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You can have good work life balance but there will be times when you need to grind. Then when there’s some room to flex then just make sure to do so. Some companies will expect you to kill your self and work to death and obviously that’s not the company for you but there’s plenty out there that don’t. Plus you will expect above and beyond from your teams from time to time and you can’t expect something out of them that you don’t demonstrate yourself.
Point blank: If you can’t or choose not to demonstrate flexibility and adaptability then leadership is not the best fit for you.
If you never ever want to work more than 40 hours a week, that will be difficult.
A healthy work life balance doesn’t have to mean a strict 40 hours per week. I tend to believe it’s more about how you integrate work and life than about a set number of hours. Proper prioritization of your time is essential. That said, if you have a hard stop at 40, as others have said, moving into a leadership role will be hard.
Think of it this way. A good leader enables their team to get the work done. That means giving them the tools they need and protecting them from distractions that could pull them away from their priorities. Sometimes those distractions happen during a regular 9-5; often they do not…I would be derelict in my role if I just told my team they were on their own after I hit 40 hours for the week.
Right back at you, ED1! Sounds like you’ve done a brilliant job with your team too.
To answer your question: no. You either sacrifice a 40 hour week or career progression into leadership roles - you can have one but not both. That you even think it is appropriate means you are not ready for any leadership role whatsoever.
Leaders don't punch a clock. You're never really 'off' after a certain level. You can, however, set some boundaries and learn to delegate. Eventually, your job is decision making, not content creation, and the 'grind' aspect changes a lot.
It’s a give and take for sure. I have weeks I work way more than 40 hours and weeks I work less. Once I got my team to a confident level of not needing hand holding, I got more time back in my weeks.
That being said, it’s a different kind of busy. It’s a lot of internal 1:1 and strategic thinking to level up your team in order to hit business plans. It’s less busy admin work.
I think this is a great post, but there’s some missing information here. It also depends on how large your team is, how long you’ve been leading, and how much leeway you have in getting the work done.
If you’re at the beginning of your leadership journey and career this is probably not going to work. The reason is because your people probably are not going to be as tenured as you need them to be in order for you to step back a bit. Now, if you have a very tenured team and you’re a very tenured leader go for it. But I do think it is a bit presumptuous to think that you can do that job in 40 hours.
You’re also going to get curveballs every step of the way, whether it’s a personnel issue, something came up that needs immediate attention, or worse leadership up the ladder needs something from you that you have to deliver in a very tight timeframe.
Doable. Delegate everything and focus on what matters, ignore the rest.
Absolutely - vertical career advancement means taking on more responsibility, not more work. I’m working fewer hours now as a business unit leader than I did as a product manager 15 years ago - I get my kids up and out of the house in the morning, then am at my desk at 7:30, I wind down around 4:30 to either pick them up or make dinner for them. 1 or 2 nights a week, I may log in to take care of some admin, especially if I’ve taken time out of my day to handle family stuff (Halloween parades at daycare and elementary school last week being good examples). But otherwise, it’s about prioritizing your workload, delegating, and making you are communicating enough that your team knows what they have to do, and then leaving them alone to get it done.
7:30-4:30 includes breaks. And my comment states that the evening logins are generally to make up for up time taken out of my work day for personal matters.
You make a good point that flexibility and the willingness to do more when it’s necessary being part of the extra responsibility that comes leadership.