Grace is the mindset and intentional action to extend kindness and understanding toward others, even during times of stress, conflict, and failure. When we or our teams feel stressed and exhausted by deadlines, meetings, and projects, we can choose to resent the people around us who make it seem so easy or give ourselves and each other a little grace.

Here are three effective ways you can extend grace and hone your leadership skills in the workplace.

Practice Self-Compassion 

First and foremost, take the perspective of befriending yourself. As I often say in working with leaders, allow yourself to be human. We all make mistakes, but we learn more through our mistakes than our successes.

Sindhu Kutty, Co-Founder of Kuroshio Consulting, says, “To practice self-compassion, it is important to look at setbacks from the perspective of a friend to be kinder and more empathetic to oneself.”

Some people use negative internal feedback to drive them forward. But think about what you’d say to a friend or child who’d just experienced failure. You wouldn’t point out what they did wrong; you’d point out what they did right and maybe even work with them to create a plan to do better next time. 

On your journey toward building effective, authentic leadership skills, try focusing on cutting yourself some slack like you would a friend.

Develop Gratitude Practices 

Gratitude makes for more effective leadership skills and thus a more positive, collaborative work environment. What are you thankful for? Practicing gratitude to yourself and to your team can increase employee retention and loyalty and lead to all-around success for the company.

Yolanda Lau, Chief Experience Officer at Liquid, states, “When you pause to practice gratitude, you give your mind, emotions, and even your body a moment to recalibrate and become more resilient[, as well as] contribute to a more positive work environment, allowing your team to work more effectively.”

Some gratitude practices you can implement include keeping a gratitude journal or working a few short minutes into your daily schedule to reflect on what you’re most grateful for. Encouraging your employees to do the same can help cultivate a more meaningful work environment.

Coach Gracefully

Grace means you give people the benefit of the doubt and are slow to make snap judgments about their behavior. One of the most important parts of developing strong leadership skills is correcting employees in a caring way. 

In his book, “Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power & Greatness,” Robert K. Greenleaf says, “Servant leadership always empathizes, always accepts the person but sometimes refuses to accept some of the person’s effort or performance as good enough.”

In other words, a servant leader — a term coined by Greenleaf — effectively corrects and encourages an employee toward better work via truth and grace. Both are dependent on the other for effective management. 

Truth without grace is harsh and can often do more damage than good. Grace without truth enables bad behavior and won’t demand excellence. Both are necessary to continue to develop a trust-filled working relationship with employees.

Balance Grace & Leadership Skills

Graceful leaders must balance their grace and leadership skills. Empathetic listening is the key to this balance. 

Grace is about treating others with compassion and understanding, even during times of stress or conflict. Whether it’s offering support during difficult times, forgiving past mistakes, or simply acknowledging someone’s efforts, grace allows us to maintain positive and productive relationships with our colleagues and clients.

How do you balance grace and hone your leadership skills to build a positive and collaborative work team?

If you want to help your team find purpose in what they do, here are five ways to cultivate a meaningful work environment.

Find Your “Why”

Meaningful work requires purpose. Knowing your “why” — why the company does what it does, but also why your employees do what they do — gives team members a reason beyond a paycheck to get out of bed every morning and come to work. 

Facilitate regular team discussion that explores the benefits that your company provides for others. The more you and your team see how your roles within the company matter to your customers, the more you’ll understand each other’s goals, dreams, and values and the more meaningful work will feel.

Facilitate Connectedness

A meaningful work environment cares about its employees and how they interact with each other. Build social time into the fabric of your team meetings and workplace; spending time with colleagues reinforces connections between one another and contributes to better teamwork. 

Most importantly, show your curiosity. Curious leaders help their teams find meaning at work by exploring, asking questions, and facilitating professional communication.

Understand the Client’s Challenges 

The more your team understands the client’s problems and needs, the more they will feel committed to helping them. Meaningful work comes from feeling a connection to the customer, whether that be by gaining insight into the target client or, depending on your field, actually meeting clients face to face when possible.

The better employees are able to empathize with the clients and their challenges, the more invested they will be in the process of solving their problems and creating success for the company.

Prioritize Growth

The opportunity for growth is essential for long-term team loyalty. Make sure to provide meaningful work experiences to help your employees expand their skills and explore areas of interest within the company. Review their goals with them regularly to ensure you’re on the same page and that they feel supported in their professional growth by their leader.

As vital as it is for you to help your team share their goals and prioritize their growth, an authentic leader doesn’t just delegate. Don’t be afraid to share your own goals and shortcomings with your team. Two-way communication creates trust, openness, and a mutually accountable team.

Amplify Your Values

Although most companies today have mission statements, many don’t actually live by their values day to day from within the organizations. Values that guide everyday actions are invaluable in making employees feel like they’re part of something bigger and creating a more meaningful work environment.

Cultivating a strong organizational culture is a great first step in defining your company’s core values. It’s crucial, though, that they be embraced from top to bottom. The more you highlight team member behaviors and connect them to your values, the more you attribute meaning and ensure your employees feel a sense of purpose in their roles.

While bonuses and foosball tables certainly don’t hurt, I encourage all leaders to help their employees find meaning in their work. The end result is a more productive and cohesive workplace filled with satisfied team members.

How do you plan to cultivate a meaningful work environment for your team? I invite you to share your ideas for making our work more meaningful.

Understandably, we want to sleep properly and eat well. We also want to stop worrying about work when we are at home so that we can focus our energy on our relationships and hobbies. And in a world that’s rapidly shifting toward potentially toxic levels of work-life integration, maintaining balance can be difficult.

The solution? Life management through habits and boundaries. Betsy Jacobson writes: “Balance is not better time management, but better boundary management. Balance means making choices and enjoying those choices.”

Read on to learn how to start setting healthy, intentional boundaries in your life so that you can continue to thrive in today’s world of work-life integration.

What Is Work-life Integration?

Jobs today are becoming less and less uniform — especially after much of the world transitioned to remote and hybrid working during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

After Covid-19, many of us work from home. We might pop in a load of laundry between meetings or log into a morning meeting in our slippers. Many of us benefit from flexible hours, meaning that we can move fluidly between work and personal time. We might take a morning off, knowing that we can make up the hours later that evening. 

Slowly but surely, we’re blurring the boundary between work and personal time. Work-life integration is this seamless intermixing of work and professional responsibilities: it’s tidying the kitchen while you’re tuned into a conference call or working remotely while on an extended weekend.

In the past, we’d have called taking business calls at a baseball game overworking. Today, we call it work-life integration. 

Successful work-life integration still maintains internal harmony and respects important trade-offs. But, it’s important to recognize that we all feel internal harmony differently depending on our personalities, personal life demands, work demands, and past work histories; practices that create harmony in one person could create stress in another.

As a rule, it is usually best to view life and work holistically. Our personal lives cycle continually between periods of relaxation and periods of intense stress stemming from children, aging parents, our own health, work demands, or a variety of other concerns. 

We constantly sense, in particular, the tension between work and personal life as we strive to dedicate adequate time to each. As a result, we can often feel as though there are just not enough hours in the day (or days in the week). And while we rush around trying to fit more and more activities into less and less time, it is often our relationships that suffer.

Start With Yourself

When we’re frustrated with the state of our lives, it’s often tempting to shift the blame externally: we might complain of long hours or heavy workloads that force our lives into chaos. And while such complaints are certainly valid, we should also recognize that we are empowered to make lasting change in our lives — regardless of our circumstances. 

To achieve a successful work-life integration, then, it’s imperative that we start internally. Start with these five habits and boundaries:

Pause and Evaluate

Be still long enough to take a deep breath and evaluate what you are feeling during the current period of your life. Consider what you want and need both at work and in your personal life, and then articulate those things in a journal or document. Articulate also your victories and frustrations.

This process gives you greater clarity and a greater sense of control over your life as you recognize trends in your successes, failures, and needs. As you observe your feelings, you’ll be able to assess whether or not your current work-life integration is working for you — and how it might need to change. 

Prioritize Your Responsibilities

Build on the list that you’ve created above by adding tasks. Which of those tasks are most important? Prioritize everything on your list from most to least important.

Consider not just your daily tasks but also those for the week and month(s) ahead. Write them down and use your time accordingly — and don’t forget to prioritize your personal needs. “Exercise,” for example, is just as worthy of your attention as a work deadline.

Set Blocks of Time for Different Tasks

Work-life integration doesn’t mean to do every thing every day. Rather than allowing your focus to be divided in myriad ways at once, set specific blocks of time for similar responsibilities. 

For example, set one block of time to check and respond to messages, another for meetings, and another to do task work. When setting up these blocks, consider when you are personally more productive, then use those periods of time for tasks that require more creativity and energy. 

Things like calling and returning messages, for example, usually don’t require much brain power, so they can be left for “useless” times (like the post-lunch slump). Use productivity hacks like a Pomodoro timer to work in short, focused bursts. Block out all other distractions so you can make the most of your time.

Take Time Off

Work-life integration should never mean that you’re constantly working. In fact, taking time off is an essential part of healthy work-life integration — and one that’s easy to overlook given the hyperconnectivity of today. 

Time off can be anything from a five-minute break to an official work-free vacation; the important thing is simply that you take time off (and we mean completely disconnected) to rest your body and mind. You might be tempted to keep working — many Americans seem to be.

In 2018, well before the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. workforce left 768 million vacation days unused. Added up, that’s $65.5 billion in unused funding from the 55% of Americans who didn’t use that vacation time. 

In 2016, records indicate that 746,000 people in the U.S. died from heart disease and strokes attributable to long working hours. The phrase, “worked to death” isn’t just a joke — it’s a real thing. 

Volunteer

Serving others is a great refresher. While it might feel impossible to devote time externally when you’re drowning in your own responsibilities, research has proven that volunteering reaps worthwhile benefits. 

According to scholars at the University of California, Berkeley, regular volunteers exhibit better mental health, higher levels of happiness, better social connections, and increased leadership capacities. 

Manage Responsibly 

If you work in a leadership role, you play an important role in creating a balanced environment for the employees under your supervision. If you’d like to up your team’s productivity, consider promoting healthy work-life integration practices.

You may be surprised by how your team’s productivity increases as you actively prioritize your employees’ mental well-being. In particular, be sure to prioritize things like communication and involvement:

1. Talk about goals. Know what your employees are striving for. Not everyone has the same work-life integration goals, so talk to all of your employees individually about their objectives. Then, determine what you can do to help them achieve a balance that will benefit both their mental health and productivity.
2. Encourage a culture of openness. This will allow your employees to speak up if they feel that they’re under too much pressure or that their current schedule isn’t working for them. Some employees may benefit from working remotely a couple of days each week, while others may prefer altering their daily work schedule. It’s important to be open-minded and flexible to keep productivity and morale high.
3. Set a good example. Make sure you are a good role model — your employees follow your lead. Are you mindful about your own work-life integration? What do you do on the weekend? Your personal example sends signals about what you expect from your employees.
4. Encourage breaks. Give time off, vacations, and comp time as your firm allows. Encourage those under your care to take advantage of these opportunities to recharge and maintain a healthy balance in their lives.
5. Be involved. Continually monitor your team members’ workloads to make sure they are realistic and achievable. If you find that employees are feeling the need to over
6. Communicate. Listen carefully to your employees to make sure that you are correctly understanding their needs. Ask employees questions about their work-life integration and pay attention to signs that they might not have a healthy balance between work and personal time.

Implementing these changes takes time, so don’t feel discouraged if you don’t see differences in your team right away. Work consistently with your team and don’t be afraid to ask team members how they feel about your firm’s work-life integration practices.

Practice for Perfection

The concept of work-life integration is one that’s relatively new — and it’s constantly evolving. With all of that change, it is still quite possible to maintain a balanced work-life integration! Don’t expect change to come all at once. Lasting change takes time, and learning the balance and techniques that work for you will take effort and motivation.

But, no matter how motivated we are to succeed, remember that none of us are exempt from becoming out of balance. We must continually monitor ourselves and be intentional about our choices. This is far beyond just good time management; this is life management. 

How do you feel about work-life integration? What methods have you used to maintain balance? Let me know in the comments!