Leaders are a different breed. They just focus on the task at hand. Completion of their deliverables is paramount and they do what it takes to ensure that they come out trumps

Often at night, when you drive past the glitzy Bandra Kurla Complex in the glamorous western suburb of Mumbai, you would find the lights on in almost all the buildings. Obviously, there are people in there who are working late. To finish the ever piling reams of work, to meet stiff deadlines and, more importantly, to be one up in this dog-eat-dog fight of the corporate world.
Longer work hours have become synonymous with more commitment. Work-life balance? Heard of this term? Does it mean anything at all?
Senior management meetings at every organisation are dominated by discussions on work-life balance. How do we ensure that employees spend adequate time at home and balance their work commitment and life outside work? Why do they spend hours and hours discussing this routine aspect of work? Is it that important?
A few years ago, I went to a leading management campus for recruitments. While addressing students, I asked them as to what would influence their decision about the company they would want to work for. I was not ready for this shocker when it came. The first answer was “five-day week”. The second was “working hours”. Good lord! What is happening to this generation, I thought. In our days, the responses would have sounded more like, exposure, job content, brand value and so on. Doesn’t this generation want to work? Build a career for themselves? I decided to find out for myself.
On my return, I subtly started checking with people around. I went around asking everyone what they felt about work-life balance. The answers after a few days started falling into a pattern. A pattern that answered some of the questions that I had in my mind.
There was a distinct set of people who said that work-life balance was critical and they look forward to the organisation taking certain initiatives toward ensuring this for employees, and a completely divergent set of employees who said that it doesn’t make a difference.
Organisations are made up of three different categories of people — leaders, followers and laggards. These categories typically exist in any organisation in the ratio 7:80:13.
The laggards are essentially losers who hang around every organisation, doing just about nothing. They don’t work and are clock-watchers. So, the concept of work-life balance holds no meaning for them.
Leaders are a different breed. They just focus on the task at hand. Completion of their deliverables is paramount and they do what it takes to ensure that they come out trumps. They do not care about what time they come in, when they leave, work-life balance and so on. Any work-life balance effort that the organisation takes, is a waste of time from their perspective.
That leaves a huge base of employees in any company — the ones we refer to as followers. These are the guys who follow instructions and execute tasks. They are individuals who are happy letting someone else lead them and work towards the objectives of the leader. This lot is very critical from an organisation’s perspective, as it makes for the bulk of any organisation. If the organisation were an automobile, the leader would be the driver and the followers would be the engine.
For this group of followers, work-life balance is of great importance. They are quite happy where they are, have limited career aspirations and know their limitations. Any step that the organisation or the leaders take to ensure that this lot of people completes their work in time, is able to spend time on their personal life and with family, goes a long way in motivating them to deliver more. This has an important message for all the readers. If you are the one who whines and whines about work-life balance, you definitely do not fall in the category of leaders. You would probably be one of those followers, or even worse, the laggards. For, leaders do not whine about their work. They enjoy it. They are passionate about it and have a drive to achieve their goals — at any cost — even if it takes a better part of their lives to get there.