Leadership: Whole Person Leadership

How many times have you noticed that someone acts differently in "real life" than they do at work. What is it that let's us feel free to be who we are at home and with friends, but we feel we have to put up a front, or play the game, or just act differently when we are at work?

I was trying to seek answers, and read a recent article on "whole person leadership" by Jack Keogh, and he pointed out that it's about "finding mutual balance among family, community, work and our private selves."1  While I agree with that point, I also feel that there are sometimes people who feel balance in those areas, and yet still act differently at work than they do at home.

An experiment recently struck me while I was in my Leadership Coaching course at George Mason University (run by Philosophy IB). What if you were to think of everything as a stimulus-response scenario. Then you look at stimuli and your response to them in your home life, and then again in your work life.

For example:

• If you're faced with a stressful situation in both, do you react similarly?
• If someone challenges you in both locations, how do you handle it?
• Are you highly task oriented at work and more creative and playful with your kids at home?
• When you think about teaching your children something, is that different than how you try to interact with colleagues at work?

Maybe next time you seem to be struggling with a situation or decision at work, take a moment to step back and put on your filter of how you act at home. Maybe there's an answer there that you aren't thinking of.

Granted, all of this requires a high level of self-awareness in the first place, and that's an entirely separate topic. Maybe one for a future post...

If this interests you, also check out my post about what it takes to be a leader.


Endnotes:
1. http://www.drivingstraight.com/Articles/Whole%20person%20leadership.pdf