3 “Work Life Integrations“ Tips in Managing a Team and a Family

Struggling to juggle your personal life and work? The reason why we struggle is that we split one person into two completely different roles. When we are at work, we feel obligated to shut down our personal life completely. Can we leverage our personal skills and experiences in the workforce and vice versa? Changing a perception may ease your stress by wearing two different hats or more.

Teamwork

Often times when we are trying to start family, we happen to be in managerial positions in the team. The individual performance is no longer as important as the skill that you manage and lead other team members to one ultimate goal. The team members all have different characters and perspectives. It is not easy to form the team to be one. A husband and a wife realize that they need to work as a team after starting the first baby. The goal is to maintain a healthy relationship between them as well as raising child/ren for the family.

We commonly have:

1. Goal/mission setting

2. Role and responsibility

At work, my role and responsibility are somewhat clear. In romantic relationships, we don't really talk about role and responsibility. In the extension of romantic relationships, we get married and start a family. We assume we have mutual goals of our life together and expect the partners to do their shares that we didn't agree on. Because we grew up in different cultures, our vision of family was far apart. How we each take responsibility was not discussed until we got married and had a baby.

Delegation to Existing Resource

It is very hard for a single person or even for a working couple to take care of the task of building a family without any help. The team members may not only be just spouses/partners. It could be grandparents or other outside facilities. Delegation can be hard for those who are perfectionists or have tight budgets. But our time and resource are limited. We can work out a few things before we delegate to the others as we do in the office.

We commonly have:

1. Process optimization

2. Apply technology

3. Educating current resource to enhance the capacity

I was lucky to have wonderful in-laws and my own parents to look after my child when I was desperate for extra help. I made a simple list of things I valued the most for taking care of the baby just like I do with my colleagues at work while I was out of office. They appreciated the list while I avoided the frustration of "their ways of taking care of a baby" in advance. The operations had to be simplified and shareable if I wasn't available. The baby cannot wait to be fed and the company had to run their business regardless of my presence. If I didn't share the common ground at first, I would have created unnecessary conflict with my help.

Hiring New Resource

If both of the parents cannot take care of the child/ren and the house, they have to use services or hire someone. The hiring process is similar to what we do for making a team in the workplace.

We commonly have :

1. Job descriptions posting including -

• Expectations

• Budgeting = Salary or cost for the service, and

• Hours of operations

2. Interview process

3. Onboarding

Then we search for candidates to interview. Once you narrow down to a couple of them, we set up another family member to screen out his/her choices. Finally, we agreed on our choice of a caregiver. Another step is to familiarize ourselves with the routine. If it's a daycare, we learn how things operate at the facility. If it's a babysitter, how to onboard and educate them. When I visited over 20 daycares in the area. I vaguely knew what I needed at the beginning of the process. As I start to speak to the facilities, my ideal daycare become crystal clear. I firmed up my criteria during my hiring process. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a spot for my baby at the ideal daycare, I chose to hire a full-time babysitter after interviewing close to 10 people. I struggled and failed many times when dealing with family and work issues separately. Only if I integrated two different worlds, I become a whole person to come up with solutions. The lesson I learned in my personal life made things easier at work. I used many techniques I learned from my work for processing many issues at my family.

"Where there's a will, there's a way. " William Hazlitt in 1822

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