Page 223 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

212 HBR Leader’s Handbook

or helping organizations or institutions that you care about. Articulate the
rationale for your additional choices and how you will ensure that your
time investment is most effective. Are your choices spread across different
domains to provide varied experiences and relationships? Have you found a
balance between some diversity of learning and not getting spread too thin?

■ Are there people or causes or institutions you naturally want to help in some
way, regardless of what you might immediately gain from the effort? Who
and what institutions are those? What does that tell you about your
values and sense of purpose?

Taking care of yourself

Executives we know speak openly about the challenges of preserving their
own sense of well-being through the stress and turmoil of their challenging
jobs. Many touch on the difficulty of finding time to think amid the day-
to-day issues at work. Others concede that their diets, health, and physical
stamina suffer from constant travel and too many late nights of constant
deadlines or client demands. Others voice frustration that they can’t give
back as much to society as they want, due to time pressure. And it’s com-
mon to hear from leaders how hard they find it to spend the right kind of
time with family and on other personally meaningful pursuits.
You bring an enormous effort to the tasks of building your organization
and your people. So who’s taking care of you to make sure you don’t burn out,
get sick, or get so fragmented that everything personal and professional falls
to pieces? If you are exhausted, frustrated, ignoring who you are and what
you care about, the people and performance you are trying to lead will suffer.
You may have a loving partner at home who supports you emotionally and a
crackerjack assistant at work who keeps you on schedule, but they can’t do
it all for you. To be an effective leader, you have to take care of yourself too.

Personal strategies
What kind of personal strategies do you have—or do you need to develop—
to be both self-protective and energized as a leader? As the word “personal”