As a baseline, I’ll start with the fact that there is dignity in work. Each person who gives blood, sweat, and tears to their work (sometimes literally) has my utmost respect. Being someone who sits in front of a computer, I have a special admiration for those that do physical work. I’ve expressed thoughts in the past about how digging ditches shaped who I am today.
In my mind, the framing of a balance between work and life starts from a flawed premise. Why the opposition? While I don’t believe your work defines you, I do think it has the potential to magnify you. And success has nothing to do with the magnification. Hard work in and of itself, as a virtue, does. Again, there is dignity in work.
If a balance between work and life is the goal, then by definition, work and life are in a state of opposition. That’s a problem. If I assume that life is the positive side of the equation and work is the negative, then my first thought toward achieving this balance is that a problem exists with your place of work.
Leadership is obligated to eliminate a state of opposition between work and life. But, again, this doesn’t mean that your work defines you. Nor does it mean that you hold your team to the same expectations that you do of yourself as a leader. Instead, it means that you create an environment absent of the factors that contribute to a bifurcation between work and life that necessitates balance. Work is part of life.
When you look strictly at the allocation of time spent at work versus not at work, I fail to understand why the two should ever be at odds. At Liberty Supply, we have no vacation policy. We have no PTO policy. We don’t count sick days. And I spend zero time thinking about the ramifications of those policies’ absence. Instead, all of that energy is allocated to making the environment more conducive to the team’s continued growth.
There is no work/life balance. There is only life.