I find it strange that we don’t look to our private lives for insights on how to manage in the workplace. And yet it is often in our personal lives that we confront our real self - not the performing self. It’s when we are hit on an emotional level in our personal lives that we are most profoundly confronted with how to manage ourselves and the situation.
My contention is that we are more likely to learn new skills when we are confronted with the hardest of issues – and those issues are almost always connected to our emotions. I would say we are lazier or resume our worst practises with those we love, often falling into behaviours that would never be tolerated in the workplace.
This description of course seems not very convincing when I say that our personal lives provide the fodder for good leadership and management practises. My reasoning is that we are more likely to see ourselves in our personal lives with some clarity in terms of our feelings and perhaps our failings. If we can somehow figure out how to move outside our egos in our private lives and resolve the issues, then we have gained valuable skills to take into the workplace.
The book , “The Goal” by Daniel Goldblatt is a good example of the reverse. He describes a process where the main protagonist discovers how he has mismanaged processes in manufacturing and, learned to find those obstacles, work with people and generate a productive but engaging workplacein the end. Because his own marriage was suffering as well he took many of the lessons he learned home only discover that he could build a better life with his family from what he learned about himself in the workplace. Not a bad concept.
I know that when I’m dealing with the complexities of my personal life I struggle to be mature, to let go of my ego/vanity, my defensiveness. I want everyone to know I’ve been wronged almost more than I want a solution. Yup it’s true. And yet it is in these moments that I learn the most about thinking objectively, what the more appropriate outcome should be and how to get there. Let’s face it our principle issue in the workplace is less about the technical stuff and hell of a lot more about how to work together for a common purpose. By honing the work we do at thinking about the problem, arriving at solutions in both our work and personal lives, each can benefit and we must learn to take the skills we learn in one area to the other.
Contributed by Dr. Helen Ramirez -- Senior Partner
