Why Striving for Balance Matters

This morning, I’d like to answer the question: Andy, why do you focus on the theme of balance? Balancing Act, The Balancing Act Podcast, and now The Balanced Business. You’ve created so much content on the subject—why is this so important and why does it matter to me?

To stress the importance of balance, get up out of your chair and stand up straight. In this moment, your subconscious mind and autonomic nervous system are working feverishly to hold you in an upright position. With your eyes open, balancing on two feet is fairly straightforward for most humans.

Now, stand on one foot. How long can you hold the pose? If you can hold a single leg balance pose for more than 60 seconds, you’re knocking the cover off the ball. Note that holding yourself upright standing on one leg takes a lot of effort and the conscious mind takes over from the subconscious mind.

Bear with me, but while I have you out of your chair, balance on one foot and close your eyes. Without the aid of the sense of sight, the length of time you can hold any balance pose decreases dramatically. Heck, forget the one legged pose and just stand on both feet with your eyes closed. For those blessed with the gift of sight, standing with your eyes closed can be disorienting and challenging.

As a human being, if I have a highly tuned sense of balance, I can perform better at almost any physical job or task I need to accomplish. Physical and mental efficiency increase. If my sense of balance is underdeveloped, I’ll generate more waste than necessary to perform even the most basic physical functions. I’m much less efficient if I’m continually fighting to maintain balance.

Remember, we should be striving toward balance in our lives—hence the use of the phrase a sense of balance. Achieving a state of perfect balance is rare and fleeting. A plethora of internal and external forces are constantly conspiring to throw us out of balance. In fact, if we’re committed to a lifetime of learning and growth, we should be engaging in opportunities to purposefully throw us off balance—a new job, a new skill, a new home, a new social group—we learn and grow when we try new things and become purposefully uncomfortable. But if we don’t know what balance feels like, it’s hard to strive toward something that we don’t recognize. That’s why working to develop a sense of balance is so important.

So what’s the point? Balance is a critical life skill that translates directly as a metaphor in our personal lives and in the world of business management and leadership. An individual with a strong sense of balance understands and can navigate the interplay between myriad competing forces that push and pull us in different directions each day—work, play, home, self, family, friends, and community are all vying for our attention at any given moment.

Applied in a business context, a team that possesses a strong sense of balance performs well under pressure and is not buffeted nearly as violently by the winds of change and external competitive pressures compared to a team that lacks a keen sense of balance. But what does balance look like in business?

Developing a strong sense of balance within a team or business is hard work. Purpose and vision must be clear, goals must be well-defined—propagated up, down, and across the organization. Learning and coaching must be the status quo and woven into the flow of work. The customer must be front and center. Communication must be strong, economic incentives aligned, and transparency of goals, standard work, and what’s being measured must be the norm. Most of all, workflows must be well-defined—smooth handoffs of work-in-process by each team and team member along the value stream is essential. Everyone, and I mean everyone should know how they’re adding value to the business’s product or service along the value stream. Again, the customer is front and center.

Now, why did I ask you to close your eyes during a balance pose at the top of this muse? As a leader, you can’t ‘see’ everything that’s going on within your team at every minute of every day—especially as team size increases. Managers that try to be everywhere and ‘see’ everything that’s going on are labeled micromanagers and firefighters. They are toxic to team culture and hinder growth and development. Taking this tack as a manager is exhausting and leads to subpar results.

A great leader empowers, coaches, and guides a team toward success. A great leader knows that they cannot and should not ‘see’ everything that’s going on. They trust their team members and allow them to learn through the navigation of challenges and failures. A great leader has done the difficult work of establishing clarity and nurturing a continuous improvement culture. A great leader verifies performance through excellence in measurement and transparency. A great leader understands that smooth workflows lead to an environment of mutual accountability and organizational trust.

Want to learn more about how to create an organization built on the foundation of organizational trust and accountability through smooth workflows? Well, here’s the point where I recommend that you pick up a copy of my new book, The Balanced Business! Hop on over to Amazon right now to order your copy today.