Slow Leadership: News and Views: February 10th 2007

Juggling life's demands

The Miami Herald reviews books that might be helpful in dealing with work/life balance issues. A wide choice, it seems. [link]

What are the tell-tale signs that you need to find a better job?

Kate Lorenz, Editor of CareerBuilder.com, tells all. Better start polishing that resumé right away! [link] [via]

Do people “quit their boss” not their job?

Adelyus of CIO Asia shares personal experience of managing attrition in a competitive environment. Seems that Asia is just like everywhere else when it comes to coping with the shortage of high-quality IT staff. [link]

The Happiness institute claims that flexibility leads to happiness at work

Their view is that without good work/life balance there’s little happiness at work—and without happiness at work, there’s less productivity, lower energy levels and less effective team work. Sounds fair to me. [link]

Wall Street Journal jumping on the work/life balance bandwagon?

Even the venerable Wall Street Journal, hardly a likely publication in which to find “soft” management ideas, has started its own blog about work/life problems. Called The juggle, it claims to focus on “choices and tradeoffs people make as they juggle work and family.” [link]

Breaking point?

According to Celia Milne, writing in the Canadian journal Financial Post, many of the worst sufferers from stress and burnout work in “what might otherwise be seen as ‘good’ jobs—full-time, high-income positions in large organizations that, like it or not, come with a lot of unpaid overtime.” Duh? [link]

Attorneys at breaking point too?

It seems that attorneys are in the forefront of cases of burnout—and the billing structure in that profession is to blame, according to Chris Marston. He says that: “professionals either face enormous pressure to ‘bill time’ to meet quotas, or they feel tremendous pressure to ‘fill time’ by billing time when work is light because of the beauty contest that our industry has created by comparing the ‘spreadsheet’ of numbers of each attorney against one another as means of determining their value to the firm.” Now where have I heard that before? [link]

Stress and the Knowledge Worker

According to Eclectic Bill, Googling this topic throws up some heavyweight reserch from the likes of the Canadian Policy Research Unit that a good business case can be made for increasing knowledge worker productivity by reducing workplace stress. [link]

Future gloom

According to the British newspaper The Guardian, a recent official survey suggests that the daily juggling act of balancing work and caring responsibilities is destined to get harder rather than easier. [link]