The Manager - The Trinity of Work Life Balance - Cultivated Management Newsletter
The Manager
THE
manager.
Edition 1
The Trinity of work life balance
Hi and welcome to the new look Cultivated Management newsletter.
Do let me know what you think to the design and contents by hitting reply to the email. I'm also super keen to hear more about what you'd like to see covered in this newsletter in the future. For now though, let's look at how you can help balance your own life and work.
Your job in life is to find the right balance between how you prefer to work, what you're good at and what makes you happy
As a manager I've come to realise that it's not MY job to help make my direct reports happy at work - it's their job, but I MUST create the conditions to allow them to use their strengths, remove system barriers and to gel the team together in a way that reduces conflict.
It's the same in my own life - it's not my managers job to make sure I get the right balance in my life, but it is his/her job to help create the conditions for success. After all, we know that motivated, engaged, productive and happy people help to make great companies and get a lot of work done.
So how do you do it? How do you get the balance right?
A simple, but immensely effective approach that I take is the "Trifector of work life" as I like to call it. Not a very catchy title but it works. Here's how it works:
Imagine a triangle. At one of the three points are your strengths - what you're good at. At the second are you work preferences - how you like to work and how you operate at work. And at the final of the three is your happiness - the things that make you happy.
My suggestion is that you try to find a job where you are using you strengths and your preferences for work. These are two of the triangle points. If you can balance the third, happiness, at work too then bingo - great job. But I also know that many people find happiness outside of work. Some people even find something outside of work that uses their strengths.
I suggest to all of my directs that their goal in life is to find some way to get all three aligned. Many people try to find all three at work - I think those that do are lucky.
How do you I work out what my strengths are, what makes me happy and how I like to work?
Glad you asked. Here's my approach - there are many other ways.
I use a DiSC Profile to find out my own, and my direct reports, preferences for work (I'll be blogging more on DISC soon) - There's a decent free one here, DiSC Profile. - I prefer to pay a few quid and use the manager-tools one
I use Gallop strengths finder to work out mine and my team's strengths. - Strengths Finder
And I use the Authentic Happiness character strengths to work out what I need more of in my life to make me happy. Authentic Happiness - use the VIA Survey of Character Strengths survey. When I first did these three I was astounded at how accurate I found them (note - most people disagree with their DISC profile at first - if you do - ask your colleagues for feedback :) )
All three pointed out what I was good at, how I liked to work (and essentially who I liked to work with) and what brought me happiness. I realised that I'm a big thinker, an influencer, a creative strategy maker at heart and I appreciate humour in my work - at the time I wasn't using any of these - no wonder i was unhappy.
The information is just that - information. It's not 100% accurate. It's yours to use as you see fit. If you do nothing with it - fine. If you choose to use it to create better designed work and jobs - awesome.
I'll be blogging about each one of these aspects (DISC, happiness, strengths) over the coming weeks.
The Trifector of Work and Life has helped me greatly. It's been a useful set of tools to help me create the right environment for my team to thrive and it's also helped me to craft a career that uses my strengths and preferences and makes me happy at the same time.
It also helped me to realise that my photography hobby would fulfil a large part of my happiness as well - and that I didn't need to rely on work for everything.
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