There is an excellent interview with Stewart Friedman at Knowledge@Wharton. I urge you to read the whole interview. The following is a snippet quoting Professor Friedman:
“There's a couple of ways in which I think this approach is different. First, it starts with the notion that you can find ways of creating value, improving performance in all four domains -- what I call a four-way win: work, home, community and self -- by making intelligent choices about how you use your time and attention that don't necessarily require a trade-off.
With most of the work/life balance approaches, the conversation that is current comes from the point of view of the employee making demands on his or her employer for more freedom and more available time to do things outside of work. And that's the wrong approach.
What leaders do when they try to create change, when they aim to make sustainable change that lasts, is enlist the people around them in whatever it is they're trying to get done that's new by having those people see the benefits for them.
So in the total leadership approach, what you do is first spend some time on what I call "being real." What's most important to you? You write about that. You think about your core values, your vision of the kind of leader you want to become, the world you want to create and the legacy you want to leave. Talk about that with others to get clearer about what really matters to you.
The second piece is what I call "being whole." There you identify the performance expectations of the most important people in your life at work, at home and in the community. You list the most four or five most important people or groups. What do they expect of you? What do you expect of them?
Then you talk to those people. You prepare for, and engage in, what I call "stakeholder dialogs." Imagine having these conversations over a concentrated period of time with the most important people. This is the peak anxiety point in this process because everyone is like, "Do I really have to talk to these people about this stuff?"
In nine out of 10 occasions, what happens is that people come through that process with really new insights about how all the pieces fit together and what other people actually expect of them, because most business professionals probably have the following problem: What they believe others expect of them is actually greater than what those people really expect of them. You discover that gap when you have a good conversation.
What's the implication of that, of getting a clearer and realistic picture of what other people expect of you? And if it's true -- and believe me, it is true -- that people expect less of you than you think, you can then reallocate your time and attention more intelligently. That's what people do in the experiments, which is the third phase, the "innovative," where people take on small steps intended to produce a four-way win.
Now, to finally answer your question about what's different here in the leadership piece: When you engage in these stakeholder dialogs, you find out a lot more about what other people are interested in, what their real interests are in terms of what they need from you and what you need from them.
On the basis of knowing more about what's really important to you and what's really important to them, you can then design smart experiments that really do satisfy their interests. That makes it much more likely that when you create an experiment to produce value for them and for you, that it actually does. And it's entirely customized to you.
The last point I'll make about the work/life balance movement and its failure is the problem of "one size fits all"-ism, which is a not uncommon problem in many HR areas where, for the sake of equality, there's a standard policy that is implemented in a way that's universally applicable -- [even though] everyone's life is different and everyone needs different things in terms of how to integrate the different pieces. It's got to be customized.
So this approach is built on your assessment of what matters, who the most important people are in your life and the experiments that fit your situation”.
