Three Unexpected Ways Work-Life Balance Can Make You a Better Leader

Think work-life balance and leadership success are mutually exclusive? Think again. Explore three of the ways you can leverage firm personal boundaries as a catalyst to enhance key (and often under-developed) leadership skills.

The Missed Opportunity of Work-Life Balance

It’s easy to believe that achieving work-life balance as a leader is impossible and that leadership success requires constant sacrifice; that more of one automatically takes away from the other.  It’s just one of the things you have to accept if you’re a busy executive, or a founder dedicated to their bigger mission, right?

In actuality, when you throw your hands up and play into the hustle culture stereotype of the sacrificial leader you’re actually missing out on big opportunities to up-level your leadership.  And to create the personal time and balance that make for a healthier, more fulfilling and sustainable experience of leadership and life.

How Work-Life Balance Catalyzes Leadership Growth

Work-life balance isn’t just a nice-to-have or a “should” we all know theoretically is good for us.  When you allow it to be, it’s also a powerful catalyst that can calling you forward into elevated leadership skills and performance.

This is because when you decide to become an ambitious, mission-driven leader who also has clear boundaries and high standards for their personal life, you do something important: you give yourself a set of constraints - something missing from leadership that causes all kinds of leaks and inefficiencies in how you show up.

Let’s look at three specific ways that setting and honoring firm personal boundaries can make you a better leader:

1. Improves Efficiency and Productivity.

According to Parkinson’s Law, an observable trend backed by research in time management and psychology, things tend to take as long as we have to complete them; work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Most leaders are working in one endless marathon without any concept of “stop” or “start” to their workday, often skipping lunches, and missing time after regular working hours to connect with loved ones and disconnect from the taxing hustle.

And all of this personal sacrifice for what?  If having an endless amount of time is counter-productive, working 70 hours a week actually an intelligent leadership strategy?

Instead, firm boundaries around working hours will help you become a more focused, productive, and efficient leader, that not only gets more done in less time, but also has extra time to rest, reset, and investing in personal priorities.

2. Master Delegation and Scale Your Impact

Whether it’s a deep-seated lack of trust, a belief that their team isn’t capable, or an unwillingness to let go of the savior role where they do it all on their own - delegation is one of the most common challenges and biggest performance blocks I see in even the most successful leaders.

But add clear boundaries around personal time, and resisting, avoiding, or being unskilled at delegation is no longer an option.  You’ll have no choice but to mastering a skill that's essential to scaling your impact and becoming a more effective leader. Main benefits include freeing yourself up from draining, low-value tasks, and operating at increasingly higher, more strategic and visionary levels.

3. Improved Problem-Solving & Creativity

Did you know that one of the biggest blockers of creative thinking and innovation for leaders is simply that they think about their problems and projects too much?  That there’s not enough space in their thinking for new ideas to come through?

And there’s no better way to over-saturate your thinking than to have loose or non-existent boundaries with your work; when the problems are big, most leaders make the misguided choice to work longer hours and think about it more.

But having firm personal boundaries will do you the favor of forcing you to take your attention off of the things you’ve been ruminating on all day, so there's space available for fresh thinking and insights to drop in as they’ve been shown to do when we let them go.

The “shower thoughts” phenomenon is well-documented in both cognitive psychology and neuroscience, and when you start to embrace more space in your thinking, your creativity and problem-solving skills will skyrocket.

Embracing Work-Life Synergy as a Busy Leader

As a leader managing high pressure, deadlines, and people counting on you, it can be challenging to take time off and create balance just because “it’s good for you.”  The sacrificial leader is such an ingrained archetype that when leaders veer outside of it, they can instinctively feel like they’re doing something wrong.

But when you can see personal boundaries and a healthy work-life balance as the constraints you might just be needing to grow and evolve some of the most important leadership skills, while also receiving the numerous personal benefits we’re all familiar with, you can start creating a true synergy between work and life that make you a better, more skilled leader and a happier, more balanced human being.

If this all sounds too good to be true, I promise it’s not.  It just takes a willingness to let go of outdated hustle-culture stereotypes and to raise your standards for yourself, your leadership, and your life so that all three can thrive.

Ready to Raise the Bar in Leadership and Life?

Ready to experience a version of leadership without the chronic overwhelm, sacrifice, and survival mode, so you can not only show up as a more powerful, effective leader, but also lead a more rich and balanced life? This is what we do inside of Quantum Leader - my one-to-one transformational executive coaching program.

Send me a message to see if we're a fit to setup a confidential, complimentary Connection Call!