How do you stay engaged with your team, while maintaining proper boundaries to keep yourself healthy? Both are important. Which one takes precedent? What do you do when you feel conflicted about which to dedicate yourself to?
Identifying your existing polarities is the first step you need to take in order to examine these seemingly competing interests. Managing polarities is an important leadership skill that feels a bit under the radar to me. I say that because I had never heard of it during my leadership development over the last 10 to 15 years, including in formal leadership programs. I only became aware of it when I started my coaching practice in 2020.
A polarity can be defined as a paradox or contradiction. Managing a polarity requires both/and thinking rather than solving a problem which is often either/or thinking. Polarities are systems to be managed rather than a problem to be solved. They are often interdependent. Viewing personal boundaries and engaging with your employees as a problem, where you have to pick one or the other, doesn’t set anyone up for success. If you focus exclusively on yourself, you risk alienating your team in a variety of ways. If you over-index on your team, you’ll put your needs second and likely be headed to burnout.
Managing polarities involves identifying the outcomes and associated actions when focused on the positive aspects of each pole, as well as early warning signs and subsequent outcomes when you over focus on one pole to the neglect of the other. Simply draw a box with four quadrants; label one pole on each side, positives on the top, and negatives on the bottom.
Positives for having healthy personal boundaries could be:
- Leaving the office on time
- Avoiding your email inbox until your next scheduled work day
- Saying “no” more often
When overly focused on yourself to the neglect of your team, you may experience:
- Feeling lonely or left out
- Disconnected from your team
- Missing avoidable mistakes made by employees
Let’s move to the other pole. What are the positives when you engage with your team through highly effective actions steps?
- Being proud of an employee who overcame a big challenge
- Being the first to celebrate a big team win
- Staying late to help others work through roadblocks on a project
Watch out, though, when you start to see warnings signs of over investing in other people and under investing in yourself, such as:
- Being resentful about others not caring like you do
- Motivating through manipulation rather than inspiration
- Stress eating
Analyzing this type of polarity can help bring more awareness to how you manage yourself and your team. It can help to create the best harmony for you when you see the relationship between the two poles and how interdependent they truly are. Knowing where you are in the system will lead you to self-identifying the action steps you need to get back on track, leveraging polarity as effectively as possible.
Matt Wallat serves as a District Ranger with the National Park Service (NPS) in Colorado. His 20-year career spans eight different NPS units in six different states with assignments in patrol, investigations, program management, court liaison, training officer, and supervisor for 11+ years.
With a strong background in employee development as an agency instructor, Matt continues to evolve with his coaching practice, creating leadership training programs, engaging in curriculum design work, and leading a recent international training program in Tanzania.
He enjoys family time and many other interests including fly fishing, creative DIY projects, music, craft beer and Boston sports.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.