The importance of setting boundaries to give yourself enough space and time to create, produce, get work done, and to simply find time to think, cannot be underestimated.
In this Leader Lesson, Jennie and Craig define Boundaries, discuss why they are important and what the risk of not having any is, and – importantly, consider the importance of how and why to communicate your boundaries to your teammates.
This conversation follows an earlier, longer, and more in-depth conversation that Jennie and Craig had on Creating Effective Boundaries. You can access the resources from that conversation here: https://www.linkedin.com/smart-links/AQEFb_vforJhdg
You can listen to their earlier conversation about Creating Effective Boundaries here:
The importance of setting boundaries to give yourself enough space and time to create, produce, get work done, and to simply find time to think, cannot be underestimated.
In this Leader Lesson, Jennie and Craig define Boundaries, discuss why they are important and what the risk of not having any is, and – importantly, consider the importance of how and why to communicate your boundaries to your teammates.
This conversation follows an earlier, longer, and more in-depth conversation that Jennie and Craig had on Creating Effective Boundaries. You can access the resources from that conversation here: https://www.linkedin.com/smart-links/AQEFb_vforJhdg
You can listen to their earlier conversation about Creating Effective Boundaries here:
Have burning questions about leadership that you'd like us to address? Email them to leadership.questions@sait.ca and let your voice be heard.
Craig:
Hi everyone, welcome to a short Leader Lesson episode of the Leading Beyond Any Title podcast, where myself and Jenny Gilbert provide a short version of one of our longer conversations. It's a chance for you to get some quick insights to an important leadership topic, and we know you don't always have time to listen to us for 45 to 60 minutes. We hope you enjoy this short episode, and if it encourages you to want to hear more about the topic, be sure to link to the full episode in the show notes. Now, for a quick Leader Lesson. Jenny, In these short leader lessons, we really want to cover a topic that we have a much longer conversation on, and we will have a link to the original conversation that we had around. Creating effective boundaries and why that is important as we've done in these leader lessons. I think it's a good spot to start with this whole concept of what is a boundary. Yes.
Jennie:
A boundary is a line, if you like. That's where we often start from. Where will we draw the line? And it's a line of respect. It's a. A line that allows us to put a limitation. It's a line that allows us to stick with our values. And those lines are sometimes very solid and very thick. And sometimes those lines are just a little bit wavy. So one of the things that we did discuss to an extent is the difference between a yes no boundary and how much. boundary as well. So they're not steadfast. There's differences within them.
Craig:
That's right. I think of that, yes, no boundary, like the divider on the grocery. When you're putting your groceries out, you don't mess with that divider. That's a very clear divider. A very clear boundary, I think. One thing that we could look into here is, why are they so important for us to have? Or the other way to look at this is the flip of that is, if you don't have any boundaries, what's the cost, what's the cost to you? You can come at this from either one.
Jennie:
And both of those are going to depend on the individual. Really, the sort of worst case, you can end up in a state of constant anxiousness, or constant stress, or even constant depletion, where you haven't set your boundaries. Generally when the boundaries aren't set, you're continually giving or you're continually allowing those behaviors that you want to limit to interject or encroach or get in the way of you and your day. The other part to it when they're not set is we can end up horribly unproductive. And so if we say yes to everything. All of the time. It's really hard to hit that quality that most people are looking for within performance if we're constantly distracted by everything that we're doing. And one of the examples we used in the longer conversation was around what the pandemic did for boundaries in the workplace. And many people, their work hours, the boundaries of work hours just went out of the window. And so we ended up with very tired, burnt out, exhausted people.
Craig:
Absolutely. The whole concept of saying yes to everything is really the same as saying yes to nothing. Because you're never going to, you're never going to progress. But it's interesting because when we had the original conversation, we had really good participation, really good interest in this. And I think it speaks to the fact that, Individuals, even if we understand the importance of boundaries, still find this difficult to do. And why is it that we struggle, or some folks may struggle, with creating and implementing and maintaining boundaries in their work?
Jennie:
Some of us have never been taught to do that. And so if we look back over time, there was a patch of time where It was actually quite cool to say yes to everything and you were different and you could achieve more and that would take you places. That was before we became inundated, pressured, overloaded with everything that hits us today. We have sped up a lot, even in just the last five years, let alone the last 10 years. The other part that is really hard for people. is voicing these boundaries. And so we set them in our head. But in fact, we actually have to speak up. We have to get them out of our head and into spoken conversation. I always chuckle as I say to people, you can't be angry about something if you never ask for it, or if you never. set that limitation. And yet we will, we'll get quite upset when those boundaries have been poked or nudged or blatantly violated. And so the hard part is the conversation that says, This is where my line is, or this is what I'm willing to do, or this is how much time you can have from me. And those are assertive conversations, and assertive conversations for a lot of people are still difficult conversations.
Craig:
Yeah, I think that's, that is the most challenging piece, because we've joked about this a little bit before, if you're if you're not setting boundaries, how dare you not set, or how dare you how dare you have a boundary in this time and day and age of, we must all collaborate, we must all work together, right? And so it's an interesting balance. And I think what we landed on is once you start figuring out what your boundaries are. And once you get into the conversation and be comfortable with being uncomfortable in communicating them, especially the first time, if you've never communicated your boundaries before, it's going to feel like a really awkward conversation the first time you go to communicate it. And the person receiving it may think, what the heck's going on? Why are you doing this to me? I think the key thing that we also talked about is that you're setting boundaries for yourself. You're not setting boundaries for people.
Jennie:
Yes, that's a really large part of it. And within that leadership part too, you as a leader can role model this. You as a leader can start this conversation. Rolling and help people into that space. Boundaries exist everywhere. Boundaries exist in our personal lives, exist in our work lives. And we have team boundaries too. So maybe that's a great place to start is, what are the days where we will not attend meetings? There's a bold, brave boundary to be set, but the impact could be huge in that area.
Craig:
Absolutely. Yeah, the leverage that could come from it is is significant. And as we wrap up this short lesson this short leader lesson on boundaries, and the link to the original conversation will be in the show notes, what's one big idea we could leave folks with around boundaries?
Jennie:
We talked about this in some detail too. Boundaries are self care. Team care, self care, and when they're set, and when they're set appropriately, they allow us to be proactive. So we become the creator, we become the designer of how we live our life. And as humans, we love being in control, so boundaries are your first step to feeling in control. You set the fences, was the terminology that we used, and you decide where those will be.
Craig:
That's good. I like that. And we often wrap up our usual conversations. We share a big idea like we just did. We share a couple strategies. A couple strategies, but we have folks could take away with today that they could really think about implementing. Right away. We
Jennie:
had two and as always, actually, and the first one is around sharing priorities. So one of the problems with boundaries often is if we don't set them, we end up over capacity. We end up with just too much going on. So this was a technique for individual contributors and even leaders. Everybody reports to somebody in most cases when you're asked For something or to do something, share what you're working on and then ask them what can be removed from there so that you can fit in their new request. Nine times out of ten, they have no idea what you're working on. And so sharing that continuously is a cadence of the conversation allows us to stay on track and not to end up in that point where we're overextended. The second one. is a great quote, and unfortunately, I still can't put a name to who it is, but when you say yes to someone else, you say no to yourself. And the big question is, are you okay with that? No. We leant into the idea of this in the workplace, and the image that we portrayed was actually a gravestone, and the reminder that no gravestone says answered emails until the late hours of the night. And where are your yeses, and where are your nos?
Craig:
Such good advice not only on the yeses and the noes, but the emails. And again, folks, there will be a link in the show notes to our original conversation around boundaries and creating effective boundaries. And we hope that this short leader lesson gave you some things to think about. And Intrigued you enough to give the full episode a lesson. So thank you once again for joining us and have a good day. Thank you once again for joining us on the Leading Beyond Any Title podcast. If you'd like to stay connected and receive more updates from us, please follow SAIT Corporate Training on LinkedIn. Stay in the loop with the latest insights and valuable content through the link in the show notes.
Jennie:
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