Page 68 - HBR's 10 Must Reads for New Managers

MANAGING THE HIGH-INTENSITY WORKPLACE

Surviving a High-Intensity Workplace

THERE’S NO PERFECT STRATEGY for managing oneself in an organization that
values selfless dedication, but it’s useful to know your own tendencies, un-
derstand their risks, and mitigate those risks to the extent possible. To get
started, think about how you tend to respond to e-mails by colleagues in
the evenings and read the table on the next page.

There Has to Be a Better Way

Our research suggests that if employees felt free to draw some lines
between their professional and personal lives, organizations would
benefit from greater engagement, more-open relationships, and
more paths to success. We outline three steps that managers can
take to create a richer definition of what it means to be an “ideal”
worker—without sacrificing high performance. These changes don’t
have to be pushed by a senior leader within the organization; they
can be effectively implemented at the team level.

Develop your own multifaceted identity
People in leadership positions can avoid the fragility that results
from blind acceptance of ideal-worker norms by deliberately culti-
vating their own nonwork identities: a civic self, an athletic self, a
family-oriented self. One architect told us that when he defined him-
self solely in terms of his work, professional struggles and setbacks
made him miserable. Ironically, as he broadened his focus, he found
more professional fulfillment. As managers become more resilient,
they may also learn that employees whose lives are better balanced
create value for the organization.
Managers can start to change organizational norms by point-
ing out the positive things that employees’ outside activities bring
to the workplace. One consultant whose firm had recently merged
with another enterprise observed that none of his new colleagues
ever stayed in the office past 5:30 PM. When he asked about this pat-
tern, he was told:
We don’t want our folks to spend every waking minute at work;
we want them to be well-rounded individuals, to be curious, to

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