What happens when personal and corporate purposes come into conflict? How do you resolve a situation where pursuing one purpose leads to the compromise or abandonment of the other? What happens when boundaries between the two become so blurred they’re nearly impossible to see — when you’re emotionally, if not practically, “living at work”? Far from greasing the wheels of engagement and performance, the conflict leaves employees to find ways to practice damage limitation on the fallout resulting from a grinding misalignment and painfully divided loyalties.
The inner life of employees is shaped by personal purpose, including goals they’ve set for themselves, which will probably feature some professional or career development targets. Nestled inside that personal purpose will be an array of aspirations, attitudes and values related to topics as varied as parenting, care for a partner and wider family, perhaps their spiritual life or other intellectual, sporting and social pursuits. These day-to-day preoccupations shape a person but are often supplemented with the twin drive to belong and make a meaningful contribution.
Employees bring their whole selves to work — not just the part of them that does the job. People bring all their other preoccupations and attributes with them to work, too, many of which are equally if not more valuable than the specific skills they’ve been hired for.
When people are unable to balance the demands of work with the rest of their lives — when they’re forced to consistently prioritise work over other activities — the time to do the extra work is inevitably diverted away from the activities that align with their personal purpose. When that happens, they lose something intensely valuable both to themselves and their employer: engagement and performance.
Preventing Burnout by “Leading by Example”
As our roles and responsibilities expand throughout our careers, meeting all those demands requires us to regularly divert time away from the very activities that ground and secure us. When this becomes the regular response strategy to frequent work-life conflict, a personal well-being and sustainability problem will be on the cards.
The net result of these divided or conflicting loyalties is clearly visible in the stress and burnout headlines we see every day. 2022 research by the UK Health and Safety Executive estimates that more than half of all workplace ill health episodes have stress as a causal factor, and 1 in 6 employees have a diagnosable mental health impairment.
If you’re a learning and development (L&D) leader who also happens to lead an L&D team, then there’s a specific form of storytelling for you to consider — the story you tell through the medium of your behavior as a people leader.
When you were growing up you may well have heard a more senior family member (perhaps ruefully) remark “Don’t do as I do, do as I say” or, if you have children of your own, you may even have said the same thing. When managers fail to role model the behaviors that they expect from others or implement policies and procedures that are misaligned with stated or agreed values or set targets and expectations at a level that requires employees to regularly bust boundaries to meet them, then they’re telling mutually incompatible stories. The manager says one thing but the decision-making and interpersonal behavior that team members experience day to day communicate something quite different. This lack of congruence is the wellspring of workplace toxicity, stress, anxiety, fear, reduced engagement and attrition. Not surprisingly, therefore, my advice is to recognize the need for congruence and take responsibility for it. It’s an integral part of good leadership, not an added extra.
If you’re a senior L&D people leader, the weight of responsibility for the congruence of messages is greater still. The entry requirements are a critical ear for your own and others’ perspectives, curiosity about how they might differ and accepting responsibility for ensuring compatibility between corporate message and corporate behavior. But there’s another critical dimension to consider. No corporate decision can ever be taken in a vacuum. Decisions made and expectations set in the boardroom, as they move from idea to implementation, inevitably and directly extend or truncate options for those working further down the company hierarchy.
If you already lead what you consider to be a purpose-driven organization, you need to ask yourself whether your company’s what — the decisions you make, how you communicate and implement those decisions and the way you organize resources – unequivocally stands as evidence of your stated why (purpose) in action. Or does it tell a different, more inconvenient story — that you’re also struggling with the same issue? Or perhaps you don’t really mean it? Are you promoting and celebrating personal mission and purpose yet at the same time asking your team members to repeatedly prioritize the company objectives over their own?
Having to ensure a high-quality response to conflicting personal and company objectives is mentally, emotionally and physically exhausting. The apparent impossibility of doing so is the reason why work and life boundaries have become so blurred for so many people. But when leaders role model resilient behaviors and set personal boundaries, they empower their teams to see beyond the corporate goal and maintain a healthy separation between work and other areas of their lives. Sustainable, healthy high performance can only be achieved by regular recovery, which means maintaining personal boundaries.
