Don’t Read This If Your Team Is Stressed

April 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Well, here you are reading this so your team (or perhaps more accurately you) are stressed. And I just know what you’re going to say … you have too much work and too little time. So if I suggest anything at all to you at this point, you might just rip my face off (you laugh but I just had that happen and not that long ago). But I will risk it anyway and suggest that at your next team meeting, you ask for 5 minutes and have everyone do the following:

  1. Write down all of the things that you can celebrate right now about your lives, your work and your team. And yes, do feel free to tweet, text or email each other if you simply can’t pull yourself away from your technology.
  2. Make a list of the things you are stressed about that you can control and ask yourselves for each one – 6 minutes from now will this be important, 6 hours from now, 6 days from now, 6 weeks from now, 6 years from now. I’d like to humbly suggest that you put all of the 6 minute, hour, and day things into perspective.
  3. Then, make a list of things you are stressed about that you can’t control and banish them from your heads. As someone once said (and I’m sorry I cannot remember who said it or where I read it), don’t let them live rent free in your head. It’s like giving someone you don’t trust the passwords to all of your accounts and that’s just plain crazy.
  4. TAKE A MINUTE, AN HOUR, OR BETTER YET A DAY OFF!!!! If your team is stressed, you have opened just one too many programs and your computer will crash (I know this because my husband watches me do this all the time and, yes, even that brand new super dooper computer will crash at some point if you just keep installing software on it.)
  5. Next, get reacquainted with the original passion and intent of the team. What is your team being called to do? How does that fit into the overall goals of your organization? How and where does your team need to prioritize its work?  How can you reignite how you all work together?
  6. Now that you’ve rebooted, take a deep breath and prepare yourself for the final bit of advice …

LOOK AFTER YOURSELVES!!!! Instead of winding yourselves up like the Ever Ready Battery Bunny, try to keep our teamwork tip of the week top of mind, or better yet the wallpaper on your iPhone.

Look After Yourselves

Jack of Hearts – Look After Yourselves

Our work lives can be challenging, and demanding. Make sure you take time for yourself on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Ensure that you are in touch with what really matters in life and strive to separate challenges and failures at work from your own personal sense of worth and efficacy. Take time for exercise, rest, leisure activities, family, friends, daily time-outs, and vacations.

How is your team doing?  How do you encourage each other to look after themselves?

Curious about the rest of the tips and want to know all about them now? Find out more.

Filed Under: Leadership, teams, Work Life Balance Tagged With: , ,

Work Life Balance

September 22, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Work/Life Balance

We take a slight risk in posting this picture to our blog … after all we are in our bathing suits!  So leadership is about risk and here we go …

But the picture is a literal and metaphorical example of work life balance, a challenge many of our high tech leadership coaching clients face. The obvious one is that work life balance does involve taking time out for fun and we recently came back from a vacation where we played on tubes in the water 🙂

The metaphorical one is how we rode this tube around the lazy river pool.  It took us an amazing amount of time to get balanced on the tube and while we look balanced in this picture, in fact our journey around the river pool was all up and down and side to side than completely balanced floating lazily along the river.

A lot of our clients think that work life balance is having everything balanced at all times on a daily basis. We think a more powerful metaphor is to think of work life balance as a paradoxical polarity that must be managed, but cannot ever be solved or fixed. We draw on Barry Johnson’s polarity management to help ourselves (and our clients) manage the tension.

If you focus too much on your work life, you will start to experience a downside to that focus.  It could look like too many hours at the office, increased stress, less enjoyment of work, complaints from your spouse, etc. Whatever it is, you need to put some focus on your personal life for a while.  If you start to focus on your personal life too much, you will experience a downside to that.  It could look like missed career opportunities, a disconnect with your colleagues, complaints from your boss.  That’s your signal to return back to your work life. Ironically, the early warning signals we most need to pay attention to are the ones we do our best to dismiss (eg. think spousal complaints 😉

And so it goes … just as Dave and I bobbed up and down on our raft, so too must people swing back and forth between work life and personal life. The trick is to not tip over, which can only be accomplished if we’re aware and open enough to those early warning signals. Sometimes I was perilously close to being dumped in the water and Dave was flying high … but we managed to get back to centre before either of us got too wet!

Filed Under: Work Life Balance Tagged With: , , , ,