Have you ever wondered why you can deal with difficult people, difficult conversations and difficult decisions all day at work, yet have so little patience when you get home?
You stay professional. You think before you respond. You manage the situation.
Then you get home.
Your partner asks you a perfectly reasonable question and you feel yourself getting irritated.
Your child starts telling you something and you become aware that you're only half listening.
Something small hasn't been done and your reaction is bigger than it probably should have been.
Sometimes guilt creeps in.
“Why did that annoy me so much?”
Or
“I've dealt with much worse today. Why did this get to me?”
For some senior leaders, this can become a pattern, happening repeatedly without them really noticing.
I think part of the reason is when we think about bringing work home it’s usually in the physical way.
You might think you don't bring work home
You close the laptop.
You don't answer emails all evening.
You don't spend dinner talking about work.
So as far as you're concerned, you've left work at work.
However, something I noticed from my own experience was that although I had physically left work behind, I hadn't necessarily switched off from it.
I could still find myself replaying conversations, worrying about something that had happened during the day, thinking about what might happen tomorrow or even planning how I was going to word an email I needed to send.
I think this is something many senior leaders will recognise.
You don't have to physically bring work home for your family to feel it.
Sometimes what comes through the door with you is the emotion you've been carrying throughout the day.
What has your working day taken from you?
Senior leadership requires a huge amount of self-control.
You're dealing with people.
Making decisions.
Managing different personalities, expectations and ways of working.
Staying calm when somebody else isn't.
Thinking carefully about what you say and how you say it.
Solving problems.
Taking responsibility.
And sometimes taking responsibility for things that probably shouldn't continually belong to you.
If your team is having problems or certain members aren't getting on, you deal with the fallout.
If people aren't communicating properly, you become involved.
If work hasn't been finished, you may pick it up.
If there's a problem nobody else seems willing or able to resolve, you resolve it.
When you're leading people with different expectations around responsibility, communication and how work should be done, those differences can create even more situations that need your attention.
Individually, you may be perfectly capable of dealing with every one of those things.
That doesn't mean they haven't had an effect on you.
Your family can get a very different version of you
This is where I think it becomes difficult.
The people you work with may have had a very patient, measured and professional version of you all day.
Then the people you care about most can get the version of you that has already spent eight, nine or ten hours doing that.
So when your partner wants to talk, you haven't much appetite for another conversation.
When somebody asks you to make another decision, you don't want to make one. You may even find yourself questioning whether you'll make the right decision after the day you've had.
When your child wants your attention, you may be physically sitting beside them but still thinking about work.
That's not because they matter less.
However, they can end up getting what's left of you and they can feel it.
If it happens occasionally, that's life. We all have difficult days.
The problem is when it becomes normal.
Sometimes your family stops asking
This is one of many consequences I don't think we talk about enough.
If your child repeatedly comes to you and feels that you're distracted, busy or not really hearing them, eventually they may start to believe:
“There's no point. They're busy.”
They don't necessarily announce that decision. They just begin to believe it based on the actions they see.
They may not argue with you about not listening.
They may simply start going somewhere else, initially with the small things.
And often it's the small things that keep us connected enough for them to bring us the bigger things later.
The same thing can happen between partners.
If someone regularly has to judge whether this is a good evening to talk to you, whether you're too tired, whether something has happened at work or whether you're going to be distracted, that can gradually change the relationship too.
None of this means one stressful week at work damages your family.
I'm talking about what can happen when it becomes a pattern.
And sometimes the leader doesn't recognise that anything has changed until they realise their child isn't talking to them as much, or their partner has stopped bringing certain things up.
“But I'm doing all of this for my family”
There's another side to this that I think can be particularly difficult for successful leaders.
You may genuinely think,
“My family is the reason I work this hard.”
You're building a career.
Providing security.
Taking responsibility.
Trying to give your family a good life.
But some of the very behaviours that have helped you become successful at work can start taking something from your life at home.
Always being available.
Picking up the problem.
Taking on more.
Being the reliable one.
Making sure everything gets done.
Those behaviours may be highly valued professionally.
But if work continually requires so much of you that you have very little patience, attention or emotional energy left when you get home, it's worth noticing.
Because being successful at work and providing for your family are important, but so are the relationships you're working so hard for.
Why being more patient at home isn't always the whole answer.
This is where I think we can easily try to solve the wrong problem.
You could tell yourself to put your phone away.
Listen more.
Be more present.
Don't get irritated.
Spend more quality time with your family.
And of course those things matter.
But if you continue spending the working day taking on too much, absorbing everybody else's problems and continually compensating for what isn't working around you, you're trying to fix the consequence without looking at what's causing it.
It may be worth looking more closely at what happens during your working day.
Are you continually picking up work that should belong to somebody else?
Are you getting involved in problems your team could be resolving themselves?
Are you carrying frustration from difficult relationships or unresolved conflict at work?
Are you giving so much of your attention to everybody else's needs that by the time you get home, you have very little left?
These are different situations and they won't all have the same answer.
Understanding what's happening is important if you want something to change.
So perhaps the question isn't only:
“Why do I have so little patience when I get home?”
It might also be,
“What am I doing during my working day that means I have so little left when I get home?”
Because you don't have to bring your laptop home for work to enter your family life.
Sometimes you bring it home in your head.
Sometimes you bring it home in your mood.
Sometimes you bring it home in how little you have left to give.
This Is Where Leadership Meets Life
I'm Karyn and I work with senior leaders who want to continue being successful professionally without that success continually taking from their personal and family life.
This matters to me because I've seen, both professionally and personally, that what happens at work doesn't always stay at work.
The pressure you carry, the problems you pick up and the responsibility you feel for everyone else can very easily become what you take home with you at the end of the day.
And sometimes, without even realising it, the people you care about most can begin to feel the consequences.
You don't have to bring work home for your family to feel it.
That's where leadership meets life.