those improve, too.

Bottom line: We have evidence now, from years of working with organizations around the world, on how this model produces measurable improvements in business results and enhances important personal life outcomes. And this isn’t the only proven approach.

We already know what works. The challenge is not figuring it out, again. The challenge is execution. And yet cultural change is a slog. I encounter nearly universal skepticism about the prospects for what most people call “balance,” a term that is retrogressive because it compels you to think in terms of tradeoffs. But work and life are not different sides of a see-saw. We need both. It would help if we got rid of that slash between “work” and “life” and, instead, gave more attention to the mounting body of evidence that demonstrates how it is possible to have more of it all — not all of it, but more of it — than most people currently think they can have, by practicing leadership in all parts of their lives; taking realistic steps forward, rooted in what matters most to them and to their most important people, and enlisting the support of others.

The time has come. Just about everyone I meet — men as well as women — expresses a desire for a saner life, for themselves and for their loved ones. The need for structural and policy change is desperate. The pain of constrained choices is real, urgent, and pervasive. The tsunami of conversation in the wake of Slaughter’s manifesto (and the recent high-profile advocacy of another powerful female executive, Sheryl Sandberg) is evidence that we have indeed reached a new level of collective awareness.

We have the tools and the motivation to make it easier for people to have more freedom to choose how to live their lives more completely and contribute their talents to the world in a way that enriches us all. Let’s make it happen.

The post “Having It All” Is Not a Women’s Issue appeared first on Total Leadership.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve listened to Bill Clinton give a commencement speech to my eldest child and his classmates; done a half-day session on leadership with ten GE company officers, followed by dinner with CEO Jeff Immelt; and led a meeting with the dozen or so physicians who constitute the senior executive corps of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. I can’t stop thinking of Dylan’s song and wondering how we’re doing on developing the generation of leaders.

Hard as it might be for old folks in positions of power to see the world in a new light and embrace it, these senior people with whom I’ve been spending some time are trying their best to lend a hand to the next generation as they roll down a new road. Smart seniors who want to leave a positive legacy will pay attention to these and other examples, learn from them, and follow suit in a way that works in their world.

For decades GE has been, and remains, the most prolific net exporter of leadership talent in the corporate world, because it has a tradition — a strongly-held cultural belief — supported by the tangible commitment of time and money, for developing people. The Business Week article about GE’s efforts a few months back got it wrong in describing the current state of GE’s leadership development system as out of step with these digital times. You need not look any further than my visit to corporate headquarters for some evidence. The expressed intent of my purpose was to stimulate dialogue and raise provocative questions about what leadership means today and what it should mean in the future. With the full backing, even prodding, I felt from Chief Learning Officer Susan Peters, I encountered a readiness to challenge the status quo — to look at leadership from the perspective of not just work but of the whole person, including family and community and personal life (mind, body, and spirit) — that was as refreshing as it was inspiring. Taking time “to address the soul,” as one attendee put it, is not how things would’ve been done at GE back in the day; but, in 2010, knowing that the world has evolved and that a new leadership model is necessary for the people who will run GE in 2020, the current executives of this visionary company are taking important steps to critically evaluate, and so revise, their approach.

The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine is the site of an NIH-funded study of the impact of a series of interventions — including, full disclosure, my Total Leadership program — on the careers and lives of talented up-and-coming women faculty in academic medicine. This first-of-its kind project is an extension of remarkable efforts led by the FOCUS program, a unique initiative dedicated to advancing the careers of women faculty. We get underway in earnest later this year, and our meeting a few weeks ago was a briefing for the top team on what we are undertaking, and why. Here, in one of the most tradition-bound fields, senior executives were engaging actively in a practical discussion about the nitty-gritty of what it would take to provide support for the next generation to succeed in experimenting with new ways to get things done that are in synch with the demands of their lives beyond work; to do nothing less, in other words, than re-think the culture of academic medicine.

President Clinton aimed one of his rhetorical arrows at this same target: To his audience of fresh-faced grads he declared that you, the rising generation, must focus on creating change that is sustainable, devising new ways to live and work that fit with the needs and interests not only of your work and your families, but of your spirit, of our society, and of our intricately interconnected world.

Tomorrow’s executive leaders need all the help we can give them. Fortunately, there are some wise men and women who know this and are dedicating serious effort to exploring innovative ways to prepare them. I have seen and heard them first-hand struggling to figure out a way forward on the new road, and I’m happy to report that my impressions lead me to be optimistic, despite the enormous resistance inherent in the status quo and the difficulties of successfully inventing new forms of organization that will work better than what we have now.

Is my hope warranted? It depends in part on whether you and your organization choose to help or hinder. How are you re-making leadership development so that future leaders are ready for the world they’ll live in, not for the one we’ve known?

The post How Are You Developing Future Leaders? appeared first on Total Leadership.

More than any particular policy initiative or new program announcement, yesterday’s session at the White House was a symbolic moment that signified, at last, a new era in which we are really talking and thinking differently about work and its relationship with the rest of our lives. The First Couple, relaxed and confident in their choices, spoke candidly about the difficulties they have faced in cultivating a successful marriage and family while pursuing careers about which they feel passionate.

As I looked around the room filled with 100 or so business leaders, government officials, policy advocates, union representatives, and researchers — and then again in one of the five small group sessions at which we shared best practices — I couldn’t help but notice that there were almost as many men present as women. When I first began addressing the matter of work and family in my Wharton School classroom in 1987, and soon thereafter organized roundtables and research on this issue, it was unusual for there to be more than one or two other guys in the room. More than one senior colleague told me to not waste my time on what they saw as a women’s issue that wasn’t of great import to business.

Yesterday, the President forcefully proclaimed how evidence shows that workplace flexibility is not just a special perk for women, but that it’s a critical part of a workplace that can help all of us: that increased flexibility doesn’t hurt your bottom line, it increases it; that work is what you do, not who you are; and that fathers need and want to be as much a part of their children’s lives as do mothers. Our chief executive was declaring to the business community that raising the next generation is the most important job we have, and that we’re going to make it easier for people to do it.

Our small group discussion focused on the importance of customizing solutions to fit local needs — that one size surely cannot fit all. Representatives of companies as diverse as J&J, Timberland, Dow Corning, PNC Bank, and Jet Blue shared stories of how they’re figuring it out. Instructive as these and other examples were, the hopeful idea that stayed with me as I left the meeting, and walked through the White House grounds admiring the cherry blossoms blooming on the warm sunny day that was the last of a rainy March (thank goodness!), was this: that we have arrived at a new juncture in the American story. Leadership in business isn’t just about business. It’s about life.

The post The First Couple and a New Era of Workplace Flexibility appeared first on Total Leadership.

Recently, in my Wharton MBA course on leadership from the point of view of the whole person, we grappled with the challenge of how to choose among the various media options available today for connecting with important people in all the different parts of your life. We came up with 17 different media currently in use for interpersonal contact, including face-to-face (verbal and non-verbal), phone, email, snail mail, text and video messaging, blogs, podcasts, online forums, even music sharing and online gaming, among others. Quite a few of these did not even exist ten years ago, reminding us that we are all still very much in learning mode when it comes to the social and psychological principles and methods we need to take advantage of the incredibly powerful, and sometimes bewildering, array of choices we have.

Digital technology has added both relief and stress to our lives. These tools can make it easier to move rapidly from one part of life to another and give rapid access to the people who need you. And you can broadcast with them, making communication extremely efficient. Yet instead of realizing all the potential benefits, most people find themselves trapped by the demands imposed by the enormous amount of information surrounding them every hour of every day. A thought experiment: If I told you right now that you had to give up all your digital devices for the next day, how would you feel? Relieved? Terrified? We’ve become enormously dependent on these tools, and yet we’ve not spent nearly enough time thinking about how best to use them so that we gain the benefits while keeping them from reducing the quality of our lives.

People complain that using new technologies reduces social interaction and sense of community while others rant about being expected to be available for work 24/7 with zero response-time to urgent messages. While the promise of new media is freedom, choice, and control, the reality for most is crippling overload. On the employer side, many bosses wonder whether people are really working when they are connecting virtually. They also worry about how to foster team spirit when the “team” is invisible. Finally, when performance is measured the old-fashioned way (by time spent in an office) and not on the basis of results (no matter where and when they are produced), digital communications can seem to undermine productivity.

But what if you could use the media available to you to build trust and gain greater flexibility? And what if you could do this without being enslaved and constantly bombarded by your Blackberry, iPhone, laptop, or whatever? You’d feel more whole, better able to integrate the diverse pieces of the social puzzle in your life.

You can learn to use new media to shift time and place in ways that work for all your key stakeholders, including yourself. But the intelligent use of the various media we now have isn’t just a matter of doing more digital. Rather, it’s a matter of more consciously allocating your use of different modes of communication: for example, making face-to-face communication a priority for those stakeholders with whom it’s needed, while using digital less. It all depends on what’s going to work best for you and for them.

Studying your forms of interaction will help you generate ideas for how you might capitalize on the benefits of each communication mode (e.g., face-to-face is best when trust is on the line) while minimizing the liabilities (e.g., emails can miss nuances better conveyed on the phone or in person). This might mean shifting to more in-person time with certain stakeholders (such as your children or clients) and less with others (such as with your boss or the people who report to you) while taking advantage of the flexibility of virtual media as a means of staying connected with others.

Here’s one way to stimulate creative thinking about exploiting various forms of communication. Think about the media you use to communicate with the five most important people or groups at work, at home, and in your community. For each of these stakeholders, estimate the percentage of your interaction time that is conducted through each of the following forms of communication: face-to-face (F2F), virtual synchronous (shifting place but not time, such as phone, IM, and videoconferencing), and virtual asynchronous (shifting both time and place, such as voicemail and email) communication. For example, you might spend 50% in F2F with your boss, 20% with her on the phone, and 30% by email and voicemail. After you do this analysis, look for patterns. Consider how using different forms of communication affects your capacity to achieve your goals in each part of your life and to align them better by asking these questions:

• What opportunities are there for you to use different forms of communication more effectively?
• Are there stakeholders with whom you should be devoting more time F2F and others less?
• With whom would it be better to use virtual more regularly?

The real value in this analysis is to become more aware of media preferences (yours and theirs) and to learn more about how you can be more effective in meeting expectations by using a given medium. Look for opportunities to explain to your people why you have a preference for one medium over another for certain kinds of communications. For example, if you prefer email, and can justify it as the option of choice to a friend, your father, or a co-worker, that conversation about your preferences will probably make the entire process of communicating go more smoothly. The technology choice should be based on a mutual understanding about why, how, and when you’re going to communicate.

Staying mindful of the preferences others have means looking for chances to talk about when, where, and how you use different media to stay connected, including when you’re available and when you’re not. You might, for instance, discuss what it would be like to shut off the digital information stream for a specific period — even for just an hour or two — to focus your attention entirely on one thing.

With so many options, there are plenty of opportunities for you to experiment, even just for a week or so, with how you use media. Try something different, with the deliberate goal of performing more effectively in all the different parts of your life, and see what happens.

The post Tweet or Meet? How to Choose Your Medium Wisely appeared first on Total Leadership.

The Directive Approach — Giving Useful Feedback

The essence of directive coaching is providing feedback. Take this approach when your goal as a coach is to instruct others on what they’ve done well and what they can do to improve.

As a coach, one of the main gifts you have to offer to anyone who you’ve seen in action is to express to them your observation of that action and its consequences. It’s best to present your impressions straightforwardly and with compassion. The quality and sensitivity of a coach’s feedback can make a huge difference in spurring growth. On the other side, to be an effective client (or coachee), the primary challenge you face is to remain open and manage your natural tendency to be defensive in reacting to feedback — information about your actions and their consequences — that is in some way inconsistent with how you currently view yourself. Getting good at both giving and receiving directive coaching requires practice. Very few people are naturally gifted in this essential skill.

In providing directive feedback, your main responsibility is to identify strengths and clarify areas for improvement that address your client’s goals, while at the same time finding ways to reduce his or her defensiveness. You produce value as a peer coach when you give feedback that, first and foremost, addresses goals that are a real priority for them, not for you. It’s useful, too, for you to push your clients to stretch and go as far as they can in pursuing the goals that matter to them.

I’ve found that the best way to offer feedback is to prepare what you’re going to say in advance and to make sure it’s balanced, not overly positive or negative; a mix of both is best, not least because it enhances your credibility and your client’s trust that you’re being candid. Be direct and specific about what you’ve seen and the consequences of your client’s actions. Of course, if you are being constructively critical — pointing out a client’s mistake or area for improvement — you’ve also got to offer a constructive suggestion or two.

When you give directive feedback, you want to make sure that what you’ve said is what has actually been heard and understood by your client. The easiest way to do this is to simply ask your client to repeat back to you how she took what you said and what it means to her. Finally, it’s almost always a good idea to conclude an offering of directive feedback with an expression of your interest in providing follow-up assistance, leaving the door open for future opportunities for you to help.

The Nondirective Approach — Asking Smart Questions

The essence of nondirective coaching is simply asking useful, probing questions. Many people fear change because it forces them into unknown territory, where things are unpredictable and unfamiliar. And yet there are predictable stages people go through when they undertake intentional change. In taking the non-directive approach, your goal is to help others to see and feel the need to create meaningful, sustainable change. Here are the stages and some of the key questions to ask in helping your clients to face the challenges associated with each:

What’s the problem?
The first step is identifying the need for change. This can be difficult, as many of us ignore information that disconfirms our current perceptions or threatens the status quo. Coaches can help identify blind spots — by encouraging self-reflection about things that aren’t obvious to their clients. As a coach, basic questions to ask to increase awareness are:

-As you think about your goals, what’s not working well in your life?
-What are the consequences of this issue for you and for the important people in your life?
-What is the source of the need to change — is it in you or is it external?

Why bother?
The next stage is about the belief that the need to change is urgent enough to take action. Because we naturally tend towards continuing the status quo, if doing something new doesn’t feel urgent, it’s not likely to occur. Coaches can help raise urgency by asking questions such as these:

-Looking ahead, what will happen if you don’t change?
-What will happen if you do change?

What’s your decision?
The decision to change is a crucial moment because it marks the point when your mind shifts and you begin to see a different future. It is also a fragile point in planned change processes, fraught with temptations to revert to the way things have always been and distractions away from the focused effort that’s required to do something new and make it stick. However, coaches can help clients reach and move beyond this point by asking:

-What have you decided to do differently and why?
-What is the ideal outcome?
-What are your new goals?

What steps exactly?
What are the possible step-by-step actions the client can take to make this decision real in his or her work and life? Good coaches ask clients to think aloud about what to do differently, how to overcome obstacles, and what skills or sources of support are needed. You can help your client discover specific ideas for how to better accomplish goals by asking:

-What exactly will you do, and when will you do it?
-How will you measure progress?
-What stands in the way, and how will you overcome these barriers?
-How will you generate needed support?

Are you really in?
Generating sufficient commitment to follow through is one of the most challenging aspects of any change process. Because commitment wanes without a sense of urgency, coaches should continually test for this. Coaches can ask:

-What if this is harder than you think?
-What are the first steps — and the next steps — you will take?
-How will you maintain your sense of urgency?

How will you sustain it?
Even if a client has made it through all of the prior stages, it is crucial that he or she receive reinforcement for the positive outcomes gained. Encouragement at every small step builds momentum, and coaches should provide frequent reinforcement and celebrate their clients’ successes to bolster confidence and help clients avoid slippage. The key questions here are:

-What impact has your new behavior had on you and others?
-What accomplishments are you proud of achieving?
-Is there a smarter step that might help you build momentum?
-How can I (as your coach) reinforce your commitment to action?

Get in the Game!

Directive and non-directive peer coaching can make a real difference in helping people change. Try both methods and then find out what works and what doesn’t by asking your clients to critique your actions. Like any other skill, practice as a peer coach — with follow-up assessment of what works and what doesn’t, along with support from people (that is, your clients) who are dedicated to helping you become more adept at helping them — makes perfect.

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We all need somebody to lean on. No one gains real success, in business or in other parts of life, without the support of other people. Peer-to-peer coaching is an important source of social support, and there are good reasons why, as a business professional, you can and should do it regularly.

Drawing on decades of experience in coaching and in teaching others how to coach, in this post I describe what you can do to cultivate your own peer-to-peer coaching network — a small group of trusted people whom you help and who help you by providing encouragement, ideas, a different perspective on obstacles and opportunities, and social pressure to actually do what you know you need to do differently.

I’m not suggesting that you become a professional coach, or pretend to be one. Informal coaching connections aren’t a replacement for professional coaching or counseling support, which should be sought when problems in your life reach the point where you are unable to deal effectively with them with the resources you’ve currently got at your disposal. Rather, I’m offering ideas that, short of professional counseling, can help you and your friends, colleagues, and family members help each other in your efforts to create change.

Coaching, to put it simply, is the process of helping others to improve performance now and developing their capacity to perform well in the future. It’s about changing behavior to make things better. Because the process of change is difficult and can provoke anxiety, people often resist it. The forces of inertia are strong, but effective coaching can surmount them. Peer-to-peer coaching is fun, because it involves learning and solving real problems; it’s free; and, I’ve found, just about anyone can do it.

What You Gain

There are many benefits that derive from informal coaching relationships. First, the obvious and automatic ones you receive as a “client” (what I call anyone on the receiving end of coaching): By talking about a new business idea, for example, with a peer coach who has no vested interest other than in helping you figure out the best next step, you can get the encouragement you need to overcome your fear of starting something new and specific suggestions for realistic actions to take. Perhaps more important, peer coaches hold you accountable — you feel obliged to report to them on your progress, of lack thereof — an all-too-often missing ingredient in recipes for cooking up something new.

Then there are the intangibles that come from helping others, and these might ultimately be the most useful. People find that when they are trying to help someone else produce change they themselves gain useful insights on their own problems, just by listening to someone else’s. (Full disclosure: I’ve made a career out of asking questions to which I wish I knew the answers.) In addition, there is a sense of camaraderie and the good feeling that comes when you have a positive effect on another person’s well-being. Further, doing so enhances your reputation as someone who invests in others’ success. Finally, because the giving and receiving of coaching support is a behavioral skill, through practice and reflection on what works and what doesn’t, you can develop and improve your ability as a coach.

Getting Started

If you’re starting from scratch, think about the people in your current personal and professional networks with whom you’d like to collaborate in an informal coaching network. They might be co-workers, friends, or members of your family. Start small, with three people, including you, and with each of you taking turns serving as both coach and client for the others.

Begin with the three of you finding a time to talk about your goals for your informal coaching network. The more open you are about your goals, the more likely they’ll be realized, because your commitment will be higher. In this first conversation, you should also talk about your hopes and fears. Discuss how your small network will work together. Establish expectations, set up times to meet (via email, phone, or face-to-face), and begin to learn about each other’s interests. Clarify how you’ll play the coach and client roles, and be open to adjusting these expectations as needed. Gain an initial understanding of your clients’ key relationships at work, at home, and in the community. At the same time, respect privacy and preferences for how much information your clients are willing to disclose.

Guidelines for Peer Coaching

Here are some general guidelines for how to be an effective peer coach:

• Show you care about helping your clients achieve their goals.
• Share your own experiences only to help the client feel accepted, not to focus on you.
• Be as aware as possible of your own biases as a coach.
• Stay in touch with the reality your client is facing — listen well.
• Don’t hide your ignorance — ask questions, even ones you might think are dumb.
• Encourage your client to get more help when needed, from all sources.

Some cautionary notes: First, if you cannot provide feedback at the time your client is expecting it, immediately communicate this to your client to explain the delay. This builds trust. Avoid long periods of coaching inactivity. Like any developed skill, good coaching requires time, energy and thoughtfulness by both participants — and you get can get rusty quickly. Try not to criticize your client’s ideas; usually it’s just best to listen and offer alternatives. Don’t promise more than you can deliver; this will decrease your credibility.

Two Types of Coaching

Once you’ve gotten started, you can focus more on what kinds of coaching work best for different people and situations. Coaching can be either directive or nondirective. Directive coaching involves listening to your client and then offering advice from your own experiences or knowledge base. Nondirective coaching requires listening to your client’s problems, but instead of then offering advice, asking questions that encourage your client to reach solutions independently. Asking good questions helps your client achieve greater self-understanding. Both forms of coaching can be effective; the preferred type depends on what your client needs. For details, stay tuned for my next post.

The post How to Cultivate a Peer Coaching Network appeared first on Total Leadership.

One of the least discussed yet quite salient issues for American business in this year of health care reform is an important yet hidden cost associated with mental illness: the drain on productive work endured by family members struggling to support loved ones who suffer from such diseases. The good news for business leaders is that it’s not hard to do something to help and thus feel good while improving company culture and morale, as well as your bottom line.

Mental illness comes in a staggering array of forms, and affects a broad swath of our general population. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, an “estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.”

Awareness and understanding of mental illness has grown in recent years; still, it’s often not taken seriously or treated as a legitimate medical disease either by businesses, by the health care system, or by our society. Indeed, too many people remain reluctant to get the help they need because of the stigma associated with mental illness. The website bringchange2mind.org (with a powerful new public service video by film director Ron Howard) asserts that “for many, the stigma associated with the illness can be as great a challenge as the disease itself.”

This stigma extends beyond those directly stricken to family members. Parents of children with mental illness are often viewed as guilty by association, unfairly perceived as the cause of the illness — the source of harmful child-rearing practices — when the origin is mainly biological. Parents and other family members feel shame and a sense of failure. I know because one of my adult children suffers from a toxic combination of schizophrenia (a thought disorder) and bipolar illness (a mood disorder).

There are real costs associated with employees having to carry this heavy weight of worry and responsibility, especially if they feel they must do so without the understanding and support of their organization. There is stress, unwanted social isolation in the workplace, and the feeling that they must find clandestine ways of responding to urgent demands for their attention. All of this undermines productivity by causing burn-out, unplanned absences, distractions from focused effort on tasks, and poor confidence in being able to contribute to the team.

As a leader in your organization, you can reduce these costs and inspire greater performance from valued employees. You can enable them to feel freer to ask for the help they need in supporting their families by changing how you think , how you talk, and how you act. In turn, they are bound to repay you with extraordinary effort and commitment to your goals and to your company.

Mind your attitude. Changing your attitude toward one of greater understanding and acceptance requires education (see, for example, this recent Harris survey on schizophrenia). If an employee with dependent care responsibilities born of a physical abnormality or illness needs to bring a loved one to a doctor’s visit, no one judges him harshly. Indeed, this is likely to evoke sympathy. On the other hand, if he has to disrupt his work schedule to care for a family member, who — for reasons difficult to grasp and explain — cannot be left alone for fear of hearing voices or of some other dread psychological symptom, then he might well be reluctant to risk letting others know why he needs the time because they might look askance or even question his own mental stability. Your attitude can make all the difference. By taking mental illness as seriously as any physical illness, you convey emotional support and encourage employees to get the help they need to cope with the strains of caring for their sick loved one.

Watch your words. The words you use, and the way you use them, convey your attitude. Here’s a tip from bringchange2mind.org: “Refrain from using terms like ‘crazy,’ ‘nuts,’ ‘psycho’ and ‘lunatic.’ While there may be times when it is too challenging or simply not possible to politely correct someone else’s insensitive use of language, you can always try to watch your own.” To combat harmful stereotypes and demonstrate understanding, it’s better to say, for example, that someone “has schizophrenia” than to call that person a “schizophrenic” — the illness is not the person.

Model behavior. The kinds of actions that show genuine support are the same ones you’d want to show all your employees in treating them as whole people, with important aspects of life playing out beyond the bounds of work: Initiate and encourage dialogue with an open mind, address the individual needs of each employee, respect confidentiality, and be flexible and willing to engage in joint problem-solving while focusing on results that matter to you and to them.

Change the culture. As a business leader you are in a position to have a positive influence on the culture of your organization which, in turn affects all your employees as well as other stakeholders — clients and customers, suppliers, community members, and so on. Your supportive attitude about those who are forced to live with mental illness — with the words and deeds to reinforce it — can shape your company’s values and the behavior in it that determine whether or not all your people get the help they need to both contribute fully to your business and lead productive lives.

What else can be done to make it easier for parents and other loved ones of those who live with mental illness to perform well at work? Please comment and share your stories, advice, and resources.

The post The Hidden Business Cost of Mental Illness appeared first on Total Leadership.