You’re a servant leader. How can you maintain a work-life balance?

First of all, it's important to understand that servant leadership is a life attitude, so pretending to avoid the behavior related to this kind of leadership is like going against your personality. Said that it's crucial to have a correct balance in topics related to work and topics separated from work. Also keep your agenda open and accessible, but also keeping space for your own growth, and obviously inside the work schedule.

Inside the team, it's important to define responsibilities about the topics that are related to the team. Also, creating responsibilities and accountabilities, through tools like the RACI matrix is powerful, clarifying internally who is accessible and in what role. Delegating here is super important, and if you see as leader that you're the one accountable of every project, it's a red flag.

More is not better, better is better, so it's super important to put the effort into the things that really matter. This can be addressed creating roadmaps quarterly and tracking with the team and with your manager, in order to check if everything is accomplished on time, and where the pain points are.

As someone- who leads with care for others, taking care- of myself allows me to bette-r support a healthy division betwee-n work and personal time. I share re-sponsibilities wisely, empowe-r independent work, and guide- by practicing reasonable standards. Through clear, hone-st talking and willingness to change, both individual nee-ds and team goals get met. This brings re-newal and meaning to life both at and away from the- job.

Self-care is not selfish, so it's fine to keep space for personal growth and also to curate your own professional path. It is vital to keep you motivated, because it's very hard to transfer motivation to your team if you're the first one demotivated.

Leaders tell their team, but they more importantly show their team. They create the culture and norms through their actions far more than their words. For example, a former boss of mine frequently said "on time is late", but far more powerfully demonstrated that through his behavior of always being on time and prepared. Servant leaders have a duty to take care of themselves and their personal lives, and to do so publicly. This creates a safe environment for employees to do the same without worry of being seen negatively, and through that an overall more open dialog between the team about everything. Openness breeds cohesion, which in turn creates team success.

Feedback is one of the pillars, and it should be bidirectional. It could be something like explaining to your mentee that performance is not the best during last period, in order to offer support, or can be in the other way around, digesting something that maybe is pending to apply inside the team.

In today's world, work-life balance is a utopian concept. Most people will never get there. However, work-life integration is completely possible. One needs to splice the time needed for work and home activities as they can, and only when you do that, you will feel balanced.