Women’s Leadership: Living and Leading a Fully Integrated Life
As leaders, many of us are experiencing new challenges in the new workplace. To help women leaders navigate this, SHAMBAUGH’s Women in Leadership and Learning (WILL) program is helping women step more confidently into their leadership roles, providing ways to get out of their own way and take the lead. I founded WILL over 20 years ago as part of our women’s leadership and women’s executive coaching practice to help women understand workplace dynamics while managing their career and maximizing their leadership potential. Today WILL continues to support women and their organizations across the US.
Last week, I opened up our Fall WILL session and asked the attendees what was top of mind for them. While there was great energy around a number of topics, what stood out the most for these women was dealing with the challenges of managing work-life and finding the energy to deal with the multiple roles and responsibilities they face every day. Many of the women leaders felt they were caught in an exhausting and endless cycle of projects and demands.
When we feel overwhelmed and underwater like this, it’s hard to channel our best leadership ability—so it’s critical to find ways to manage this overload. A key to this, which is an important element of leadership, involves finding ways to live and lead a fully integrated life that incorporates both your personal and professional sides, which allows you to be true to yourself and become a better leader.
Here are some learnings that SHAMBAUGH helps WILL attendees implement with deliberate action plans:
Get Focused
When we feel frazzled, the first thing to go out the window is our focus. So as a first step toward better balance, take an audit of how you spend your time during the course of a day or week. This requires being very intentional and noticing how you’re investing your time. Cut out those tasks that are time wasters and don’t bring the ultimate value you’re looking for in your life or produce value in your leadership.
Think of managing work and the rest of your life like working with a financial planner. How are you investing your money, and are you getting the ROI for those investments that you deserve and need?
Leave a Time Cushion
To help get focused, leave yourself some “cushion” to invest in other areas that will optimize your life and improve your leadership. Again following the financial planning analogy, think about giving yourself some extra time to do things beyond work, much as you leave yourself a financial cushion for greater security with your funds.
While it may feel impossible to find extra time when you’re already feeling swamped, taking this step will ultimately help ease the sense of being booked solid. Leaving a cushion also forces you to avoid overbooking or overinvesting in one thing, instead allowing flexibility to tap into other spheres and experiences that life presents to you. The idea here is to help you avoid overpacking your day and life so you don’t have a spare moment to breathe.
Establish Boundaries—and Hold Them
Being transparent with colleagues about your goals relating to outside commitments can help ensure that you garner the support of others to create better balance. Let people know in advance that you’ll be ending work at 5 p.m. to see your child’s soccer game or go to a doctor’s appointment.
This helps manage the expectations of those around you and allows you to create boundaries. Be sure to stick to your own plans once you’ve announced them, rather than getting caught up in answering work emails and cheating yourself out of the time you’ve carved out.
Build a Supportive Network
No effective leader can do everything singlehandedly. Build and tap into the right relationships that will fill in the gaps, make up for your shortcomings, and provide the emotional, moral, and practical support you need to stay grounded and energized. When you have a supportive network around you, you’ll also have an easier time getting buy-in for your boundary-setting efforts.
Don’t Worry About Being Perfect
I was a perfectionist for years until I realized that striving to be perfect was the wrong approach to achieve success and personal growth. Perfectionism can create self-doubt, burnout, and loss of focus for your bigger, more important goals and activities. Here are some strategies to combat this:
- Think about why you’re a perfectionist. Where does it come from and what does it cost you? Once you recognize the toll that these unreasonable expectations are taking, you’ll be better equipped to change this unhealthy pattern.
- Seek feedback by talking with your teammates and colleagues to ask about their priorities and expectations. What are their most critical success factors? What part of the project is most important to them? Use their feedback to guide the work versus getting caught in the weeds and setting your own arbitrary standards, which can lead to perfectionism and overwork. The key is to be sure you understand the performance standards and use those as operational guidelines, rather than trying to do everything perfectly even if something doesn’t matter in the big picture of the project.
- Focus your efforts on things that matter rather than spreading yourself too thin by trying to do it all well. Identify which actions you take that bring the most value to your team, organization, stakeholders, and customers. Decide what work you really need or want to do that best showcases your leadership—and delegate the rest.
Recognize That It’s Never an Optimal Balance
When it comes to your work-life integration, it’s rarely going to be ideal. Just when you think you’ve achieved a moment of balance, something else will come along to knock you off of the tightrope. Even though our work-life balance can’t be perfect, just like we can’t be, we shouldn’t neglect this vital aspect of our leadership. It’s important for your own health and happiness—and those you lead—to reflect and take action on managing your time with priorities that align with your well-being, not just with business priorities.
Improving your work-life integration is about changing old habits to new ones that work better for you. Don’t compare and model what works for someone else in this arena. It’s up to you to take the accountability to design your own life in such a way that you don’t have regrets and don’t put your health and well-being on the back burner—and you give others permission to do the same.
Learn more about SHAMBAUGH Women in Leadership and Learning (WILL) program on our website.
If you or your team have advice for women in leadership that you’d like to share or questions you’d like to ask about this topic, please reach out to me at info@shambaughleadership.com.
Link to SHAMBAUGH’s offerings on Executive Coaching, Leadership Development, Accepting Enrollment for SHAMBAUGH’s 2024 Coaching and Development Programs for Women Leaders – WILL, Keynotes and Fireside Chats.
Listen to the latest Women Rise podcast episode: A Conversation with Nancy May, President and CEO of BoardBench Companies, on ways for getting on corporate boards.
Rebecca Shambaugh is a recognized author and speaker on leadership best practices. She is president of SHAMBAUGH Leadership, founder of Women in Leadership and Learning, and author of the bestselling books It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor. Read Rebecca’s best-selling Harvard Business Review article “To Sound Like a Leader About What You Say and How and When You Say It.
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